EnglishMobster
Well... maybe.
Artists are able to work off of commissions, assuming that there is a demand for their art. (Getting that demand is the tricky part.) If people don't want their work on its own, then they have to work at a corporation - maybe making concept art, or drawing animation cels, or whatever. None of that art is owned by them; it's typically in the contract the artist signs when they become employed. Anything they make belongs to the corporation.
I used to work for Disney - in their theme parks, not as an artist - and even my employment contract said that any idea I had while Disney was my employer was property of Disney. Literally, if I had an idea on the job, I could not monetize it. If I thought of an idea for a video game or novel or movie, Disney owned that idea just because they were my employer.
Now. Could they enforce that? No way. But they could try, and as Tom points out then it doesn't matter if I'm in the write or not - Disney has expensive lawyers, I do not.
Scientists need grant money to do science. You have to convince a panel of experts that you have a good idea, and that your idea is worth throwing grant money at. Then you use that grant money to pay yourself and your assistants while you perform an experiment. This grant money can be from a university... or it could be from a corporation doing research and development for new concepts or ideas. If you make a discovery, the corporation might be able to patent that, since you were on their payroll at the time.
Making things Creative Commons doesn't magically make money appear. When you get paid by someone wanting to publish your work, they are specifically buying out your copyright on that work - they can do whatever they wish with it after. (Famously, this is why the first Harry Potter book is called "Sorcerer's Stone" in the US, because the publisher owned the copyright and changed the name.)
Creative Commons, therefore, is completely at odds with traditional publishing, since you can't sell your copyright to them. You can still self-publish, of course... but that's a whole can of worms. Not to mention that it's incredibly easy these days to have AI churn out 80k words of BS and sell it on Amazon for $1.99. You don't need many sales to break even.
100%.
It gets tricky, though. For example, I'm using a website called "Sudowrite" to help me write a novel. I've been kicking this idea around since 2007. I have a general idea for what it should look like, but I always struggle with Act 2.
Literally over a decade's worth of notes. And not a good Act 2.
But I was able to use ChatGPT and Sudowrite (especially its "Story Engine" tool) to finally understand what Act 2 was missing. And now I'm able to rewrite what I've already done, making it better. AI is a tool just like a word processor is a tool.
Lest anyone think I'm writing an ad here - I'm not. Per their FAQ, Sudowrite says that I own the copyright on anything that I generate with their stuff.
Who owns the copyright to what I write?
You do. Anything you write in Sudowrite and anything Sudowrite suggests for you belongs to you.
But if I don't modify it, that's clearly not true (as you mention). Furthermore, I can actually have it suggest things that might run counter to that idea.
I've had it suggest lines from Kafka - good lines, too. I've read Kafka, so I recognized them... but what if I didn't? I don't own the copyright on those lines, as Tom Scott points out in OP's video. Kafka's original German is public domain... most translations are not.
You can highlight some text in the tool and say "Write this in the style of Douglas Adams." It knows who Douglas Adams is. It knows what his work sounds like. And the only way it knows is because its model was trained on his work. When I did this, one of the suggestions included Zaphod Beeblebrox, which was certainly not mentioned in my text. It also suggests spaceships and aliens and futuristic gadgets, all written in the kind of prose that you'd expect from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
How would it know that, if it hadn't read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
It's why Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI. While the model may be a bunch of statistics, it also must know what her text is like - to some degree. We can argue over how, but going back to the AI suggesting Zaphod Beeblebrox... if I didn't know HGTTG maybe I'd think that's a cool name for a character? How can Sudowrite say I own the copyright when it's clear that they don't own it, either?
Which sort of brings me back to the beginning. AI has the potential to be a wonderful tool - again, like going from a typewriter to a computer. I have had this idea for literally 16 years now, and Sudowrite was literally a game changer. I knew all of act 1, act 2 was... ehhhh, and then act 3 was never satisfying without a good act 2. I knew where I wanted to go, but not how to get there. AI really helped, because it understands story structures - and how to make good stories (with some prodding - it's not perfect). And now, whenever I'm stumped, I can type some stuff into the prompt and it'll generate ideas for me.
But that only works if we really figure out where the line is for copyright. I'm trusting what Sudowrite is telling me... but I'm taking a risk, because what if they're wrong?
Lemmy won't let you see it; it's just a Kbin thing.
Oh yes, I know.
At the same time, I don't trust that this guy isn't going to go into the magazines I run and start spamming the comments section or anything like that.
In 2003? 2004? - somewhere around there - I was the only mod on a small internet forum. A guy got mad at something I did and decided to start putting gore in every single thread. He did it when I was asleep, and I came back on the next morning and had to clean up the mess.
