> Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior.
That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category. Taking a utilitarian approach here is exactly what the sam altman / effective altruist crowd is doing (or claiming, at least).
Believe it or not, but there are different philosophies. The US Constitution, for example, is written under the framework that all rights are innate, and the government merely endorses, not grants, those which are described. This framework creates a moral basis to rights, such that things like property are not merely social constructs but moral goods. To violate them is itself an immoral act.
The Constitution (and the thinkers that it was based off of) creates a moral basis to rights. At the time the Constitution was written, this was a pretty radical idea. The most prevalent moral framework at the time was the divine right of kings, the idea that the king was ordained by God to rule and anyone who questioned that right was speaking heresy.
My wording was actually wrong, as the constitution recognizes a divine source for the rights, it doesn't create the moral basis. Perhaps 'establishes as the formal basis' would have been more appropriate.
You're right that it was a relatively radical idea at the time, but not without precedent. The Dutch, Venice and Genoa were republics, the Swiss Confederation was a union of cantons and territories, for example, not to mention the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy, John Locke, Montesquieu, and the assorted Greek and early Roman city states.
All of the powers granted to the government are through the constitution, and copyright is a form of property right... hence the phrase "intellectual property".
Funny how, when Aaron Swartz did the exact same thing (in a much narrower and more focused way), he was driven to suicide by the US government, but when Sam and Dario do it, people argue about whether (or not) "IP is real".
Note that society is more about justice than it is about philosophy or logic. Whether you believe that IP makes logical sense or not, is not terribly relevant through the lens of justice. To allow the Altmans and Amodeis of the world to escape the kinds of consequences that Swartz could not (despite having purer intentions than either -- despite being a genuine utilitarian, instead of an aspiring oligarch _pretending_ to be one), would be the height of injustice.
It would be a grotesque and cruel insult to all the people who remember Swartz, and share his values and optimism about the internet and computers.
Why would I want it to happen to more people? This is, at least to me, an insane point of view.
"Oh my god, the police just shot a black man for no reason. To make this fair they should also shoot more white people for no reason". Do you see how absolutely unhinged that sounds?
There are two injustices here. The first injustice is the sheer existence of this notion of intellectual property. The second injustice stems from the selective application of the associated laws.
Intellectual property should not exist, but since it does, one can and should expect it to be applied consistently in all cases. Just look at what they did to Kim Dotcom, he basically got destroyed. SWAT rappelled down helicopters and descended upon this guy for the egregious crime of copying bits. That's exactly what should happen to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta. Anything less than that is an insult to previous enforcement victims.
Inconsistency robs authorities of all credibility. Selective enforcement exposes them for the arbitrary tyrants they are and delegitimizes their decisions.
"For my friends, everything. For everyone else, the law."
And
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
I usually shit post on this website because it’s full of amoral idiots who just want to make a lot of money and don’t care about others, but I want to suggest to you that arguing using extreme analogies is almost never a persuasive rhetorical device. The other person almost always just sees the way it doesn’t accurately apply to the situation.
I didn't want to bring up Aaron Swartz myself first, but now that you did and proved the point I did not want to post first, I nevertheless will:
It's a cruel and sad irony that people invoke Aaron Swartz to argue directly opposite worldviews depending on prevailing fashion, making him into some kind of perpetuum mobile in his grave. Literally the same arguments, using his memory to argue position that's opposite to what was argued two years ago, back before AI fully took off.
I personally doubt Aaron would be against AI companies doing what they did on the grounds of intellectual property. There's plenty of things to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but this is not it.
The funny thing about having a divine source for rights is also recognizing that humans are fallible and thus inevitably going to be unable to live up to that standard. This argument is the basis for people who want government to have limited powers- the less power it has, the less it can abuse it.
There's a flip side to this as well- President Lincoln famously suspended habeus corpus unilaterally in violation of the Constitution, outright ignoring a Supreme Court ruling in the process. It became moot when Congress retroactively approved the suspension and allowed it to continue for the remainder of the civil war. Lincoln remains celebrated, despite what could rightfully be argued as blatantly unconstitutional power grabs.
