Or, we just need to get this over with and declare any digital data findable via the internet to just be public property of everyone. Everything becomes public, besides stuff you keep locally, and there is no difference anymore, it's all just data anyone can use for whatever. A 1 year grace period for everyone to pull stuff off they don't want to be a part of this bright new open era, then we just scrap everything related to intellectual property, copyright and similar stupid stuff, and slap UBI on top of all of it for good measure.
I'd prefer to stay within the [hacker ethics](https://www.ccc.de/en/hackerethics), and protect private data. For non-private/personal data, sure. But individual people need their privacy protected.
Me too, I'm hacker ethics all the way, which is why I'm saying anything network connected should really realize the "All information should be free." dream, and then private data should be far away from the internet, on computers/drives not even connected to the internet. The whole E2E encryption is a ticking time bomb people rely to keep their data safe from others, but nothing that you don't physically have close to you can be truly secret forever, and even then it'll be hard.
The last point is pretty clear, and the text below clarifies it:
> To protect the privacy of the individual and to strengthen the freedom of the information which concern the public the yet last point was added.
The privacy of individuals is important, regardless where they store their private data. Their account information -- what they buy, their medical information and so on is stored on servers and could be hacked.
I think the second point is equally clear, and further up on the list.
I agree that what people buy, their medical information and so on should be private, hence it should only be offline and not stored/handled on computers connected to the internet at all, the internet should be for public data exclusively, is my argument in the initial comment. Medical information would be only on effectively airgapped computers, as that data should be private, as you say.
So you say it is okay when someone you trust, uses that trust to upload your personal files from your air-gapped system to the internet, for everyone to freely share it, because now the data is "public"?
To me private file stay private, even if they get leaked onto the open or closed internet, because the public has no right to know them, they are private data of an individual. They might no longer be secret, but they are still private.
I'm talking about liking waffles, then you appear asking why I hate pancakes. Fun.
> To me private file stay private, even if they get leaked onto the open or closed internet
We have very different definitions of what "private" means. Once it's leaked, it's no longer private, and pretending it can go back to being "private" after being on the public internet, is doing no one any favors.
I just find it very interesting that someone equates secrecy with privacy. In my opinion, and in the current law there is a distinction.
If private data got leaked, like revenge porn, it is a breach and that private data that belongs to an individual is still private, and still needs to be protected. This is what GDPR and other legislation is about. If secrecy and privacy is the same, someone that isn't able to protect their data sufficiently will not have any privacy, thus any leaking of data is now the fault of the person that got their data leaked, not of the person that broke the trust and leaked it.
Your conclusion seems rather extreme to me. So of course data that got leaked, and is no longer secret is still private, because 'private' means who should be in control of that data, not about if the person has control or not.
I also don't follow your point about waffles and pancakes, because this is a pretty big disagreement we have here. To me this dialog is more like you are saying "I don't like laws", and I say "While I agree that some laws are stupid, other laws are pretty useful, for instance people shouldn't be allowed rob other houses, even if they are able to do that or even where invited." And then, instead of agreeing, you sort of say, "No, I really mean that. If someone isn't able to defend their home properly or give out invitations to someone, it is okay to steal from them."
I don't really get what you're suggesting. You give a 1 year grace period for Metallica to pull all its music off the Internet, but then as soon as I host some of their MP3s on my Wordpress blog it's "public property of everyone" from that point forward?
What you're slightly more realistically looking for here is for publicly available data to have a Fair Use exemption for certain uses, which is certainly something worth discussing.
I hate to invoke Poe's law but, I've now flip-flopped like six times over whether this could be serious.
I think it is serious. In which case, I gotta say, it really seems like you didn't spend much time thinking about this. "A 1 year grave period for everyone to pull stuff off they don't want to be a part of" - How does that work when the Internet is already full of unauthorized reproductions, most of which people aren't even aware of? Even ignoring practical considerations, when literally everyone is basically stuck using the Internet for everything, this seems a bit unfair to anyone who isn't onboard, akin to The Onion's Google Opt-out Village. But there are so many practical issues with this, it would be easier to list the number of problems this doesn't have. You accidentally leak something to the Internet and it becomes commons? What happens when other people leak things to the Internet? How about revenge porn?
Not minor stuff that can easily be papered over, this literally reintroduces the problem of needing to care about the provenance of data again, in a way that can't be automated, which makes the whole thing entirely moot. All just to make training data for AI models easier to distribute?
I'm all for intellectual property reform, maybe even fairly radical. But this just seems like it wasn't thought out.
If this was satire, well, I took the bait. Oddly convincing despite being hard to believe.
> If this was satire, well, I took the bait. Oddly convincing despite being hard to believe.
It wasn't entirely serious, but also not entirely un-serious. But yes, I spent maybe 20-30 seconds thinking about then barfed up the text that makes the comment, so yes, obviously many issues and not really workable in practice.
I'm glad it made you seriously think about it and also flip-flopp back and forth about it, made it worth posting the comment so happy to hear :)
I respectful disagree. I enjoy reading e.g. Asimov and well-executed journalism. And I completely respect the IP of those people who create these works.
It secures the benefits of copyright for work being produced by the creator up to death, for their heirs and dependents, which is why they were creating for money in the first place. People don’t just die after twenty years of resting on their laurels; everyone is creating copyrighted work. It’s a key part of the incentive to create lasting works of value.
