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Modern copyright duration is the actual problem: It should've never been longer than what was outlined in the Statute of Anne. (28~14 years)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

The Lord of the Rings should be in the public domain.

The original Harry Potter book should've been in the public domain.

Star Wars should've been in the public domain.

Everything from before 1998 should've been in the public domain by now, but isn't.


In my view duration is not the problem, but copyright itself is. Nobody should expect to be "passively" paid for a job/effort made at a past point in time. You work 40 hours this week, you get paid 40 hours at whatever your rate.

Authors should use other ways to charge for their 40/80 hours work, and when released it should be in the public domain.

Scientists have learned to do it (by getting tenured or postdocs), im sure other can do it.


What about something you've made for fun but haven't made any money from? Should someone else be allowed to sell and profit from your work?

I'm not expecting to be "passively paid" for my hobbies. But I'm expecting that someone won't steal and profit from the things I make. Why would that be fair?


Say my hobby is statue making. I design and create a concrete statue that I failed to sell. Whether that be because I did not try or because I could not find a buyer, I could not sell it.

So I took it, and I put it in my pile of completed works: a pile of crumbling statute rubble by the roadside. In the digital case, maybe it was posted online and the pile is a timeline or portfolio.

Someone in a pick up truck drives by sees it, takes it, and sells it for half $1 million to a trust fund baby.

Was the output of my work and therefore the half $1 million stolen from me?

If there was nothing physical to take, and I had never tried to or successfully sold it to anyone and somebody else does it, was I stolen from or did I just fail to sell?

And then if I get my knickers in a twist over that sale I have to ask myself: is my hobby to be a sales person and to sell art or is my hobby to be an artist and make art?


I don't think I'm really following your analogy. Did I put it out on the side of the road because I didn't want it anymore, or did that person steal it off my property?

From what I can tell, the million dollars does not belong to me, but the person who stole my statue should be held accountable for stealing it, and they should be held accountable for selling an object that did not belong to them. Both of those things should be illegal.

Your analogy seems besides the point, though. In my original question, I specifically mentioned that the art piece was made for fun. Sometimes, as an artist, I make things just for fun, with no intention to ever sell them. Other people should not be able to take the things I make and sell them without my permission, or without some sort of deal beind struck between me and the seller. A society where it's legal to take another artist's work and sell it without their permission would be supremely unfair. A society for vultures.


Are you high or a paid shill?

For a concrete statue there sure are suspicious large amounts of straw peeking through

So no authors, directors, or any other creative work that can be stolen & duplicated? Why don’t we get rid of patent laws too while we’re at it?

Unironically, let’s get rid of patent laws while we’re at it.

The advancement of technology would take off if we did not have patent trolls telling us what you could, and could not use understand and improve.

Just imagine what Palworld could be if it didn’t have to spend the last year two years, however long spending all of their budget fighting a patent case against the biggest fucking gaming company in the world instead of paying their developers to add new features and pals.

Imagine what crazy awesome intense games could be made with the nemesis system.

The patent is the coward‘s bargain.


Palworld ripped off another company's hard work. The IP holders poured insane amounts of time and money to market and make their work a success story. Now comes a bunch of snotty kids and try to make money off it. Nah, go fuck off. Use your head and come up with something original.

AI already gives IQ to the braindead masses. And now people want to abolish copyright, so the totally unworthy, useless nobodies could leech other's hard work and profit from it. Get a grip.

Maybe do not make games if you have zero ideas yourself. Go and mow the lawn if that's all you are capable of.


May you ever be the defendant of a patent troll's lawsuit on tech you believed was original.

> Copyright is what facilitates copyleft.

Chesterson's fence. The existence of copyleft is the result of being forced to live within the domain of copyright, not the other way around.

> Getting rid of IP protections also rids us of GPL, which gave us a few things including the most popular OS in the world.

Linux became popular because of the persistent effort of Linus & the Linux community into making the kernel better, not because of copyleft.

