Ill believe it when I see people directly vote to full surveillance of all their chat and speech. Just because politicians in a democracy want something that doesn't mean the voters want it too. The voters are voting for people, not on policy, and that holds true even if we were able to ignore all the manipulations and external influences upon choosing political representatives.
But doesn't claiming that immunity require them to identify themselves as such? In which case identification to claim immunity to the law also happens to involve complying with the law.
I think the author is wrong. If you don't have agency over your own decision to live or die you cannot be free.
There is an argument for narrowly tailored assisted suicide as there is evidence that many regret their attempts, however the moralizing should be left out of the equation entirely.
I have a whole box full of buzzers and beepers that I've liberated from their original equipment environments. Needy electronics are not in line with my idea of a quiet environment. I've made an exception for a pretty powerful Lithium-Ion/LiPo charger, that thing has the potential to burn the place down and I like the fact that it only alerts when it needs to and never 'just because'.
In an economy where ideas have value, it seems logical we should have property protection, much like we do for physical goods. Its easy to argue "ideas should be freely shared", but if an idea takes 20 years and $100M dollars to develop, and there are no protections for ideas, then no one will take the time to develop them. Most modern technology we have is due to copyright/patents (drugs, electronics, entertainment, etc.), because without those protections, no one would have invested the time and energy to develop them in the first place.
I believe you are probably only looking at the current state of the world and seeing how it "stifles competition" or "hampers innovation". Those allegations are probably true to some extent, especially in specific cases, but its also missing the fact that without those protections, the tech likely wouldn't be created in the first place (and so you still wouldn't be able to freely use the idea, since the person who invented it wouldn't have).
this is a kinda strange example, since the discovery tends to be government funded research, and the safety shown by private money
the USSR went to space without those protections. its not like property protections are the only thing that has driven invention.
MIT licenses are also pretty popular as are creative commons licenses.
people also do things that don't make a lot of money, like teaching elementary school. it costs a ton of money to make and run all those schools, but without any intellectual property being created that can be sold or rented out.
i dont believe that nobody would want to build much of the things we have now, if there wasnt IP around them. Making and inventing things is fun
> i dont believe that nobody would want to build much of the things we have now, if there wasnt IP around them. Making and inventing things is fun
People write fanfiction without being paid, however, Avatar 2 cost hundreds of millions to produce [1]. The studio didn't spend this money for the heck of it, they spent this money with the hope of recouping their investment.
If no one can make money off of intellectual property, people will continue writing fanfiction. But why would a studio spend hundreds of millions making a blockbuster movie?
> The studio didn't spend this money for the heck of it, they spent this money with the hope of recouping their investment.
I wonder if the world would be a better place if we had fewer financial incentives to do things, in general?
> But why would a studio spend hundreds of millions making a blockbuster movie?
Under this hypothetical scenario, I believe there wouldn't be a "studio" in the first place.
There could be a group of people who want to express themselves, get famous or do something just for fun, without any direct financial gain. Sure, they wouldn't be able to pull off Avatar 2, but our expectations as consumers would also be different.
I note that production, or developing an idea, is not the same as having the idea. You can't deliberately have an idea by spending money, or have a better idea by spending more money. You can employ people to look at a problem and expect some of them to have reasonably good ideas about it - people who were selected because they already have good ideas in that general area. Then you say "these ideas cost this much money to come up with," as if you made ideas happen by decree. That's not what you did, those ideas were latent. What you did was to get them organized.
The opposite idea is intrinsic motivation, and that artists make art because they love it, and they were going to make the art (or come up with ideas) anyway, even if you didn't pay them. But artists also love having comfortable lifestyles, maybe families, maybe expensive studio equipment, maybe parties. And although you can't force them to care about your project you can certainly bribe them into seeing if they are interested. So you can bring out the ideas that they were supposedly going to have anyway - but might not have been able to have without funding - and you can steer the emphasis of their pre-existing interests around.
Which is to say that creativity and money interact in a weird way, where ideas don't have a cost, but creative focus does.
