524
‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says
(www.theguardian.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Meh, patents are monopolies over ideas, do much more harm than good, and help big business much more than they help the little guy. Being able to own an idea seems crazy to me.
I marginally support copyright laws, just because they provide a legal framework to enforce copyleft licenses. Though, I think copyright is abused too much on places like YouTube. In regards to training generative AI, the goal is not to copy works, and that would make the model's less useful. It's very much fair use.
Trademarks are generally good, but sometimes abused as well.
Patents don’t let you own an idea. They give you an exclusive right to use the idea for a limited time in exchange for detailed documentation on how your idea works. Once the patent expires everyone can use it. But while it’s under patent anyone can look up the full documentation and learn from it. Without this, big business could reverse engineer the little guys invention and just steal it.
Goes both ways. As someone who has tried bringing new products to market, it's extremely annoying that nearly everything you can think of already has similar patent. I've also reverse engineered a few things (circuits and disassembled code), as a little guy, working for a small business . I don't think people usually scan patents to learn things, and reverse engineering usually isn't too hard.
If I were a capitalist, I'd argue that if a big business "steals" an idea, and implements it more effectively and efficiently than the small business, then the small business should probably fail.
Amazon is practically a case study on your last point. They routinely copy competitors products that use their platform to sell, taking most of the profits for themselves and sometimes putting those others out of business. I don’t see that as a good thing, it’s anticompetitive and eventually the big business just squeezes for more profit.