Тег: Copyright

How do you feel about feeding neural networks all the content from the internet, disregarding copyright and without anyone’s consent?

M1inki

It has long been no secret to my readers that the copyright law appears to me as an entity that is hopelessly obsolete and extremely expensive in terms of enforcement, and therefore will immediately wither away as soon as the state ceases to carry out this very enforcement. However, with the appearance of large language models, all grounds have emerged to believe that copyright will wither away even and significantly sooner than the state.

There are various arguments in defense of copyright. There is the utilitarian one: if everyone takes someone else’s content for free, the incentive to compose this content will vanish, and that is the end of progress. There is the objectivist one: a person has a right to the product of their mind, and damn it, because that’s what Ayn Rand said. There is the ethical one: labor must be paid for.

And then it turns out that to train another, more advanced version of a large language model, it needs to be fed the entire corpus of texts ever created by humanity, and it will devour them and ask for seconds. If this is not done, then a promising direction of information technology development will hit a dead end. Those training the model are not concerned with the artistic merits of the text. For them, whether it is the Bible or a Harry Potter fanfic—it is simply text possessing a key quality: written by a human. Knowledge of the Bible is more important for a language model, but only for the reason that, firstly, it is more voluminous, and secondly, references to it are far more frequent in other texts and in user queries.

And that’s it, we have immediately lost the utilitarian argument, because it is precisely for the sake of progress that texts need to be fed to the neural network. In exchange, we have acquired very wealthy lobbyists for the abolition of copyright, since companies developing large language models can quite well compete in terms of capital size with digital publishing houses. Moreover, even if for particularly widely circulated texts the rightsholders manage to defend the right not to acquaint LLMs with them, who wins from the fact that in response to “summarize such-and-such story by Stephen King” the chatbot will answer “I don’t know a single work by this author, let me instead summarize such-and-such story by David Friedman”? Surely it won’t be Stephen King’s publishers nor Stephen King himself who will benefit from such a thing.

How will content for training neural networks be obtained? Very simple. Content is usually already physically present on the web in free access; it just has a “pirated” label, and therefore law-abiding companies have to pretend it doesn’t exist. However, this is too flimsy a little fence, and it won’t stop those who consider themselves entitled to step over it. The only person a neural network won’t get is some Rodion Belkovich, because he in principle does not post his books on the web, even for money))) This is a huge loss for the future interlocutors of intellectual chatbots, but what can be done, humanity has lost many valuable texts throughout its history, shit happens.

If buying is not owning, then copying is not stealing

When someone talks about piracy, images from pirate movies usually spring to mind—a wooden leg, a bottle of rum, and a parrot. But in the digital world, things are a bit different. There, a pirate isn’t some guy stealing “riches” from poor authors. It’s more like a guy or a girl who keeps the doors of a massive digital library open for everyone.

Imagine Nintendo. The legendary company has released over 1,500 games over the last 40 years. Many of them are now lying in dusty boxes in attics or have long since rotted in landfills because it’s not profitable for the corporation to maintain old content. But who saved these games for history? Exactly, those same “pirates.” In the digital age, they are a kind of volunteer guarding cultural heritage. Piracy today is a guarantee that we won’t lose priceless culture tomorrow.

But isn’t this theft? This is where it gets interesting. Theft is when you take something from someone, and that person no longer has it. By downloading a movie, a song, or a book, you aren’t taking it away from the author. The file remains exactly where it was, in its original form. No real loss—except, perhaps, the copyright holder’s illusions about their hypothetical income.

Fine, but shouldn’t authors be paid for their work? Of course they should. But for the first copy of the product that buyers voluntarily purchased, the money was indeed paid. Everything else is an artificial monopoly imposed by the state (i.e., a privilege from a stationary bandit, which is what patents were openly called in the past).