> but if an idea takes 20 years and $100M dollars to develop, and there are no protections for ideas, then no one will take the time to develop them
This sounds trivially true but I have some trouble reconciling it with reality. For example the Llama models probably cost more than this to develop but are made freely available on GitHub. So while it’s true that some things won’t be built, I think it’s also the case that many things would still be built.
I appreciate you giving the parent comment a fair chance.
As a society we’re having trouble defining abstract components of the self (consciousness, intelligence, identity) as is. What makes the legislative notion of an idea and its reification (what’s actually protected under copyright laws) secure from this same scrutiny? Then patent rights. And what do you think may happen if the viability of said economy comes into question afterwards?
It's just a fiction to allow something freely copiable - pure information - to be pretended to be a commodity. If the AI firms have only a single redeeming feature, then it is that in them the copyright mafia finally has to face someone their own size, rather than driving little people to suicide, as they did to Aaron Swartz.
Only people who don't create anything say that. Every musician and every author I know (including myself) thinks they should have some rights concerning the distribution and sale of the products of their work. Why should a successful book author be forced to live on charity?
It seems like a pretty logical conclusion that if you removed copyright, then book manufacturers would just copy author's books and sell them without paying the author. Or ebook services would just distribute their books for free.
Author's could potentially get a couple months of sales by working with manufacturers themselves and being the first to sell their books. But as soon as untrusted parties can get their hands on the book, someone will start selling their own copies of it.
Personally I strongly detest ip law, but I see it as problematic for its implementation rather than its intent. So much so that I would rather it be abolished than hold its current form. I feel this from the perspective of a creator and a consumer because I so often see works that are unfairly removed or have their profits stolen as a result of the guilty until proven innocent style enforcement. This makes me fearful of publishing works that build upon previous work (which many creative fields naturally do). The most blatant abuse I've seen recently was the Gamer's Nexus documentary being taken down by Bloomberg. However, IP is arguably more problematic in industries like medicine where patents are renewed ad infinitum by evergreening to milk a protected monopoly.
Realized I didn't address your concern, I have still seen many creatives able to profit without strong protections. The gaming industry often has controversy with its drm but even drm free releases are continuously able to make large sales volumes and drm has been shown in that EU study from 2015ish to not actually protect sales.
Piracy is not nearly at the same scale as what would happen if copyright was scrapped. Piracy requires you to go to shady websites to get illegal copies of games/movies/tv series. That is enough of a disincentive for most people that just buying copies of the games is easier.
But if it were legal to distribute copies, these websites wouldn't need to operate in the shadows, switching domain names constantly to evade law enforcement. Instead, these websites could become as easy-to-use as Steam, but instead of paying the creators of the games they could just take 100% of the revenues for themself.
There would be an explosion in what we would call "piracy" today, but what would just be called downloading games if copyright were scrapped, because the barrier to entry for doing so could be made so much lower.
I am not a fan of intellectual property and copyright enforcement (at least the weaponisation of them). But scrapping IP and copyright entirely would be disastrous. I prefer the idea of reducing the amount of time someone can hold IP/copyright for, or additional punishment for patent trolls, or other measures to alleviate the concerns of IP/copyright without destroying R&D and digital work.
This is fair, I don't actually want no protection for creatives, but the enforcement of a law is a large part of what draws the line of generally good or bad for me.
Installing open source software on phones is becoming more and more difficult. It used to be the case that bootloaders were generally unlocked or unlockable. That is no longer true, including on Android. Google is also planning on banning APKs from unregistered sources soon.
We need end-to-end encryption on phones to have reasonably convenient privacy. We can definitely lose that, and open source software won't help.
Worse, once phones are locked down desktops and laptops can be locked down as well.
If this becomes a widespread way to bypass this, wouldn't they just pass a law to make Linux usage illegal unless you install some module?
I mean, look at all the geniuses saying "I'll just use a VPN" in response to the latest ID for age verification. A week later, the law was amended to also involve VPNs.
How long until hardware vendors prevent you from installing a certified OS that is specifically not anything like linux? Before you call it a conspiracy, know that we are already there with our phones, which represent an overwhelming share of consumer compute use today.
