Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back 6:56 PM. April 11, 2025. Write it down. That's the precise moment the tech-bro-niverse imploded due to the gravitational force of irony at its core. That was the moment Jack Dorsey posted "Delete all IP law" on X. A little later, Elon Musk added his approval with "I agree." Is this a considered intellectual stance born from a …
Copyright is a type of IP, or at least, one of the mechanisms that makes IP- and ownership of non-physical concepts- possible.
The GPL might use it in a way not originally intended, but it still (ironically) depends on copyright and ownership to allow the creators to enforce its conditions on how *their* code may be distributed.
(Of course, if copyright didn't exist, then much of that would be irrelevant in the first place, but that's a can of worms and another discussion).
The Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPo) has in its pamphlet What is Intellectual Property?
"Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind - everything from works of art to inventions, computer programs to trademarks and other commercial sign"
Legal protections would typically apply to at least patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets.
Dorsey and Musk collapsing under the mass of irony - if the pair can pony up 1.5 solar masses each they can hug each other into their own exclusive black hole. As it is the wonder is why they haven't already disappeared up their own fundaments.
I am not entirely happy with current intellectual property law and particularly how the US has attempted to and frequently succeeded in foisting asymmetric and disadvantageous US IP Law on the rest of the world often through its "Free" Trade Agreements most of which the current demented administration has disavowed.
Intellectual property rights exist in principle to serve a variety of socially constructive purposes which by nature involve balance, concession and compromise. The idea of "Property" intrinsically assert the rights of an individual or small group against those of the larger community.
If Dorsey and his equally defective fellow travellers wish to ditch Intellectual Property, why stop there? Ditch all property rights? Can't see that sticking to the wall somehow.
> If Dorsey and his equally defective fellow travellers wish to ditch Intellectual Property, why stop there?
In the first instance, they don't want to ditch all IP. They want to ditch everyone else's IP, and use that to create new IP which they'll own. It's the classic "trickle-down" theory which is much loved by billionaires: give us everything you have, and we promise to give some of it back, honest.
Beyond that, it can be argued that some of the greatest socio-economic uplifts came from people breaking trade embargos and IP laws. Such as when tea and silkworms were smuggled out of China, or when the USA "stole" British steam-engine technology, or the more recent way in which China quite happily turned a blind eye to wilful IP infringements.
You could maybe even point to the massive technology transfer which was sent by the British to the USA during WW2 as part of the Tizard Mission, and the equally massive "transfer" of German IP to the USA and Russia at the end of WW2, and how all that came together to drive technological developments during the Cold War.
It's a tried and true mechanism; however, for some strange reason, those who profit from getting "free" access to IP generally then turn around and demand protection for their own IP!
It absolutely should be deleted. Maybe it was OK to leave obviously false assertions like this on message boards in the past and rely on downvotes, but now this crap is going to get crawled by "AI" and may become fodder for AI-generated falsehoods.
Also, not cool that it's the top comment, notwithstanding almost exclusively downvotes. It's unambiguously wrong, and it should neither waste anyone's time nor give the impression that it's a point that can be debated in good faith.
You are going to have to spend a long time living down the manifestly stupid claim that copyright law and intellectual property law have nothing to do with each other. Your claim is on the close order to claiming that red paint and paint have nothing to do with each other.
Yes, it's the sort of thing that gets you remembered, isn't it. After several hundred apparently sensible posts, suddenly UCAP is the one who thinks copyright isn't intellectual property. Everyone has a blind spot, I guess. But this blunder was a serious one - by no means a damp squid.
> "Jack Dorsey posted "Delete all IP law" on X"
This has the same grandstanding adolescent tone as Elon Musk's claim to be a "free speech absolutist".
And much like how the first thing Musk did after spouting that was to start kicking anyone who disagreed with him (or got under his thin skin) off Twitter, we know damn well that Dorsey's comment is coming from the same one-sided place and is similarly hollow and hypocritical.
Musk only "cared" about free speech when it was coming from him or in his own interests.
As with all ultra-rich, ultra-entitled tech bros, Musk's "principles" only include freedom for himself and the ability to crush any "little people" who have the audacity to get in his way.
Similarly, when push comes to shove, it'll be clear that Dorsey's all mouth and no trousers and only really wants to get rid of IP that's in *his* way.
Tech bros all over.