It’s also important to understand that the modern copyright system (let’s call it “copyrism” for convenience) doesn’t allow us to fully own even the things we’ve already paid for. You bought a game? Great, but it’s tied to a dozen DRM protections that vet you like a border guard at an airport. Bought a Netflix subscription? You aren’t the owner of the movies, just a temporary tenant. Subscription ends—goodbye, favorite series. Copyrism is a cult of control where the user is always under suspicion. We have become tenants rather than owners of our own culture. Admit it, that’s not very market-like at all.

Lost sales are a myth. Companies love to calculate virtual losses: claiming that since you downloaded 10,000 copies of our album, we lost 10,000 sales! No, folks, you lost at most the chance to sell it to a few dozen people. The other 9,950 would most likely never have bought your product if they couldn’t download it for free. And you know what’s funny? The most active pirates spend more on music and movies than the average consumer! Because piracy is more like a sampler than a robbery.

Piracy also helps in cases where the copyright holder doesn’t want to or cannot help. Remember how HBO ruthlessly deleted favorite series from its servers when closing HBO Max? They were saved specifically by pirates. When a book is banned by censorship, the only hope of reading it is again through pirate sites. They literally support the freedom of information.

Free does not equal immoral! Libertarian ethics are simple: violence is bad. And when you make a copy of a digital file, you aren’t taking anything from anyone. But government raids on servers, million-dollar fines for students, and criminal cases against “pirates”—that is real violence. If an author is talented, grateful listeners, readers, and viewers will support them voluntarily. This is fair and free, and most importantly—non-violent.

What can we do? Advocate for the abolition of copyrism. Don’t be afraid to say out loud: copying is cooperation and the dissemination of knowledge, not theft. We are not obliged to feel guilty for simply wanting to freely manage our files and the culture that has long since become part of a common heritage. And one last thing: keep your torrent client handy. Because while corporations are playing Monopoly, pirates are the only ones truly ensuring the preservation of culture!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Minecraft versus copyright

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Supporters of the state monopoly privilege known as copyright and patent law are very afraid that without a mechanism of forceful punishment for the unauthorized copying and distribution of information content, its creators will simply be left with nothing, pirates will rob them and deprive them of the means of subsistence and the incentive to create new content in the future. Of course, there are dozens of ways to monetize content without using such a privilege, however, we will not analyze them now, but simply look at one practical example that I have known for a long time, but for some reason remembered only very recently. And this example is a game called Minecraft.

The creator of Minecraft, Markus Persson, is a supporter of piracy; he criticizes the attitude towards this phenomenon prevalent in large companies and is even a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden. He has never been against people freely copying and distributing the game he created. However, this did not prevent him from earning 640 million Swedish kronor (about 100 million US dollars) from the sale of licensed copies of the game in 2012 alone, and later selling his stake in the company he founded, Mojang, for 2.5 billion dollars (currently owned by the Microsoft corporation). Minecraft itself became the best-selling game in the world, with about 200 million licensed copies sold by 2020.

Indeed, although Minecraft is officially proprietary software, in reality it is not protected against copying; its files are not encrypted in any way and anyone can download and use them, and this is not even restricted by its current copyright holders (although I am not familiar with their future plans). Access to the official game launcher is only available to players who have purchased a licensed copy, however, a large number of unofficial launchers already exist, and the game itself can be launched without a launcher, simply using the command line. And for unlicensed players, not only single-player but also multiplayer is available. The game server core has a function in its settings which, by disabling it, the server owner can grant connection access to anyone regardless of whether they have a license; therefore, there are many unlicensed servers in the game. And this fact, by the way, also in no way hinders the development of licensed servers and the earnings of their owners.

As we can see, after creating information content, it is entirely possible to get by without forceful privileges. Their absence did not prevent Minecraft from becoming the best-selling game in the world, nor did it stop the game’s creator, Markus Persson, from joining the Forbes billionaires list. There are also many examples of other games that were cracked and posted on torrent trackers even before their official release; nonetheless, the sales of licensed keys did not collapse because of this.