Nah I neither agree nor empathize. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of how the internet works knows that putting something on it means that thing can be used in a myriad of ways, many of them unanticipated. That's something one implicitly signs up for when posting content of their own free will. If the gift isn't to be wholly given, don't give it at all; put it behind a wall so it's clear that even though it's "available", it isn't a gift.

> restricting restricting access

And that's exactly the point. The rule of copyright is explicitly used against itself, which makes it a legitimizing string.

TIL I'm "rich and powerful." It doesn't feel any different, I've got to say.

The thing is, nobody in China gives a rat's patoot about copyright. If we do, they win.

A compromise might have been possible, based on treaties engineered by the people who brought us the TPP, but nobody in the current US government is capable of negotiating anything like that or inclined to try. And it wouldn't exactly leave the rest of us better off if they did.

As a result, copyright is a zero-sum game from a US perspective, which matters because that's where the majority of leading research happens on the majority of available compute. Every inch of ground gained by Big IP comes at America's expense.

So they must lose, decisively and soon. Yes, the GPL will be lost as collateral damage. I'm OK with that. You will be, too.

> Just ask Disney.

Disney saw which way the wind is blowing and invested over a billion into OpenAI

Not true; e.g. https://allenai.org/open-models .

For my own purposes, open weights are 95% as good, to be honest. I understand that not everyone will agree with that. As long as training takes hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of somebody else's compute, we're always going to be at the big companies' mercy to some extent.

At some point they will start to restrict access, as you suggest, and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful. What I advocate is simply to save up enough outrage for that battle. Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests.

From a political perspective there's no closing that tap, only opening it further. As long as China exists there will be constant pressure to try to stay ahead, or at least match Chinese models. And China is gleefully increasing that pressure over time, just waiting for the slip that causes a serious migration to their models.