One can make the case that this period should be more limited, or that the combination should be capped, but life+X is the right formulation, I think.
Why can't they do what the rest of us do? Earn and save money during your working life and leave _that_ for your heirs. Let copyright die with the author.
Work is often only recently published when an artist or author dies but has taken years of non-earning to create.
I know this them-and-us thinking is fashionable in the tech world but the reality is that the majority of creative people don’t earn much and never have, and copyright was developed not to give them extra power over the rest of us but to create a framework for creative work to earn them an income at all.
Sure, some number of years is reasonable - but what do you think that is? Because 70 is insane. A single bestseller should not be able to support an extended family over three generations; at some point the rent-seeking becomes excessive. If you publish a work, at some point it stops being yours. The fact that this takes a whole lifetime is already very generous.
I don't disagree; personally I think you could go with life plus 35 and cap the whole thing at 80 years from publication.
But I do think some potential post-mortem protection is essential for creative work to remain viable, and that means that any post-mortem buyer of an artist's estate has to be able to get value from recent work for a period of time.
This whole discussion is somewhat fantastical now anyway, because copyright is fucked.
But the intent was always to make working artists' lives possible; the various copyright extensions have always been for the benefit of corporate copyright holders, and it is unfair to vilify individual working artists for that.
It was only narrowed for the purposes of the point I am making, which is that copyright protects working creatives. I am not at all saying that all artists only make work for money.
It is working artists we are talking about; working artists work for money.
That money, in the post-patronage era, comes from exercising copyright. The reason the copyright can’t simply die with them is that this tends to dissuade the creation of long-gestating work.
Copyright was developed to make it possible for artists, writers, musicians etc. to work for long periods on work of significance with no income, on the basis of the future, deferred earnings of the work, without their work being stolen from them, and it gives them the limited right to direct how their work is monetised on their behalf, including establishing publishing rights etc.
Some protection after death is a key component of that, because people do die while they are still working.
The current "lifetime of the author + X years" rules in effect in the United States still carry the same perverse incentive, though the incentive diminishes rapidly as X gets larger; with the very large value of X in effect today the perverse incentive is so small as to be effectively non-existent, but it's still there in theory.
Personally, I'd prefer a fixed term. I know enough independent authors making a living from selling their books that I'm willing to allow the fixed term to be large, like 50 years from date of completion of the work. (With a good definition of "completion" so someone can't cheat by editing a couple lines per year to keep something copyrighted indefinitely). The simpler the rule is, the easier it is to understand, and the harder it is to cheat it. The more complicated you make a rule, the more loopholes get found.
That dead man took the risk of not earning much in his lifetime, to continue feeding his family even after his passing. You might as well ask why does someone acquire life insurance.
You could sidestep it by running non-permissibly licensed training data that you purchased through an LLM. Legal attitude so far seems to be that this is transformative as long as it's not 1:1. The question on whether or not the end result is copyrightable of course remains controversial and inconsistent, but that question is also fairly irrelevent. You don't get more libre than public domain.
That's a fair amount of computational and labor overhead mind you, as you'll need to verify and prune the quality of your mountain of synthetic data, but certainly possible.
Though this assumes the legal system is a rational actor playing by the set of rules it claims to. In fact, I highly suspect you could get very unlucky and get an unfavorable ruling against you, because you stepped on a big pile of money's toes in the process of doing this.
They do not appear to have published the training data yet, but if they do it like Olmo https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/dolma3_pool you get a license to the database, but not to its content, which they cannot license to you because it was scraped from the internet. E.g. have a look at the preamble of the ODC-By license https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1-0/ which makes this distinction.
Eventually we'll just construct 100% synthetic training data that can reliably reproduce pretrains and fine tunes.
The first broadly useful fully open source models will do this.
We already have open data / open code / open weights for some domain-specific cases, such as audio models trained on large open datasets, eg. Tacotron / LJSpeech from waaay back in the day, though that is certainly not SOTA anymore.
Distillation could possibly be considered an early case of this as raw AI outputs are themselves not copyrightable unless humans enrich, filter, or transform them. Granted, that does not handle the cases where the outputs are sufficiently similar to copyrighted original works.
But how much of that synthetic data still ultimately derives from non-open sources? You'd still have to ask what a clean room implementation ultimately is, depending on how granular or aggressive a large publisher wanted to get about it.
That said, I don't necessarily disagree with you. Talkie[1] presents an interesting case for it being at least possible to do this entirely on public domain material.
But even that used Claude somewhere in the course of its training pipeline (it's listed as a contributor on their GitHub), so again, how granular you want to get with that is still a question.
Decentralized unstoppable storage, combined with decentralized unstoppable training, sorta like SETI for AI training. The seed of this tech already exists with IPFS and others like it.
We know (some? all?) of the big labs have skirted copyright laws at one point or another. Truly open models would just build on what is publicly available.
If the LLM/AI ecosystem starts actually needing some Person-To-Person (or maybe Agent-To-Agent?) payment system because things actually get smart enough to be useful autonomously, they're gonna need some way to send money/currency around. Depending on how banks will react to this need, we might see another return of digital currencies from the current winter.
