Strypey
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz  ·  activity timestamp last week

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  ·  activity timestamp last week

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;

gnu.org/philosophy/boldrin-lev

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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Strypey
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied  ·  activity timestamp last week

@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?

mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/114

> 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;

pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how
Strypey
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied  ·  activity timestamp last week

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

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

bizjournals.com/bizjournals/ho

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  ·  activity timestamp last week

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;

pluralistic.net/2022/04/10/big