> It’s one thing to reject the specifics of IP laws as currently implementated; it’s another thing to celebrate the dismantling of the entire foundation of open source by for-profit corporate interests who sought to do it for decades.

There are similar corporate interests who profit off of hoarding decades-old works so they can charge fees to what should've been in the public domain, under the original durations that should've stayed (28/14 years).

What has resulted from the endless extensions of the original terms has been the societal lobotomization of human creativity, with an untold number of works now being forever lost simply because they were derived from what should've been in the public domain.

When having lived in such a society, and recognizing existing copyright laws as the reason why it is creatively in such a state, the celebration of its destruction should not be treated as illogical.


> Linux became popular because of the persistent effort of Linus & the Linux community into making the kernel better, not because of copyleft.

Not at all. It was born thanks to Linus, but it exploded in popularity and gained its contributorship precisely thanks to the promise of GPL that volunteer work will remain for public benefit.

Without the ability to say that, a corporate entity could have taken volunteer work so far, built a closed-source solution on top of it, and ran with it commercially, with no repercussions and with great results.

In fact, we have just that example at hand: Apple. There’s a reason Linux distros are much more popular than BSD, nearly rivaling commercial systems on desktop and far surpassing them in the server world.

> The existence of copyleft is the result of being forced to live within the domain of copyright

Sure, and by that logic the existence of copyright is the result of being forced to live within the current socioeconomic reality.

The existence of copyright hinges on existence of property in general and intellectual property in particular. To eschew that is to propose a stark foundational change to society.

Sure, if we imagine a world where there’s no corporations hiding the source from users, everything belongs to everyone, no one is recognized for their work or has any control over it, etc., we can say that copyright is non-essential. There will be many questions to that reality, of course (for example, what would drive innovation in that world, if not the motivation for recognition and profit), but it has a right to be considered as a thought experiment. It could even be more desirable than the reality we live in!

However, we don’t live in that reality, and what people tend to mean when they propose getting rid of copyright is a half measure—a reality which has nothing in common with the above, which is all the same as now, except with copyright protections removed. Those protections used to be a hindrance to pirates, but now with the advent of LLMs are a massive issue for corporate interests building their new empires on top of our original work.

You yourself then proceed to argue that terms should be limited—as if I would disagree with that!


> A digital library needs almost no funding.

Clarification:

To maintain the library still requires resources & effort to do so. It only appears to need no funding because the donators of said (disk space / bandwidth / dev effort) are subsidizing it in aid of a goal they believe in (i.e. the church model).


> How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better?

If the obscure book/text is permanently lost forever under your stringent advice of "no stealing under any circumstances", would the "stealing" have saved it? If so, is it ethical to prevent others from accessing the book/text, under your guise of "preventing stealing"?


As literally stated in the second paragraph of the blog post:

> This support will be dedicated towards Blender core development, to maintain and continuously improve foundational features like the Blender Python API, which enables developers and artists alike to extend and improve the software for custom workflows.

https://hackernews.hn/item?id=47936552


Taking the task at face value:

- 1 week to prototype: The tool + its accompanying JS sandbox + System prompt updates + context injection

- 11 months of public testing to go through i18n + a11y edge cases & fix them


> There’s a reason why many professions have professional bodies and consolidated standards - from medicine to accountancy, actuarial work, civil engineering, aerospace, electronic and electrical engineering, law, surveying, and so many more.

Professional bodies = gatekeeping. The existence of the body means that the thing its surrounding will be barred from others to enter.

It means financial barriers & "X years of experience required" that actual programmers rightfully decry.

Caveat: When it comes to anything that will affect physical reality, & therefore the physical safety of others, the standards & accreditations then become necessary.

NOTE ON CAVEAT: Whilst *most* software will fall under this caveat, NOT ALL WILL. (See single-player offline video games)

To create a blanket judgement for this domain is to invite the death of the hobbyist. And you, EdNutting, may get your wish, since Google's locking down Android sideloading because they're using your desires for such safety as a scapegoat for further control.

https://keepandroidopen.org/

> We DO NOT have this in software engineering.

