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0 pointsOutOfHere1y ago0 comments

Regarding life without vaccines, the life expectancy could then be very low. Whether this qualifies as "thriving" is subjective. The population as a whole could still thrive, but individuals may not.

Regarding your other points:

1. That is a bad argument. Imagine that some people called collectors get to collect royalties from you every time you post a HN comment. Such collectors are paid for moderating comments. Some such collectors are wildly successful. Imagine that "commentright" law protects such people. If commentright law were to go away, how do such people get paid? (It's a fake problem, and copyright law is similarly no different.) In essence, if you love to write, go write, but don't expect artificial laws to save you.

2. To my knowledge, Amazon is not known to violate a preexisting GPL license. Amazon forks only things that were open in the past, but are now no longer open. In doing so, Amazon ensures the fork stays open. There is no license violation. If Amazon is making tons of money, it's probably because the software wasn't AGPL licensed in the first place.

3. This has already happened twice to me, and frankly, I am not worried. I can still carve out my limited focused niche.

I try to look at the bigger picture which is the picture of AGI, of the future of humanity, not of artificial protections or even of individual success. Your beliefs are shaped by the culture you were exposed to as an adolescent. If you had grown up in Tibet, or if you had tried LSD a few times in your life, or were exposed to say Buddhism, your beliefs about individual greed would be very different.

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tivert1y ago

> Regarding life without vaccines, the life expectancy could then be very low. Whether this qualifies as "thriving" is subjective.

The life expectancy would not be "very low" without vaccines. It wasn't especially before they were invented, and it wouldn't be afterwards (especially with modern medicine minus vaccines).

> In essence, if you love to write, go write, but don't expect artificial laws to save you.

All laws are "artificial." You might as well go the full measure, and say if you want to keep what's "yours" defend it yourself. Don't expect some artificial private property laws to save you.

And if writing is turned purely into a hobby of the passionate, they'll be a lot less of it, because the people who are good at it will be forced to expend their energy doing other things to support themselves (if they're a member of the idle rich).

> 2. To my knowledge, Amazon is not known to violate a preexisting GPL license.

You missed the point. Copyright is foundational to the GPL: without it, no GPL. "Amazon is not known to violate a preexisting GPL license," for the same reason they don't print up their own "pirated" copies of the latest bestseller to tell, instead of buying copies from the publisher: it would be illegal.

> 3. This has already happened twice to me, and frankly, I am not worried. I can still carve out my limited focused niche.

It did, did it? Tell the story.

> your beliefs about individual greed would be very different.

What do you mean my "beliefs about individual greed?" Do tell.

OutOfHereOP1y ago

For well over ten years now, companies like Facebook/Meta and Google have perused research code by academic and other researchers, seen what is catching on, then soon made better versions themselves. Google in particular has soon also offered commercial services for the same, outcompeting the smaller commercial services offered by the researchers. Frankly, I am glad Google does it because the world is better for it. It's the same with Amazon because frankly it's a lot of work to scale a service globally, and most smaller groups would do a far worse job at it.

My criteria for what is good vs bad is what makes the world better or worse as a whole, not what makes me better off. It is clear to me that the availability of AI triggered by GPT has made the world better, and if OpenAI has to violate copyrights to get there or stay there, that's a worthwhile sacrifice imho. There is still plenty of commercial scientific and media writing that is not going away even if copyright laws were to disappear.

Book readership (outside of school) is already very low now, and is only going to get lower, close to zero. You might be defending a losing field. An AI is going to be able to write a custom book (or parts of it) on demand - do you see how this changes things?

Ultimately I realize that we have to put food on the table, but I don't think copyrights are necessary for it. There are plenty of other ways to make money.

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