Since then, I've been a bit less forgiving when someone has shown to be a bad actor. Maybe I'm just colored by past experiences, but I didn't want to deal with any BS, and on the bigger of the magazines I run we have a full modteam that can overturn the ban if they disagree. (The smaller doesn't even have any organic activity yet, so I haven't recruited a modteam for it.)
Additionally - and I don't know if this has been fixed - if you're a mod and you block someone, you also don't see posts they make on your magazines.
So they can easily go in and make spam posts and you - as a mod - would never see it.
The 18 number is the number of unread messages I had at the time. They were all "you have been banned." I just went back and counted; I have 18 messages (across 2 pages of notifications now).
It's possible that they extended the length of the ban and doing so gave me another message; the bans were all different lengths. Or it could be some duplication happening server-side.
I avoided some of the finer details because the downvoting isn't the point - the bans are. Especially from so many magazines.
But - to give the full story:
I have a Tampermonkey extension which hides posts after an upvote/downvote. Because of this, I'm voting on basically everything in my subscribed feed.
I downvoted something of his - I don't even remember what, exactly. I made some comments and noticed when checking replies later that I had been downvoted on a bunch of them.
Curious, I checked to see where the downvotes were coming from - all of them were this guy. I checked their profile and saw that I had already downvoted one of their posts, hence my guess as to why he was mad.
Usually I'd let these things pass, but I found it a bit childish and I was feeling petty, so I did it back to them. You can judge me if you like; I'm not exactly proud of stooping to that level but I was already in a sour mood that day.
I haven't been on Kbin for a couple days, but I checked back this afternoon and saw 18 messages, all of which said "you have been banned." Evidently they got angry and decided they weren't going to let me participate in any of their communities.
I got pissed at this and banned him back - which is, again, perhaps childish on my part. At the same time, I've been a mod for a long time across multiple platforms, and I have a low tolerance for BS at this point. I've seen folks like this start spamming communities in retaliation to perceived slights - something like that happened on the first forum I ever ran, way back before Reddit even existed - and frankly this guy has already proven to be acting in bad faith.
One reason why I didn't delve into details is because this is going to devolve into petty he said/she said arguments, which frankly isn't the point.
The point is that this guy got pissed off at something I did and decided I wasn't able to participate in any of their communities anymore. Like I said, I was only subscribed to one of these communities anyway - so it didn't really affect me - but I worry what would happen if these weren't small communities. What happens if a powermod that runs multiple big magazines decides to ban people for perceived slights?
I know this was a issue on Reddit (awkwardtheturtle), and I'd hate for it to be an issue here, too.
That was me banning him, a gut reaction on my part when I noticed. Maybe childish, but when they revealed himself as a bad actor I didn't want them coming into my communities.
Things change over time.
For example - I want to see the broadest possible choice of content in my feed. I want to be able to interact with anywhere that's not outright hateful and/or malicious. So when I was choosing an instance, finding a permissive (but not too permissive!) admin was important to me.
But when Threads started making waves and the fedipact started becoming a thing that people were discussing, things changed out of left field.
I still wanted to federate with Threads. I think fears of EEE are overblown; Facebook has to comply with the Digital Markets Act and guarantee third-party interoperability. EEE on the fediverse runs counter to EU law. Additionally, most of my friends are folks who don't "get" the fediverse; I tried coaxing my fiance onto Mastodon and she lasted 1 day before going back to birdsite. She uses Threads actively now, and I'd love to be able to see her posts and interact with her without needing to sign up for Threads myself.
I had hoped that the semi-permissive admins I've found would tolerate it, but a lot of them decided to draw the line and join the fedipact (including my Mastodon admin).
Which now sucks - it feels like a bunch of bullies are trying to use intimidation to tell me where I can and can't post. By threatening to defederate everywhere that's not in the fedipact, there's this feeling where now I can't join a server that curates the way I want because if I do, I'll be cut off from the rest of the fediverse. If I run my own server, there's a good chance these other instances will use bots to catch that my server federates with Threads and pre-emptively defederate me.
Defederation is used as a weapon and a way to bully other instances, which I really don't like. I understand the need for defederation as a tool but it sucks seeing how easily it's abused, and how you really can't trust that admins of a server you join won't be intimidated into compliance by these fedipact bullies.
So now, if I want to like my fiance's posts... I basically have to join Threads and help Zuck directly, or have an account elsewhere that basically can only federate with Threads. Thanks, fedipact.
Based started on 4chan. People stole memes from 4chan, where it spread and became Zoomer slang.
Cringe I think has a similar but slightly different etymology; I don't know if it necessarily came from 4chan or if it came from Reddit.
Let's not forget Android as well!
Google's been slowly killing the open-source part of Android for a while now...