THIS IS A GOOD THING. FULLSTOP.

The ability to build your own tools & apps is one of the rightfully-lauded reasons why people should be able to learn about building software, WITHOUT being mandated to go to a physical building to learn.

To wall off the ability for people to learn how computers work is a major part of modern computer illiteracy that people cry & complain about, yet seem to love doing the exact actions that lead to the death of computer competency.


Professional bodies are a necessary form of gatekeeping for practicing the craft of software engineering professionally.

You are then bringing a whole host of other issues that are related in nature but not in practice: * Locking down of Android ecosystem * Openness of education * Remote teaching * Remote or online examination etc.

Professional bodies don't wall off the ability to learn nor to tinker at home, nor even to prototype or experiment (depending on scale and industry).

You can't confuse all these issues into one thing and say "we don't want this". It's a disingenuous way to argue the matter.


> Yes, but not the Nasdaq-100 [1] which added the "Fast Entry" rule listed right there in section 2 literally this February because SpaceX is demanding immediate inclusion into the Nasdaq-100 as a condition for listing on the Nasdaq instead of the NYSE.

...Honestly, Nasdaq's to blame for bending the knee in this case. If they choose to chase that pie, then they alone should be the ones to bear the burden, including any/all reactions from passive investors.

Passive investors should (ideally) switch to another index if they wish to not be involved in this IPO. The decision of how they should invest is theirs, and if they're not happy with this index, they should move to another index: Their money talks louder than any posturing that could ever be put out.


> None of the highest up were sent to jail. CEOs perfectly fine taking responsibility for the profits, but what happened to taking responsibility for the fraud they enabled?

> > Literally dozens of CEOs went to jail, which is again why I think this may be the biggest ball-drop of the media this century

The GP's remark is centered around the *sentiment* that none of the C-suite / execs in the Big Banks (Merrill, Goldman, BoA, Citi) were jailed for their involvement / excessive speculation in the 2008 crisis.

The keywords there being "Big Banks": If it's a national household name, OR if their positions are coveted by finance employees, it's a Big Bank. Otherwise, it's not a Big Bank.

> > > Your Google skills may need some work because this is the first result for "bank CEO jailed by TARP":

1) This is a goalpost shift from "bank CEOs jailed for causing / excessively speculating up to the 2008 crisis".

2) TARP was established as a result of the crisis (i.e. AFTER it happened), and therefore cannot be used to mark execs that were jailed for their involvement / excessive speculation in the 2008 crisis.

3) "TARP defraudment" is a different matter, and not "Causing the 2008 crisis" or "excessive speculation"

> > > https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/atlanta/press-releases/201...

The case cited only tangentially involves TARP, when the bulk of the case was about the President of FirstCity Bank & his associates defrauding the bank with loans that *they themselves had involvement in*.


If you want to argue the wrong 200 bankers went to jail I think that would be a great discussion to have, but that's absolutely not where the public narrative is right now, which is that these convictions simply never happened


> but that's absolutely not where the public narrative is right now, which is that these convictions simply never happened

In terms of public sentiment, for the conviction to have happened, it has to happen to the Big Banks, and not anyone else. If it didn't happen to the Big Banks, then narrative-wise it didn't happen at all.


You're blaming the public for not caring about 200 irrelevant bankers going to jail for mostly other reasons (e.g. TARP fraud), when there's no reason for them to. There might as well have 0 bankers gone to jail. Getting pedantic about your definition of "bankers going to jail" being technically correct and the public's definition of "banker going to jail" being too specific, completely misses the point and serves nothing but to make you feel good. You well know what the public means, and that they're right about it.

This comment puts it well. [0]

[0] https://hackernews.hn/item?id=46898199


> Right now latex would be a high indicator of manual effort, right?

...no?

Just one Google search for "latex editor" showed more than 2 in the first page.

https://www.overleaf.com/

https://www.texpage.com/

It's not that different from using a markdown editor.


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