There may be a case where "I am a free speech absolutist" didn't mean "I want to say slurs without any pushback", but I've never seen it. The only people who care about being able to say anything are the people who want to say things that nobody decent would say.
"There may be a case where "I am a free speech absolutist" didn't mean "I want to say slurs without any pushback", but I've never seen it. "
There may also be a case where "I am a free speech absolutist" also includes to what is said about the "free speech absolutist" themselves, but I've never seen it.
It is impolite people that can least suffer impolite people.
> "without any pushback"
And that's it in a nutshell. For all that they've probably convinced themselves otherwise, when push comes to shove it's clear that it's not simple freedom of speech or action- with the much idealised but hard to live up to All-American elements of personal responsibility and self-reliance- that most of them *really* want.
What they're actually after is is the freedom to do or say what they like without consequences. Even when that would involve trampling similar "freedoms" for others to respond to what they're doing.
Many self-proclaimed libertarians (of which most, if not all, fall into this group) argue that they're not "conservatives". Yet in light of the above it really comes across as just another flavour of self-interested, double-standard conservatism.
Something that paraphrasing one famous definition makes clear:- "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups [ whose freedom ] the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but [ whose freedom it ] does not protect."
Merriam Webster:
Decent
1) marked by moral integrity, kindness, and goodwill
Sounds fitting. It is a trait lacking in anyone involved in the current Orange utan's administration as well as their supporting billionaires.
I cannot claim their exist no 'decent' Libertarians, but I am currently unable to come up with an example of such a person.
they probably have some degree of integrity, kindness, and goodwill, but it likely only extends to people they know personally. everyone else whom they don't know personally simply doesn't exist. to them the people they don't know are the dots at the bottom of the Ferris wheel, would you be upset if one of them disappeared? are there any decent libertarians? probably, but the ones i've listened seem to suffer from fuzzy thinking which leads to fuzzy logic. really no reasoning with fuzzy thinking.
I'm not sure why but this all puts me in mind of something from about a year ago in David Gerard's Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain blog
“My big takeaway from this and every other Jack Dorsey news cycle is that I could easily get him to pay me $125,000 for a jug of something called Diarrhea Water in the understanding that it would ‘detoxify his beard.’”
— David J. Roth1
________________
1 Jack Dorsey, Bluesky, decentralised social networks and the very common crowd
> I really like the idea of poisoning as much of so called "AI" as possible
... because it ain't gonna happen.
In the first instance, unless these poisoning tools are built into your production tools, few if any people are going to use them.
Secondly, what we'll end up with is an arms race, similar to that with spam and zero-day CPU exploits like banhammer. I mean, if we can virtually unroll charred papyrus which has been sat under volcanic ash for a few centuries, scan all the writing on it and produce a valid translation, then I'm sure someone can build a tool to unpick "poison noise" from a media file. Hell, it'll probably even be AI powered.
Thirdly, as the arms race escalates, what you'll end up with is a degradation of your media, as you're forced to apply ever stronger "poison" to your creations.
Fourthly, if your creations can't be "AI" parsed, then that means that they can't be curated. Which in turn affects your ability to publicise and monetise them.
Fifthly, "poisoning" only works in certain scenarios; it's (currently) zero-impact for audio and video, but what about text?
And so on.
tl;dr: it ain't happening.
We'll delete all IP law the moment you fully release (not BS 'open source' that isn't) all code and training data for FSD, Optimus, SpaceX and all other companies you currently work for.
As it is, the whole tech-bro excitement over AI is that it's reassuringly expensive (in the West at least) to train a big ole' model - which guarantees the billionaires can monopolise the source of production. Give the robber-barons all of your free IP and they'll grant you permission (for a small monthly fee) to use some of their services in return.
The answer sadly appears to be to poison the well, salt the ground and man the barricades. It all sounds horribly revolutionary, but the alternative currently being thrust on us by these social incompetents is seriously broken. AI can certainly be useful, and can be trained fairly to benefit all of us as tools - but this is not what they're offering, despite the nonsense promises they make to governments, journalists and credulous investors.
I don't use AI, but that wouldn't stop it from ingesting and partially-reproducing anything I produce. "Don't use AI" is only a solution if it's a blanket, around-the-world prohibition - don't let ANYBODY use AI. A far more sensible approach would be to require AI training data to be properly licensed, not ripped off.
