LocalLLaMA
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Europe has clearly chosen a path that will increase its technological dependency on either the US or China. It's not likely to play a large role in figuring out the future economic order. We'll see how long it can continue on this path.
Its AI policies are reminiscent of Feudalism. People create AI, but then they have to pay a levy to people who have contributed nothing. But they have rights awarded by the government. AI is not the only area where the EU is shifting to policies that facilitate wealth extraction rather than creation. I don't think that is domestically sustainable. Sooner or later the European nations will try to extract wealth from each other and that will be the end. It doesn't have to go that far. Maybe we will just see a stagnation and decline, as in South America.
Is your stands limited to AI or do you generally condone paying a levy? Like towards Spotify or Netflix or Hollywood, because I could as well skip that and watch the newest movies without obeying their copyright...
I mean it's not nothing, there is some effort people put into things. Like the Wikipedia is super useful for machine learning. My computer code on Github teaches AI programming. And I can see the crawlers at my own server and today I had to update my config because it's been hammered by Alibaba. Dozens of different IP addresses, fake user agent and they completely overloaded my database with requests. It's not like I don't contribute or am part of a different world?!
That's a bit of an odd question, given my praise of American Fair Use. The USA has had copyright, including Fair Use, for longer than much of Europe. The predecessor of modern copyright law was created in the 1700s in the UK. There is a German scholar, Eckhard Höffner, who argues that this caused book production to plummet in the UK. He also says that the German-speaking lands produced more books, more different books, than the UK in the century before such laws arrived.
The American founding fathers were men of the Enlightenment. They, or some of them, understood the problems with such government sponsored monopolies. Therefore, the US Constitution limits copyrights and patents. It's an interesting clause. Congress is empowered "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". It's about progress first; very much a product of the Enlightenment.
I don't know if there was ever a discussion if entertainment should qualify at all for copyright protection. I have to try to look it up at some time.
In 1998, US copyright was extended by 20 years. Now it is life of the author +70 years. That has been called the Mickey-Mouse-Protection-Act, because it meant that the original Mouse enjoyed another 20 years of copyright This was roundly criticized by economists and even lead to a case before the Supreme Court. Obviously, making copyright retroactively longer does not encourage any kind of creativity. It's in the past. Well, the case was lost, nevertheless.
For many left/liberal people, this is corruption; just the Disney company getting what it wants.
The EU countries had expanded their copyright years earlier, without resistance or even comment. Smug Europeans may feel superior when Americans rage against the corporations. But the truth is often like this, where Europeans simply quietly accept such outrages.
The original copyright in the US (and before that in the UK) was 14 years. Copyright protection required registration. It worked like the patent system. The interesting thing is that patents still work a lot like that. One must register and publish them and then they last for 20 years. Patents still have a 20-year duration. Meanwhile, copyrights have gone from 14 years to life+70 years, no registration required.
Patents are public so that people can learn from them. That has been used as an argument for patents. The alternative would be that everyone tries to keep new inventions secret. This way, people can learn and try to circumvent patents; find other ways of achieving the same thing. That's an interesting observation in light of AI training, no?
I haven't answered your question. In my experience, pro-copyright people will always refuse to argue over what should be covered by copyright or how long. They demand an expansion and use psychological manipulation to get it. If you do not let yourself be manipulated, they change the subject and will argue if copyright should exist at all. I have never met a single person who was able to defend copyright as it exists. Perhaps you can answer own question now.
Yes, I mainly wanted to rule out the opposite. Because the multi billion dollar companies currently do some lobbying as well. Including the same manipulation and narratives, just the other way around. They want everyone else to lose rights, while they themselves retain full rights, little to no oversight... And that's just inherently unfair.
As I said. Copyright might not be something good or defendable. It clearly comes with many obvious flaws and issues. The video you linked is nice. I'd be alright with abolishing copyright. Preferrably after finding a suitable replacement/alternative. But I'm completely against subsidising big companies just so they can grow and manifest their own Black Mirror episode. Social scoring, making my insurance 3x more expensive on a whim and a total surveillence state should be prohibited. And the same rules need to apply to everyone. Once a book author doesn't get copyright any longer, so does OpenAI and the big tech companies. They can invest some $100 million in training models, but it's then not copyrighted either. I get to access the model however I like and I can sell a competing service with their model weights. That's fair and same rules for everyone. And Höffner talks to some degree about prior work and what things are based upon. So the big companies have to let go of their closely guarded trade secrets and give me the training datasets as well. I believe that'd be roughly in the spirit of what he said in the talk. And maybe that'd be acceptable. But it really has to be same rules for everyone, including big corporations.