In some way, the meaning of publish is to make something public, give the people and agents accessing that content some freedom to get and what do with it. And that what decide to do with that freedom may benefit you (i.e. making your site visible) or not. Google is a big player, and most of those content publishers may have been benefited by previous Google decisions, but it should be assumed that new decisions (like the AI summaries) will keep being made.

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imoverclocked 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

IMHO, that’s a pretty entitled view of the whole process. I’ve published software under a license that disallows certain uses of it. Just because it is published doesn’t mean that it should be usable in any way that anybody wants.

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carlosjobim 3 days ago | parent [-]

You're asking a lot from law enforcement if you're giving away something for free and then demand that law enforcement make sure that people use the thing exactly as you have mandated.

It's akin to me putting up billboards and stickers around town and then demanding to decide who gets to look at them.

Same thing with online publishers. If they want to control who uses their content and how, there's a tried and true solution and it's spelled "paywall".

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os2warpman 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

>You're asking a lot from law enforcement if you're giving away something for free and then demand that law enforcement make sure that people use the thing exactly as you have mandated.

I don't think the Free Software Foundation is asking a lot when it uses the rule of law to control who uses their content and how.

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dns_snek 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is why we can't have nice things. People contribute to communal efforts such as free software but inevitably some assholes come around to exploit everyone's good will and their contributions for their own gain. That's not enough of course, so you further demoralize them for being stupid enough to believe that they would be protected by laws that were specifically designed to protect them, and mock them for pursuing higher ideals than immediate personal enrichment through paywalls.

And no, sharing your labor for free with anyone who wants it (as long as they agree to a few simple rules) is nothing like putting up a billboard and "demanding to decide who gets to look at them".

The entire premise of billboards is to force people to look at something they had no intention or desire to look at. You weren't forced to search for, look at, or use someone's free software or other type of content. You did so willingly and intentionally.

	▲	carlosjobim 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well then it's like handing out free birthday cake recipes in the middle of the street to anybody who passes by and then calling the police later demanding that they arrest people, because they're baking the cake even though it's not their birthday. Recipes are a good real world example of open source working properly. Anybody is free to use and improve. And anybody is free to not share their recipes or improvements with the public.

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aryehof 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I publish under the assumption that I retain copyright to my material that I make public, not the freedom for anyone to republish it in a different form for commercial gain.

Perhaps the answer for me is to put my content behind a login. A sad future for the web.

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tremon 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your first assertion hasn't been true since the Statute of Anne in 1710 (the first copyright law). Commercially distributing information is subject to rules, regardless of who "benefits" or not.

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martin-t 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Publishing does not and should not mean you give away all your rights.

Part of the reason for writing is to cultivate an audience, to bring like-minded people together.

Letting a middleman wedge itself between you and your reader damages the ability and does NOT benefit the writer. If the writer wanted an LLM summary, they always have the option to generate it themselves. But y'know what? Most writers don't. Because they don't want LLM summaries.

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Also, LLMs have been known to introduce biases into their output. Just yesterday somebody said they used an LLM for translation and it silently removed entire paragraphs because they triggered some filters. I for one don't want a machine which pretends to be impartial to pretend to "summarize" my opinions when in fact it's presenting a weaker version.

The best way to discredit an idea is not to argue against it, but to argue for it poorly.

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airza 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What? I don’t publish my writing on the internet so google can make sloppy AI summaries. I do it because i want people to read it. Google’s decisions benefit google.