Humans are far better at detecting deceit, as well as filtering out "noise". Tweak the sound of a song slightly, and everyone will still recognize it (but AIs won't). Put a piece of tape on a speed limit sign, and humans will see the original speed plus a piece of tape (but AIs will read 35 as 85) - not to mention humans can recognize that a winding country road or a neighborhood street wouldn't be 85 mph.
Yes, you CAN fool humans - but it's MUCH easier to fool AIs. (Way too much A, no I at all.)
These calls to weaken IP protections in the name of progress echo the early modern enclosure movement. Get rid of those untidy, unefficient commons with their messy web of individual small scale rights held by far too many, using them poorly. It's holding us back from maximising profits. That was an actual land grab but the motivations and analysis seem similar
Tech companies use it to lock out innovation until their patent lawyers can make them an offer they cannot refuse. It was never intended to do that. All it was supposed to do was see that IP creators were rewarded. It needs reforming to allow for fair use on a sliding scale linked to profit. But you won't get any useful intervention out of King Donald. Don't be surprised if he invalidates all non-US patents within the US.
You're wrong about patent law being created to reward creators, it was created so that creators could share their methods for the general good while still enjoying exclusivity on benefiting from their methods for a limited period. The deal was that rather than protect their ideas for their own exclusive use by keeping their methods secret that they would be given exclusive rights for a limited time if and only if they openly published them in a patent application. Patents were originally about promoting openness.
And the concepts were sound - letting creators have time to profit off of their creations is an excellent way of encouraging new creations. But now we have the monstrosity of current copyright law, all the way up through the Mickey Mouse Protection Act err, the Sonny + Cher Retirement Fund umm, the Copyright Term Extension Act. Now it's "life of author + 75 years, 95 years after publication for corporate works, or up to 120 years after creation" - one rule of thumb is "if it's in color, you can't copy it".
How about we go back to "50 years after creation of work"? Maybe make it 20 years but allow a 30-year extension if the work is registered by providing a copy to the Library of Congress?
For all I find LLMs to be generally helpful and useful if
used wisely, I must say the notion of poisoning the data (and other means of discombobulating them) is fascinating. Bedtime reading, I think.
"Enough of it, and business models break down as well. That's before the potential for pranking and attacking voice recognition systems."
But, when business models break down, businesses tend to follow. In this case, businesses in which vast sums have been invested, and which would presumably be lost if the business failed.
If it could be shown that money was lost through an AI ingesting deliberately poisoned data, the likely result of said action likely being known to the poisoner in advance and even being their intention, I should imagine that there would be some grounds for suing the poisoner into oblivion. Criminal liability is distinct possibility, too - does the computer misuse act still make it an offence to cause a system to do something without proper authority? Placing damaging data on a website, for the express purpose of mucking up an AI that ingests it, sound like it might fall under that heading.
It's a nice idea, though, and one I must look into further.
"However, it turned out to be white spirit and so I'm suing you for poisoning me"
And, sadly, you might well succeed, particularly if the bottle was labelled "water". Homeowners have a duty of care towards people on their premises, whether legally or not, and anything left around with a view to harming an intruder is going to land them in trouble if it does. There's a reason you don't see houses with bear traps in the shrubbery, even though I'm very much in favour of it.
Scraping an open website isn't really like breaking in, though, is it. Unless the bot takes steps to bypass access control methods, it's more akin to walking in to a public library, where you read some text deliberately left with the intention of causing you harm, and which does so.
Turn the idea around. Suppose you have a website that deliberately drops malware onto visitors. Nothing really nasty, just, say, mangles Chrome because you believe everyone should use Firefox. That would, quite rightly, be illegal. Poisoned data is just malware for LLMs, and would likely be treated as such.
@TheMaskedMan
Don't know why you got downvotes there. If I have a workshop with a fragile roof (In the UK at least) I must put signs up to warn scroats who climb up and try to break in through it, only to find themselves injured from the 10m drop that ensues. Otherwise I get arrested as well as the scroat.
of pushing the analogy too far it's more like you broke into my house, stole my gold bars, and then your gold-selling business went kaput because you were caught selling gold-painted bricks. No liability there because my duty of care is unlikely to extend to your business interests.
If your bot ignores robots.txt then sorry, you deserve everything you get!
Companies spend huge amounts of money training staff, creating, for example 3d models of humans to use in games & movies, pay the models etc then openai or perplexity come along and hit that site millions of times a day driving up their costs, DDOS their customers & stealing their data.
