No idea, but Brewdog's scandals did generate a lot of press, so presumably yes. Some people object to his use of "punk" in trade names and some have claimed the founder was predatory both financially and towards female staff.
"The chief executive of Scottish beer giant Brewdog has been accused of inappropriate behaviour and abuse of power in the workplace by former staff. More than 15 ex-Brewdog workers have spoken out about CEO James Watt to the BBC's Disclosure programme. Former Brewdog USA workers said Mr Watt's behaviour made female bartenders feel "uncomfortable" and "powerless".
No, but that doesn't stop them from pushing vibe coded software at meetings and demanding it be put into production or otherwise regurgitating verbatim what their agents tell them.
Sounds like these cops went on a power trip. They weren't listening to anyone or acting with logic or reason - they just wanted to arrest and prosecute someone.
you massively collapsed what AI companies have been doing by comparing it to old internet-scraping. Facebook flat-out admitted that they scanned copyrighted books for their AI. The image generators most definitely trained on copyrighted images.
LAION and Common Crawl both scraped copyrighted images. From what I can tell (I'm not an expert in this domain at all), the main difference between those two and frontier labs is in how they stored and used the data. CC and LAION seem to be actually open (unlike "Open"AI) and are more centered around publicly sharing the data they scrape to support research and innovation.
OpenAI et al also stole everything from everyone. But then they raised billions of dollars from that data and sell back their LLM to people (again, among other things). They are also very much NOT open in any way, aside from sharing their benchmarks of new models.
What I meant more is that the dataset they scrape is openly available for download by anyone, unlike any of the frontier labs. Not that they don’t scrape copyrighted content. Still sketch, but at least they don’t call themselves “OpenLAION”.
Also my understanding was they’re not storing the actual music, but the metadata and a link to the YouTube video.
The thread is not really about what's legal; the topic is integrity. It sounds like, based on the fact that you wouldn't do it yourself, you agree that it's not a good thing to do.
There’s precious few places on earth that don’t have room for landfills, and those places will be shipping their refuse whether it is sent as “recycling” or as trash. The article also points out that incineration is an option to reduce volume, but expensive.
There are cases of shipping trash around, but it has more to do with it being cheaper to send a container of garbage somewhere than dispose of it locally.
Can you give a specific example of a rich country that is "ship[ping] trash over to low-income countries" in 2026? It must be a tiny minority at this point.
It's much more the case that we ship plastic to be recycled to other countries than trash. The problem is that then the unrecyclable plastic mixed in often ends up in rivers.
Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalties on the properties they sold to producing companies.
Intellectual property rights rewards the first-comers, not the innovators. For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available. The same can be said about AI models: the heavy investments by OpenAI and Anthropic to make these frontier models forces them to charge pretty expensive prices, but if we only had them, we would not have much innovation in making fast tiny models that are more cost and energy efficient. That drive comes from China because they are resource constrained and price-conscious.
in engineering software land, FreeCAD exists, yet Fusion, Catia, OnShape, Creo, SolidWorks, NX, and many other paid Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Engineering softwares exist and have features and use-cases that FreeCAD simply does not have. In this scenario, how do you square taking the risk and time required to develop something good with the hopeful payoff for creating something?
I guess some of the major value in those closed softwares is enterprise support and that could still be feasible, but still, the question stands - if what is currently software piracy becomes legal, how do the people who commit a portion of their lives to improving whatever it is they're working on get compensated?
I regularly contribute to FOSS, but I am in quite a privileged position to do so, because I have time to do so after putting food on the table.
I hope this comes off in good faith, I'm genuinely curious
> For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available.
The pharmaceutical industry is also very highly regulated and so without some protection of profit you actually are likely to end up in a situation in which innovation doesn’t occur because it costs a lot of money to build new pharmaceutical products and if you build them and someone can just reverse engineer it and sell it cheaply you’ve switched your competition model from rewarding the development, however imperfect, of new drugs to rewarding a race to the bottom on cost and increasingly thin supply chains propped up by cost-cutting measures. With more regulations you probably need stronger IP protections as well.
> Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual.
Well it’s good to have a capitalistic mindset since so far that has been without a doubt the best economic model that has worked for humankind, even including the negative repercussions, but you shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to IP. It’s a bit like “free” trade - if the US was, for example, completely open with IP and China isn’t they simply take your IP, build cheaper products, and then funnel profits into IP protected drugs. It’s a lose-lose. Don’t let communists and other such authoritarians confuse you about how the world actually works.
We can also reform some IP for certain industries. When it comes to trade secrets maybe we protect those. Internet content? Who cares? It’s almost universally useless and not economically valuable so there isn’t any need to solve the problem of capturing monetary value. One of the best potential effects of AI would be that it could wipe out all of these useless content creators and pundits leaving only the good stuff left (established institutions like the NYT and truly great content creators - Khan Academy for ex).
The parent was responding to this diabolically uninformed quote from the GP: “You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like.”
It’s hard to have “invest” in a sentence without a capitalist structure unless GP somehow meant invest their personal time or barter or something.
I think they meant more like "people band together to pay Christophe Nolan to create some new film" ala crowdfunding. Is that a sustainable model for the world economy? Unclear.
Well if we got enough people together it would be pretty cheap, maybe 15 or 20 bucks or so with inflation. And we could fill the movie upfront, and create some previews and launch an advertising campaign -- that'd certainly help drum up interest and get more people to crowdfund. Best even to just collect their money as right before they watch it so they know they aren't getting scammed and will in fact get to watch the movie they are crowdfunding. We can also crowdfund some popcorn machines and communal viewing rooms, after all people will want to have a snack and watch their crowdfunded movie with friends and family.
That was a lot of snark :-) I know what you're saying. It's not clear to what degree the film industry would be viable in its current form though without IP rights. If everyone can watch the latest marvel film at home for free, are they going to be willing to pay to see it in theaters?
There would likely still be some demand for the experience, but the tickets would need to be more expensive to recoup the costs of making the film. At that point: it does seem like people pooling together their funds to fund the movie itself isn't insane. The point is that the "investors" wouldn't be investing in the hopes of a financial return, they'd be paying for the creation of the film.
Namely... every society in existence before the year 1496. Our current form of property rights includes copyright, which had no formal treatment until the city of Venice issued a decree that fined anyone who printed an author's work without direct permission.
Previous to that, the effort of copying a book was seen as so high, that one deserved reward simply for doing that. In fact, there were times that copying books was seen as social charity, that needed to be encouraged.
So your argument is what worked back when most people were illiterate and books were a luxury and audio and video recordings were non existent will also work today?
It's how all hyperscalers and kickstarter work so small and big companies. You raise based on an idea and a sample. Who invests? Those who want to see the product made i.e. instead of buying an album. You invest in a band who promises to make an album if they raise a certain amount otherwise refunds. Then you don't have to care about distribution as that's a solved problem. The band can still make more money doing festivals etc.
The issue is as others have pointed out the vested interests in the status quo.
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