I pirated 90% of the texts I used to write my thesis at university, because those books would have cost me hundreds of euros that I didn’t have.
Fuck you, capitalism.
"Did you realize that we live in a reality where SciHub is illegal, and OpenAI is not?"
Submitted 10 months ago by Star@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
https://fosstodon.org/@yabellini/111727900478196827
Comments
Aielman15@lemmy.world 10 months ago
puchaczyk@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
I pirated texts for my thesis even when I had access to them through my university. A lot of journals are just too annoying to use.
BloodSlut@lemmy.world 10 months ago
unfathomably based
EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 10 months ago
He has me so inspired imma go pirate a bunch of textbooks just because I can. I don’t even need them.
ICastFist@programming.dev 10 months ago
What really breaks the suspension of disbelief in this reality of ours is that fucking advertising is the most privacy invasive activity in the world. Seriously, even George Orwell would call bullshit on that.
agitatedpotato@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The amount of advertisements you have to consume weather you consent or not is wild. Billboards, bus banners, marquees, you have no choice unless you don’t leave you house, and then you’re still subject to ads, just ones you sort of consented to buy buying TV or Internet service.
danielbln@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Road billboards are always a trip when I visit the US. Not only do they have everything on them from Jesus to abortion to guns they are also incredibly distracting physically, especially at night.
MSgtRedFox@infosec.pub 10 months ago
Agreed. I hate ads passionately. Ive been able to eliminate every source of ads from inside my house except websites, but I immediately back any site that don’t do simple or reading view.
Every moment of my attention taken by some stupid billboard or hearing tvs at a gas station I had to stop at is a moment I could have been thinking about something better. Or nothing, which sometimes would be nice.
Fungah@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Why do people hopl their TV’s up to the internet? I’ll never get it.
skarlow181@lemmy.world 10 months ago
What I find even more mind boggling is that despite all that tracking, advertising still misses the mark by a mile. I regularly see the same ad repeated 10 times in a row while also being completely irrelevant to me. Meanwhile I also frequently miss stuff that would be relevant for me and that should be covered by ads (e.g. movie releases, I might pick up the first trailer, but completely miss when the movie actually hits cinemas).
For the money and effort spend on ads you’d think they could do a lot better than what they are.
trolololol@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Ads know your profile better than yourself. It’s telling you you’re a cheap bastard who won’t actually buy popcorn at the movies, making the theater run at a loss.
/S
Fedizen@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Make the AI folks use public domain training data or nothing and maybe we’ll see the “life of the author + 75 years” bullshit get scaled back to something reasonable.
patatahooligan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Exactly this. I can’t believe how many comments I’ve read accusing the AI critics of holding back progress with regressive copyright ideas. No, the regressive ideas are already there, codified as law, holding the rest of us back. Holding AI companies accountable for their copyright violations will force them to either push to reform the copyright system completely, or to change their practices for the better (free software, free datasets, non-commercial uses, real non-profit orgs for the advancement of the technology). Either way we have a lot to gain by forcing them to improve the situation. Giving AI companies a free pass on the copyright system will waste what is probably the best opportunity we have ever had to improve the copyright system.
JustZ@lemmy.world 10 months ago
They let the Mouse die finally, maybe there is hope for change.
yokonzo@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Tbf that number was originally like 20+ years and then Disney lobbied several times to expand it
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 10 months ago
19 years. It wasn’t life of the author either. It was 19 years after creation date plus an option to renew for another 19 at the end of that period. It was sensible. That’s why we don’t do it anymore.
fossphi@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Wow, I really really like this take. These corporate bitches want to eat there cake and have it, too.
LWD@lemm.ee 10 months ago
AFAIK the individual researchers who get their work pirated and put on Sci-Hub don’t seem to particularly mind.
Check out blog post critical of sci-hub and how it appeals to academic faculty:
By freeing published scholarship from the chains of toll access and copyright protection and making them freely available to all, it can feel like you are helping a Robin Hood figure rob from the rich and give to the poor.
It goes on to explain that credentials can be used for much more than simply providing academic papers, but it doesn’t seem to attack the concept of freely providing academic papers to begin with.
I’m starting to think the term “piracy” is morally neutral. The act can be either positive or negative depending on the context. Unfortunately, the law does not seem to flow from morality, or even the consent of the supposed victims of this piracy.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 10 months ago
AFAIK the individual researchers who get their work pirated and put on Sci-Hub don’t seem to particularly mind.
Why would they?
They don’t get paid when people pay for articles.
