I was watching a video talking about how a world before copyright allowed innovation to spread quickly and allowed people miles away to iterate faster. Even if LLMs reproducing feature perfect software is deemed a copyright violation, people will just do it privately and use the software themselves.

I’m personally waiting for LLMs to get so good that I can make music and movies based on my favorite ones. I probably could never release it to the public, but being able to make it and enjoy it myself would be amazing.

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tgma 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Another thing that can help contextualize this phenomenon is mix tapes, which are fair use in the US.

Modifying/modding/remixing software was simply not as feasible as music, but LLMs made it possible.

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mschuster91 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That world worked because the ones doing the research were either self-sufficient hermits (often self-sufficient by necessity as they were outcast for "being mad"), financed by the Church or financed by a rich person (usually the fiefdom's ruler, sometimes independent wealth).

Copyright, patents and IP are the evolution of our (Western) way of converting research into a form of financial investment.

	▲	ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Patronage and support of the arts (and sciences) was a great value proposition for Churchmen in old times. You could commission works of music or sculpture or stained glass or what have you, and these were of course well-fitted to be installed or performed in the confines of your church and serve the liturgy. So they were collective goods that were enjoyed by many; they attracted locals and they beautified their surroundings, and they encouraged pilgrimages and stimulated income if you could become particularly distinguished and attractive, based on the beauty lent by your artisans and artists. And a big church could employ lots of them, and thereby stimulate the economy. It seems that the Baroque Era and churches crammed to the rafters with art, may be an artifact of a very good job market for those architects, craftsmen and artists! Yeah... you could copy some sheet music and share it around, but it still required skilled musicians to perform, play and sing it. And nobody was taking photos or uploading JPEGs of your art and sculpture, so it was fairly locked-in that people needed to visit, and see it in context. So it stood to reason that you could probably reconstruct Noah's Ark from the fragments of True Cross that were circulating around Europe... and how many fingers did your favorite saint really have? Copyright-free church economics have sort of fallen apart since then. However, museums, arena concerts, theaters and the rest, they have all taken pages from the Church playbooks. The fact that a church can still draw in hundreds for a show with great production values, every week or daily, seems dull and unremarkable now, but a good rock concert or museum collection can evoke the same "goin' to church" fervor in people who like that kind of stuff.

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verdverm 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There is something similar happening in the game modding communities. One of my favorite streamers had claude write a little mod to change the UI of KSP so it kept with the larger fanciful theme of the game, over being so sci-fi-ish. He didn't like, he changed it, he's probably not going to release it because of sensitivity in the broader gaming ecosystem.

I have agents maintaining several patches to my main tools, not forking, not sharing (some have no interest), personal adjustments

	▲	tancop 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> he's probably not going to release it because of sensitivity in the broader gaming ecosystem There is basically zero pushback to generated code. All the crazy Minecraft in GTA type mods that came out in the last couple weeks are obviously vibe coded but no one cares because they play good and surprisingly bug free. If he put in AI visuals as in generated textures then it's different, because that's way more visible and gets labeled as slop immediately. There's also the (accurate imo) perception that AI is taking artists jobs against their will but coders adopted it on their own and benefit from it, so using it for code is ethical from a labor rights POV.