The use of the term divine at the time was more of an aftereffect of most people having some kind of belief in god and using that as a casus belli to redistribute power. The actual causal reasons seem more technological and more of England spreading themselves too thin. Lincoln went on to further prove there is no divine power enforcing these rights, it's the distribution of power and information that defines the rights you have. The Constitution is simply a piece of paper, not an agent.
We see this happening again in our modern world. Technology has allowed us to concentrate information like never before. If you believe knowledge (hence processing of information) is power then we've created new power structures that must change society.
Now, we can say things like "well, you can't concentrate information" but the other party can simply disagree and say it's my divine right to. You're at an impasse unless you plan on taking up a path to violence (any and every legal action is implied violence).
> Lincoln went on to further prove there is no divine power enforcing these rights,
This is a straw man that nobody is arguing.
> Now, we can say things like "well, you can't concentrate information"
Again, nobody is arguing that "concentrating information" is bad. They're arguing that the expression of ideas in a specific format is a type of property, and that what AI companies are doing is immoral theft. Further, states and the federal government have the means and impetus to prosecute theft according to the powers given them by the Constitution. The only thing that is stopping them from doing so is that the claim that theft has occurred is contested, and the method in question has not been successfully tried in court in the broad.
"A social construct" and "not real" are not the same thing. Money, laws, countries, gender, even civilization itself are all social constructs. More importantly, all forms of ownership are social constructs, and that doesn't provide any information as to whether we should respect them or not.
> Perhaps you need to look up what "real" actually means.
On the contrary; I think. Nearly every definition disagrees with the claims you're making. It's not a mere synonym of "concrete" or antonym of "abstract".
And regardless, the usage here was clearly in the context of GP's (false) dichotomy between "real" or "false concept", so obviously the definition you're trying to prescribe doesn't apply.
> That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category.
AH. Given that framing, then I suppose anything that varies from "these axioms are perfect there can be no others" must fall into the "not real" category.
But isn't there some debate about the moral axioms themselves? A space that is much more complex than "yes/no"?
EDIT: I always wonder, when I get two downvotes in the same moment, if someone is cheating. It happens so often.
EDIT2: And now! 3 upvotes in the same moment. I daresay someone is confessing.
no, I think people are just annoyed that you're trying to have an irrelevant and kinda cheesy 'is epistemology really real - think about it bro' conversation
I'm also a fan of nuance and non-black&white thinking but that is quite literally not how the rule of law generally works
that seems very anti-social and immature, like throwing a tantrum. you get a singular downvote from me for one comment but I do like how reasonable you're being about all of it :)
Social constructs are bought and paid for by the wealthy.
Most people want a clean environment while the current US administration is pulling back environmental regulations to allow for more pollutants. The current US Supreme Court has taken gifts from those that have invested interest in the outcome of their judgements.
Social axioms are mutable while mathematical axioms are immutable.
Human trafficking is bad. How many of the wealthy that partook of Epstein's trafficking have been prosecuted? This shows that human trafficking being bad is mutable based on wealth and power.
"The Axioms of choice" is talking about a mutable set of sets that contain immutable axioms.
The number 4 in a set is immutable, 4 == 4 under all stances, while it can be taken out or added to the selected set. Objective reasoning.
Example: The OS function that applies IP port assignments. Application may utilize one or more port numbers. When the application is done, they are moved back into the unused set. The port numbers themselves are immutable.
Social axioms are mutable because subjective reasoning is being applied.
Example:
Ask a person if they support domestic abuse. They most likely will so no. Ask them if they ever funded a performer that committed acts of domestic abuse after the facts were revealed. There is a high chance they did and write it off by saying, "don't look at their character, look at how well they perform. That was a good show, movie, book, ..."
Ever hear someone use the phrase, "that is different" when describing two equal scenarios that apply to two different people?
Kanye West still selling out shows highlights that people are willing to reject objective reasoning in a social environment.
Or to rephrase, social axioms are mutable because they can collapse and no longer exist.
Axioms are not in flux, set of axioms are in flux. Axioms are fixed and finite. This is how software works.
Gödel's incompleteness theorems is built around this. By saying axioms change then one could create an universal math theorem. Since axioms are finite in definition and applied in a finite space, functions, there cannot be an universal math.