One of the reasons kids aren't allowed in my flat, apart from my lego collection is that I MIGHT have a bottle labelled water that's actually white spirit or a jar full of what looks like sweets that's actually washing up pods. All unlabelled. Now if someone DOES come into my place and eats one or drinks it, then that's their problem.
Robots.txt is the door. Ignore it & then the rule should be tough
The author has weakened his argument by centring it upon so-called 'AI' and two billionaires. Indeed, AI is not what it's cracked up to be. Each billionaire is immersed in controversy over his business ventures. Hence, sources for confusion.
AI and the personal motivations of two people are irrelevant to discussion of IP's validity as a concept and of its capability of being enforced by law within the general intellectual and geopolitical context of the 21st century.
Without IP law, the structure of the 21st century would degenerate into warlord-managed fiefdoms where the organizations with the most power to intimidate would take what they wanted and deny others.
You're saying there's a difference between that and status quo?
I'm having a difficult time finding one.
Someone help me out here.
Quite so, Philo T Farnsworth. The present status quo is a black mirror of that lawless IP structure and AI is the bright white knight light intelligently designed to lay waste to the established darknesses and ill-treasured inequities.
Que sera, sera ....... and if there are those who would think to fight against a better future, you can be sure that they will be prime targets for a blitzkrieg of totally unexpected and unsurvivable woes [just unknown unknown consequential desserts] ’Tis only natural .... even though it also be supernatural
And that is something a great deal more than just a little something oft being confused and equated as spooky at a distance nonsense but in actuality an unfolding emergent energetic reality Going Dark and Deep which El Reg as recently as less than a week ago clearly warned you about with you being advised to expect something of which you have no prior knowledge ..... unknown unknowns.
Delete IP laws and they will have no leg to stand on when it comes to the DMCA. People can download movies, music and games without repercussions again. Emulation would once again flourish because Nintendo can no longer sue emulator makers (and indie devs alike) while development houses will think twice about making games that cost $100 and yet claim that the public doesn't own the game. EA, Ubisoft and Nintendo will receive their much needed reality check and eggs to the face. Gamers can once again stream and upload playthoughs of games without the looming fear of a copyright strike over something as trivial as a background music piece.
So the world would be a better place in some way but worse in others. Double edged sword.
I have wondered whether I could 'train' an AI agent to act on my behalf on social media, generating opinions I don't hold from places I've never visited backed by contact details that won't reach me and fronted by AI generated images of someone who looks very like me but with random flaws like number of nostrils, shape of pupils etc. The purpose would be to make sure any AI search would be poisoned at source.
Reclusive billionaire sinks his fortune into building machine that he claims will revolutionise life as we know it bringing about great prosperity for all. There is only one problem, its powered by the minds of the very people he wants to save and for the project to succeed they must be fed into it one by one until no one is left .
It doesn't matter that AI doesn't work well or at all, the board believe it's good enough to replace meatbags.
I'm sure we'll see services soo proudly proclain they are human only businesses but that is likely to be a premium offering.
For the most part we'll deal with AI agents that do the minimum badly.
AI poisoning might work a bit but it'll just get outlawed, government will always protect big business. Protecting your own works will be unlawful and damaging the AI will net you a bigger sanction than your losses from letting it happen.
So AI only has to be 'just good enough' which is how a large slice of the world works now.
Or at least not so bad that the Machine stops.
The Luddites couldn't halt new tech, and nor can the AI poisoners.
Non-AI, human-only, or human curated, creative enterprises will fill a much-needed high-value niche
if their product or service is seen as superior by the discerning.
The latter will remain as small in number as ever.
The burning issue is not will AI be 'just good enough,' it will and in some cases it already is.
The issue is how the less efficient, less creative, less superior humans, whose roles AI can fill, will make a living.
The current LLM approach is clearly yet another a bubble of "tulip fever", because even the most expensive $200 pcm subscription operates at a loss.
It's simply too expensive to operate these massive inference machines - and unlike every previously successful industrial change, the cost is continually rising.
Even the dotcom bubble had decreasing operating costs, so this crash is likely to be far worse.
The reason it hasn't burst yet is that the groups funding it have very nearly all the money in the entire world. They can afford to waste huge amounts of cash in the hope that they find something profitable before the others.
The big problem is of course that when it bursts, the losses will be similarly gargantuan and affect everyone - including the winner.