Back before everyone left twitter, the easiest way to get a paywalled study was hit up to be of the authors, they can legally give a copy to anyone, and make no money from paywalls
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Also, no researcher would even exist if grad students had to pay for the papers they read and cite. A lot of people is not fortunate enough to have access to these publications through their uni. Heck, even when I had it, I’d still go to sci-hub just for the sake of convenience.
Like a lot of services nowadays, they offer a mediocre service and still charge for it.
odium@programming.dev 10 months ago
That’s still the easiest way. Email them don’t tweet them.
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
It still works. The journal websites always include author contact info, just e-mail them.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 10 months ago
legally
Not necessarily. They often do not own the copyright, so then it depends on fair use exceptions. The real owners have gone after authors, which may be the reason they don’t make their articles downloadable by default.
breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Academics don’t care because they don’t get paid for them anyway. A lot of the time you have to pay to have your paper published. Then companies like Elsevier just sit back and make money.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 10 months ago
I follow a few researchers with interesting youtube channels, and they often mention that if you ask them or their colleagues for a publication of theirs, chances are they’ll be glad to send it to you.
A lot of them love sharing their work, and don’t care at all for science journal paywalls.
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Other than be happy for that attention and being curious of what extra things you can find in their field, they get quoted and that pushes their reputation a little higher. Locking up works heavily limits that, and the only reason behind that is a promise of a basic quality control when accepting works - and it’s not ideal, there are many shady publications. Other than that it’s cash from simple consumers, subscriptions money from institutes for works these company took a hold of and maybe don’t have physical editions anymore just because, return to fig. 1, they depend on being published and quoted.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Don’t mind? Hell, we want people to read that shit. We don’t profit at all if it’s paywalled, it hurts us and hurts science in general. This is 100% the wishes of scientific for profit journals.
honey_im_meat_grinding@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
I’m starting to think the term “piracy” is morally neutral. The act can be either positive or negative depending on the context. Unfortunately, the law does not seem to flow from morality, or even the consent of the supposed victims of this piracy.
The morals of piracy also depend on the economic system you’re under. If you have UBI, the “support artists” argument is far less strong, because we’re all paying taxes to support the UBI system that enables people to become skilled artists without worrying about starving or homelessness - as has already happened to a lesser degree before our welfare systems were kneecapped over the last 4 decades.
But that’s just the art angle, a tonne of the early-stage (i.e. risky and expensive) scientific advancements had significant sums of government funding poured into them, yet corporations keep the rights to the inventions they derive from our government funded research. We’re paying for a lot of this stuff, so maybe we should stop pretending that someone else ‘owns’ these abstract idea implementations and come up with a better system.
JustZ@lemmy.world 10 months ago
When you publish something in an academic journal, the journal owns the work. The journal also sells that work and it’s how it makes its money.
quickhatch@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Yes it is, and that’s the problem. I work my butt off to identify mechanisms to reduce musculoskeletal injury risk, and then to maintain my employment, I have to hand the rights to that work to a private organization that profits over it. To make matters worse, I then do the work to ensure the quality of other publications for the journal through the peer review process and am not compensated for it.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 10 months ago
the journal owns the work.
Fortunately, open access has made some inroads. It is not universally true anymore. The situation is still pretty bad, though.
reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 10 months ago
this is because the technocrats are allowed to steal from you, but when you steal from them what they’ve stolen from actual researchers that’s a problem
blazeknave@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There are no technocrats. Just oligarchs, that titan newer industries. Same as the old boss. Don’t give them more credit than that. It’s evil capitalism. Lump them with bankers, not UX designers imho
hottari@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
This is different. AI as a transformative tech is going to usher the US economy into the next boom of prosperity. The AI revolution will change the world and allow people to decide if they want to work for money or not (read UBI). In case you haven’t caught on, am being sarcastic.
All this despite ChatGPT being a total complete joke.
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Honestly couldn’t tell if you were being sarcastic or not because Poes law.
If all the wealth created by these sorts of things didn’t funnel up to the 0.01% then yeah. It could usher in economic changes that help bring about greater prosperity in the same way mechanical automation should have.
TurtleJoe@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This was a case where you needed the sarcasm tag. Up to then, it was a totally “reasonable” comment from an AI bro.
BTW, plug “crypto” in to your comment for AI, and it’s a totally normal statement from 2020/21. It’s such a similar VC grift.
SparrowRanjitScaur@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Can you elaborate on the specific ways that chatgpt is a joke?
joe_cool@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
So, I feel taking an .epub and putting it in a .zip is pretty transformative.
Also you can make ChatGPT (or Copilot) print out quotes with a bit of effort, now that it has Internet.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 10 months ago
In case you haven’t caught on, am being sarcastic.
