Shakespeare is sufficiently close to contemporary English that audiences will watch and enjoy his plays. I have seen plenty of kids and audiences in different countries enjoy them.
> humans can't either as they haven't produced it. If there is guaranteed no one which can claim ownership it often seen as being in the public domain.
Says who?. The US ruling the article refers to does not cover this.
It is different in other countries. Even if US law says it is public domain (which is probably not the case) you had better not distribute it internationally. For example, UK law explicitly says a human is the author of machine generated content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260110
As other's have pointed out, this case is really about refusing to allow an LLM to be recognised as the author. The person using the LLM waived any right to be recognised as the author.
Its also US only. Other countries will differ. This means you can only rely on this ruling at all for something you are distributing only in the US. Might be OK for art, definitely not for most software. Very definitely not OK for a software library.
For example UK law specifically says "In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken."
> the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.
This seems extremely vague. One could argue that any part of the pipeline counts as an "arrangement necessary for the creation of the work", so who is the author? The prompter, the creator of the model, or the creator of the training data?
The courts will have to settle that according to circumstances. I think it is likely to be the prompter, and in some cases the creator of the training data as well. The creator of the model will have copyright on the model, but unlikely to have copyright on its outputs (any more than the writer of a compiler has copyright on its output).
The problem is not that he was not willing to review it. It was that he was willing to conclude it was true. If he had said "that is interesting" or "that is plausible" or whatever, that is fine. It is concluding it is true that is the problem.
Of course restrict it to his opinions on software licensing. I think that is the sort of thing people mean when they say he was right.
Lots of people made similar claims. Most notably The National Council for Civil Liberties (now called Liberty), the UK's leading civil/human rights organisation made submissions to parliament claiming that sex with minors was not always harmful, had a pro-paedo organisation as an affiliate and give them a representative on the gay rights subcommittee: https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/scotl... The people involved were unaffected, some reaching fairly high political permissions.
A lot of other people whose works are respected have actually had sex with minors. Eric Gill and Oscar Wilde for example.
None of that makes Stallman's opinions defensible in my opinion. On the other hand I am happy to ignore his opinions on that topic and still value his opinions on other things.
The entire point is of my post is that it's no longer his opinion.
> Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that.
Obviously I am glad he has abandoned his opinions.
I do think it is terrible that the politicians, activists, teachers etc. who held such opinions in the past did not suffer severe career consequences even if they subsequently changed their opinions. I think they cannot be trusted in those areas. However, Stallman is not in such an area.
You could use exactly the same argument for not bothering about doing things that pollute, generate landfill, or generally make things worse for society.
Its highly unlikely your vote will swing an election.
If you want easy things to do use cookie blocking extensions.
These are all related to the collective action problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem). This is why we have regulations and rules and laws about things like pollution, because we CAN'T rely on everyone wanting to live in a clean world to make everyone not pollute.
> You could use exactly the same argument for not bothering about doing things that pollute, generate landfill, or generally make things worse for society.
Which is why those things need laws to create any meaningful change.
reply