Post · bonfire.cafe

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz · 3 months ago

If I ever meet #ChrisAnderson, I'm going to recruit him into an Multi-Level Marketing scheme, or sell him a public bridge I don't own. Listen to his apologetics to Carol Cadwalladr;

https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_and_chris_anderson_can_big_tech_and_privacy_coexist

To paraphrase Rob Newman's Brief History of Oil, the level of naiveté necessary to believe such things is almost unheard of outside of 70s porn films; 'ok Mr DataFarmer to make your AI serve my every wish you just need me to take off all my clothes, and bend over like this?'.

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#AI

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 3 months ago

Anderson seems to hold on to beliefs about how Sillycon Valley works that require a complete suspension of natural scepticism and total amnesia of recent tech history. Cadwalladr has the patience of a saint for resisting the urge to laugh in his face given some of the gormless things he says out loud in that interview.

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Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 3 months ago

But Carole Cadwalladr loses me about 5 minutes from the end, where she claims that copyrights are "property" and that copying public data is like walking into someone's house to "steal the silver". For one thing, this is just factually wrong, and was thoroughly debunked 20 years ago;

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/boldrin-levine.en.html

But it's also the old anti-traveller cant; 'we can't have those kind of people loitering around here, going into people's places stealing the silver'.

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#IP #IntellectualProperty

Aloniaxx

@Judeet99@mastodon.world replied · 3 months ago

@strypey So why isn't copyright "property"?

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 3 months ago

@Judeet99
> So why isn't copyright "property"?

The linked essay explains that better that I could in 500 character chunks, which is why I linked to it. Did you read it?

Aloniaxx

@Judeet99@mastodon.world replied · 3 months ago

@strypey I couldn't see any mention of Cadwalladr in it. The essay seems to be saying patents, copyright etc shouldn't be irrefutable, so does that mean that anything by anyone can be copied and used at will by anyone? Like LLMs or AI?

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 3 months ago

@Judeet99
> I couldn't see any mention of Cadwalladr in it

Why would it? It's about "IP" and how it's a propaganda term. Did you scroll up to the start of the thread for context?

https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/114992254671823849

> does that mean that anything by anyone can be copied and used at will by anyone? Like LLMs or AI?

That's an entirely separate question. The fact is that it can. But I think what you're asking is what (if anything) we can do about that. Try;

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 3 months ago

While checking the link for that GNU.org article, I stumbled on a different article entitled;

"The role of intellectual property in 'unicorn' valuations"

https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/how-to/funding/2015/11/role-of-intellectual-property-in-unicorn-valuation.html

Which sums it up pretty nicely. As I write this, I can just imagine the healthy racing unicorns, frolicking across the fields of intellectual properties : P

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Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 3 months ago

Now I can't help but see Anderson and Cadwalladr as human proxies, of Big Tech and Big Content respectively, negotiating how they're going to carve up the global information commons. Like an intellectual Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The rest of us aren't even in the room.

The thinking behind this is summed up pretty well here by @pluralistic.net;

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/10/big-tech-isnt-stealing-news-publishers-content/

Craig Duncan

@craigduncan@mastodon.au replied · 3 months ago

@strypey@pluralistic.net

Which Cadwalladr?

https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_this_is_what_a_digital_coup_looks_like/transcript

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 3 months ago

@craigduncan
> Which Cadwalladr?

Yes, that one. Or if you meant to ask 'which *is* Cadwalladr', the copyright is property stuff positions her pretty unambiguously as representing Big Content. Probably quite unwittingly though. As with many of the shock troops pushing link tax schemes, she seems like a principled person.

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