It sounds like a completely sincere Marc Andressen post to me.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Oh OpenAI is just as illegal as SciHub. More so because they’re making money off of stolen IP. It’s just that the Oligarchs get to pick and choose. So if course they choose the arrangement that gives them more control over knowledge.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 10 months ago
They’re not serving you the content they sampled, and that makes all the difference.
TWeaK@lemm.ee 10 months ago
OpenAI isn’t really proven as legal. They claim it is, and it’s very difficult to mount a challenge, but there definitely is an argument that they have no fair use protection - their “research” is in fact development of a commercial product.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Using it to train is a grey area…
What it does is output copyrighted works which is copyright infringement. That is the legal issue. It’s very easy to prompt it into giving full copyright text they never even paid to look at, let alone give to other people.
“AI” can’t even handle switching synonyms to make it technically different like a college kid cheating on an essay
erranto@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If you have enough money, you can do whatever you want!
Jknaraa@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
And people wonder why there’s so much push back against everything corps/gov does these days. They do not act in a manner which encourages trust.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 10 months ago
What do you expect when people support 90 year copyrights after death?
Bananigans@lemmings.world 10 months ago
If this ends with LLMs getting shutdown to some degree, I wonder if it’s going to result in something like a Pirate Bai.
Jordan117@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’ll result in the industry moving to nations with more permissive scraping laws (like Japan) or less respect for Western copyright (Russia, China).
Muffi@programming.dev 10 months ago
Are there any historical examples of a technology as valuable as LLMs being effectively shut down?
skeptomatic@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Not to be confused with, “Pirate Bae”, the pirate dating site for those endowed with abundant doubloons.
yuki2501@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Doubt it. GenAI requires a shitton of resources, both in storage and for processing. Training a GenAI requires clusters upon clusters of NPUs and/or GPUs, even more than crypto miners and 3D renderers. The full storage requirements are proportional to the amount of training data you give, so expect them at least to be dozens of gigabytes long.
I doubt AI companies do it “for science” (yeah, right) so if they’re shit down by a court of law they’ll just shut the thing down. They can upload the code somewhere, but without training data their engine is useless.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
The IP system, which goes to great lengths to block things like open-access scientific publications, is borked borked borked borked borked.
If OpenAI and other generative AI projects are the means by which we finally break it so we can have culture and a public domain again, well, we had to nail Capone with tax evasion.
Yes, industrialists want to use AI [exactly they way they want to use every other idea – plausible or not] to automate more of their industries so they can pay fewer people less money for more productivity. And this is a problem of which generative AI figures centrally, but it’s not really all that new, and eventually we’re going to have to force our society to recognize that it works for the public and not money. I don’t think AI is going to break the system and lead us to communist revolution ( The owning class will tremble…! ) But eventually it will be 1789 all over again. Or we’ll crush the fash and realize the only way we can get the fash to not come back is by restoring and extending FDR’s new deal.
I am skeptical the latter can happen without piles of elite heads and rivers of politician blood.
JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Thats actually not a bad idea, train a model with all the data in scihub a then release the model to the public
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah, but did SciHub pay Nigerians a pittance to look at and read about child rape? Because- wait, I have no idea what I’m even arguing. Fuck OpenAI though.
KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
man this cyberpunk present fucking sucks
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Consider who sits on OpenAI’s board and owns all their equity.
SciHub’s big mistake was to fail to get someone like Sundar Pichai or Jamie Iannone with a billion-dollar stake in the company.
rivermonster@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Kind of a strawman, I’d like everything to be FOSS, and if we keep Capitalism (which we shouldn’t), it should be HEAVILY regulated not the laissez-faire corporatocracy / oligarchy we have now.
I don’t want any for-profit capitalists to have any control of AI. It should all be owned by the public and all productive gains from it taxed at 100%. But open source AI models, right on.
And team SciHub–FUCK YEAH!
Tathas@programming.dev 9 months ago
Time to make OpenASci?
/rimshot
CrayonRosary@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Lemmy users: Copyright law is broken and stupid.
Also Lemmy users: A.I. violates copyright law!
Mango@lemmy.world 9 months ago
What’s scihub?
Tillman@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Weird, why would OpenAI be illegal? Bizarre comp.
LibreFish@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yes, because 1:1 duplication of copy written works violates copyright, but summaries of those works and relaying facts stated in those works is perfectly legal (by an ai or not).
Star@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
It’s so ridiculous when corporations steal everyone’s work for their profit, no one bats an eye but when a group of individuals do the same to make education and knowledge free for everyone it’s somehow illegal, unethical, immoral and what not.
Grimy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Using publically available data to train isn’t stealing.