Example: Fibonacci sequence only works with positive integers and zero. It will work with negative integers wrapped in absolute value. The axioms of Fibonacci did not change while wrapped in absolute value. Rational and irrational numbers can work with Fibonacci too by applying another function bound to absolute value.
So long as there have been people, there have been those who had more than others, be it material goods or power, which gains more material goods, which begets power. I'm not really sure there it's true that any society predates wealth, ergo no social construct predates wealth.
Compared to feral dogs, quite wealthy indeed. They've claimed sleeping and feeding spots that are very valuable for being both safe and climate controlled, and have a number of chew bones and toys that are free of dangerous splintering wood, animal bone, parasites and fleas. These are things that are valuable enough to fight over and will contribute greatly to their lifespan.
If you think the only measure of wealth is money, you have it backwards- money is a polite fiction representing an abstraction of value, and is only good for use as an exchange into another more concrete form of value.
You've missed the point of my response- wealth, as in the accumulation of value- is not uniquely human. It is born out of the inability to see into the future, gathering resources to survive times of hardship. It is securing the most desirable mates, controlling territory, being the first to get the choicest fruits or bites of prey.
It is this biological imperative that pushes humans to desire ever more, and only higher order thinking- social behavior, religious discipline, whatever floats your boat- that suppresses those instincts into virtue, altruism or civility.
So, when I replied to the following:
> Well... no. I'd say that most of the social constructs I'm thinking of predate wealth. Most likely shaped by evolutionary pressures.
I'm pointing out that the social constructs were shaped as a reaction to our nature, which includes a intrinsic, if subconscious, understanding of the concept of value and wealth.
FF's market share crashed because it was painfully slow compared to chrome when it first came out. The marketing helped, but it wouldn't have stuck if it hadn't been better. You can only blame users being too stupid to know better for just so long.
I grew up near a house that was painted an odd combination of purple with pink trim (shutters, etc). Nobody else followed suit because all anybody thought of it was "the ugly house".
Standing out doesn't really help if it isn't more desirable than the boring normal.
What I personally dislike is the recent trend of all black siding and trim. I have no idea why people are doing this on new construction near me, other than perhaps cooling is cheaper than heating in our climate. It's certainly (IMHO) hideous though.
I'm a little more skeptical that this is "AI is big so it is worse" issue. Yes, AI is big in scale, but this has been the case for almost every popular free service. They either start:
- charging (news / journalist services)
- gate-keeping (X forcing log-ins)
- enshittifying (lots of ads and degraded service)
The fact that the way back machine is incredibly useful but most people didn't know about it or use it very much doesn't change the fact that it has basically become very popular... only with LLM agents rather than humans. Ads alone aren't enough to support human traffic for many sites with human traffic.
There's a difference between being able to be successfully sued (civil liability, petitioned by a private entity) and charged (criminal liability, or petitioned by a government entity).
The thresholds for suing and charging differ greatly depending on the circumstances.
Another set of hypothetical examples that make things muddier:
- If I drive a fishing boat into a pier, I am liable, not the manufacturer of the boat
- If I drive a car over someone lying in the road, I am liable, not the manufacturer of the car
- If my life is in danger and I shoot a gun and kill my attacker, neither I nor the manufacturer are liable so long as I obeyed the relevant self defense laws and gun possession of whatever jurisdiction I am in
- If I fire a gun into a crowd indiscriminately, I am liable and several jurisdictions have used that to also hold gun manufacturer liable as well
That last example has been less successful as of late, but there are other variations too.
Some offer zero data retention policies, but there can be weasel words. For example, on the individual pro plan, you can turn off the setting that lets them train models on your data, but they still have a section in their terms that allows them to evaluate your anonymized data for statistical and "research" purposes. You have to actually get a signed contract along with an enterprise plan that spells out exactly what they're going to use, and what settings enable what retention.
Seems naive to think that those providers - who have a financial interest in selling the data - would not also try to weasel out of the precise definition of ‘zero’ retention.
I've observed this dichotomy myself. Some people will make things because they enjoy the experience of making. Others make things because they enjoy achieving an outcome- happy client, open source community, a new useful tool for themselves, whatever the case may be.
There's also room in the middle, and people who are nowhere on the scale, that just like getting paid.
This would be the more charitable take than your TL;DR
And here's me thinking it would be a lot of fun...
reply