Daily reminder that the ones pushing this narrative are literally corporation like OpenAI. If you can’t use copyright materials freely to train on, it brings up the cost in such a way that only a handful of companies can afford the data.
They want to kill the open-source scene and are manipulating you to do so. Don’t build their moat for them.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 10 months ago
And using publicly available data to train gets you a shitty chatbot…
Hell, even using copyrighted data to train isn’t that great
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 10 months ago
OpenAI is definitely not the one arguing that they have stole data to train their AIs, and Disney will be fine whether AI requires owning the rights to training materials or not. Small artists, the ones protesting the most against it, will not. They are already seeing jobs and commission opportunities declining due to it.
Being publicly available in some form is not a permission to use and reproduce those works however you feel like. Only the real owner have the right to decide. We on the internet have always been a bit blasé about it, sometimes deservedly, but as we get to a point we are driving away the very same artists that we enjoy and get inspired by, maybe we should be a bit more understanding about their position.
winterayars@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
That depends on what your definition of “publicly available” is. If you’re scraping New York Times articles and pulling art off Tumblr then yeah, it’s exactly stealing in the same way scihub is. Only difference is, scihub isn’t boiling the oceans in an attempt to make rich people even richer.
kibiz0r@lemmy.world 10 months ago
We have a mechanism for people to make their work publically visible while reserving certain rights for themselves.
Are you saying that creators cannot (or ought not be able to) reserve the right to ML training for themselves? What if they want to selectively permit that right to FOSS or non-profits?
grue@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah, by using the argument you just gave as an excuse to “launder” copyleft code in the training data into permissively-licensed output.
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The point is the entire concept of AI training off people’s work to make profit for others is wrong without the permission of and competition for the creator regardless if it’s corporate or open source.
BURN@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Too bad
If you can’t afford to pay the authors of the data required for your project to work, then that sucks for you, but doesn’t give you the right to take anything you want and violate copyright.
Making a data agnostic model and releasing the source is fine, but a released, trained model owes royalties to its training data.
Asafum@feddit.nl 10 months ago
Scientific research papers are generally public too, in that you can always reach out to the researcher and they’ll provide the papers for free, it’s just the “corporate” journals that need their profit off of other peoples work…
SchizoDenji@lemm.ee 10 months ago
All of the AI fear mongering is fuelled by mega corps who fear that AI in some sort will eat into their profits.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 10 months ago
True, Big Tech loves monopoly power. It’s hard to see how there can be an AI monopoly without expanding intellectual property rights.
It would mean a nice windfall profit for intellectual property owners. I doubt they worry about open source or competition but only think as far as lobbying to be given free money. It’s weird how many people here, who are probably not all rich, support giving extra money to owners, merely for owning things. That’s how it goes when you grow up on Ayn Rand, I guess.
Coasting0942@reddthat.com 10 months ago
This is the hardest thing to explain to people. Just convert it into a person with unlimited memory.
Open AI is sending said person to view every piece of human work, learns and makes connections, then make art or reports based on what you tell/ask this person.
Sci-Hub is doing the same thing but you can ask it for a specific book and they will write it down word for word for you, an exact copy.
Both morally should be free to do so. But we have laws that say the sci-hub human is illegally selling the work of others. Whereas the open ai human has to be given so many specific instructions to reproduce a human work that it’s practically like handing it a book and it handing the book back to you.
Mango@lemmy.world 9 months ago
What data is public?
richieadler@lemmy.myserv.one 10 months ago
Cue the Max Headroom episode where the blanks (disconnected people) are chased by the censors because they steal cable so their children can watch the educational shows and learn to read, and they are forced to use clandestine printing presses to teach them.
mPony@kbin.social 10 months ago
what's this? an anti-corporate message that sneers at cable TV companies??? CANCEL THAT SHOW!!!
that show was so amazingly prescient: the theme of the first episode was how advertising literally kills its viewers and the news covers things up. No wonder they didn't get renewed. ;)
grue@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Reminds me of this: www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
burliman@lemmy.world 10 months ago
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Because it’s easy to get these chatbots to output direct copyrighted text…
Even ones the company never paid for, not even just a subscription for a single human to view the articles they’re reproducing. Like, think of it as buying a movie, then burning a copy for anyone who asks.
Which reproducing word for word for people who didn’t pay is still a whole nother issue. So this is more like torrenting a movie, then seeding it.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Because humans have more rights than tools. You are free to look at copyrighted text and pictures, memorize them and describe them to others. It doesn’t mean you can use a camera to take and share pictures of it.
Acting like every right that AIs have must be identical to humans’, and if not that means the erosion of human rights, is a fundamentally flawed argument.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Whoosh