GioCities

blogs by Gio

Atom feed Recent essays

⚖ The ambiguous "use"

I keep seeing people make this error, especially in social media discourse. Somebody wants to “use” something. Except obviously, it’s not theirs, and so it’s absurd for them to make that demand, right?

Quick examples§

I’m not trying to pick on this person at all: they’re not a twitter main character, they’re not expressing an unusual opinion here, they seem completely nice and cool. But I think this cartoon they drew does a good job of capturing this sort of argument-interaction, which I’ve seen a lot:

I’ve also seen the exact inverse of this: people getting upset at artists because once the work is “out there” anyone should be able to “use” it. (But I don’t have a cartoon of this.)

There is an extremely specific error being made in both cases here, and if you can learn to spot it, you can save yourself some grief. What misuse is being objected to? What are the rights to “certain things” being claimed?

The problem is that “use” is an extremely ambiguous word that can mean anything from “study” to “pirate” to “copy and resell”. It can also cover particularly sensitive cases, like creating pornography or editing it to make a political argument.

webcomicname: beliefs you do not agree with

But everything people do is “using” something. By itself, “use” is not a meaningful category or designation. Say you buy a song — listening to it, sampling it, sharing it, performing it, discussing it, and using it in a video are all “uses”, but the conversations about whether each is appropriate or not are extremely distinct. If you have an objection, it matters a lot what specific use you’re talking about.

But if you’re not specific, there are unlimited combinations of “uses” you could be talking about, and you could mean any of them. And when people respond, they could be responding to any of those interpretations. There’s no coherent argument in any sweeping statement about “use”; the only things being communicated are frustration and a team-sports-style siding with either “artists” or “consumers” (which is a terrible distinction to make!).

Formal logic§

This is not a new problem. This is the Fallacy of Equivocation, which is a subcategory of Fallacies of Ambiguity. This is when a word (in this case, “use”) has more than one meaning, and an argument uses the word in such a way that the entire position and its validity hinge on which definition the reader assumes.

The example of this that always comes to my mind first is “respect”, because this one tumblr post from 2015 said it so well:

flyingpurplepizzaeater Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

See, here the “argument” relies on implying a false symmetry between two clauses that use the same word but with totally different meanings. And, in disambiguating the word, the problem becomes obvious.

Short-form social media really exacerbates the equivocation problem by encouraging people to be concise, which leads to accidental ambiguity. But social media also encourages people to take offense at someone else being wrong as the beginning of a “conversation”, which encourages people to use whatever definition of other people’s words makes them the wrongest.

Since I’m already aware that copyright is a special interest of mine, I try to avoid falling into the trap of modeling everything in terms of copyright by default, Boss Baby style. But this is literally the case of a debate over who has the “right” to various “uses” of things that are usually intangible ideas, so I think it’s unavoidably copyright time again.

95% of the time when people complain about a “use” being inappropriate, or complain about people feeling “entitled” to a “use”, they’re talking about a specific kind of use that has its own field of study under the broad category of “intellectual property”.

When people categorically object to “use” of their work, this can mean one of two things. One is that they subscribe to the extremely juvenile idea that authors have an unlimited, perpetual, inalienable right to control all publication, derivation, and interpretation of work “they created”, for some definition of “create”. This is wrong. The question of “what rights do people have over information they produce” is an incredibly complex topic, and the answer isn’t “all of them, stupid”.

The other case — and this is usually the case — is that they mean something much more specific by the word “use”, and have simply failed to explain it. Maybe they specifically mean redistribution, or plagiarism, or a more nebulous idea of “ripping off”, or some combination of those things. Maybe you agree with this, or maybe you don’t, you don’t even know. You can’t possibly talk about it until they define what their assertion is!

This means in arguments about rights to “use” work which refuse to specify the exact rights they mean, the “sides” are effectively talking past each other. In good faith, this can just be a mistake, but in bad faith can be deliberate outrage farming. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a very effective sleight of hand when used deliberately.

It is very easy for someone to “feel” wronged when someone else is “using” “their” “thing”. But, if they haven’t actually been wronged, they’ll find it dificult to articulate why there’s a legitimate grievance, because they don’t have one. When this happens, instead of reconsidering their own emotions, people often cover up their own error by pretending they don’t need to articulate their grievance at all, and keep all their complaints convincingly ambiguous.

This happened with the Internet Archive lawsuit, an ugly saga I’ve discussed in detail. The rhetorical argument against the archive was this wiggly little “use”: “they’re using our books without paying us!” When in reality, the way the Internet Archive’s library was “using” them was lending out books they owned legally. But “we’re demanding libraries stop lending our books” makes you sound obviously evil, whereas “you have to pay us when you use our IP” doesn’t.

A person who believes “artists should be paid when you use their work” might also agree that “the builder doesn’t get paid every time the house sells” and “artists should study books on technique”. But the second two statements both conflict with the first one! How can they all make sense at once? Because the first statement uses a wiggly “use” that folds itself down to be as reasonable as you want it to be.

AI “use”§

I have another piece I’m writing about the very complicated relationship LLM AI has with “using” work. I’ll talk about this much more in-depth then, but here are some early thoughts to chew on. People really like using the ambiguous “use” with regards to AI, and I think one of the reasons is to create an outrage that’s amplified by the ambiguous metaphor.

Take the article1 OpenAI Pleads That It Can’t Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials For Free. Only in the body of the piece does it explain that the actual conflict is the unsettled question of whether or not AI training — an act that is mechanically very different from copying — is considered to be a violation of copyright that needs specific licensing.

This is a pretty detailed and technical question, actually, and one I have an upcoming major essay dedicated to. It’s also an important question! It deserves to be considered carefully and given a thoughtful, specific answer. Simplifying it down to “use” isn’t just inaccurate, it’s intellectually lazy.

An accurate summary would be “OpenAI argues Training on Copyrighted Materials Is Non-Infringing Use”, which is the thing that happened. But “OpenAI can’t make money without using copyrighted materials for free” bakes the outrage directly into the headline, and creates an easily-digestible narrative for people: OpenAI is profiting by exploiting a resource it should be paying for. But that all hinges on the ambiguous “use” in the title.

Same thing with News Corp sues Perplexity for ripping off WSJ and New York Post by Emma Roth2, where the imprecise phrase “ripping off” lets the reader immediately stop thinking about the problem. What does “ripping off” mean? It sure sounds bad when you don’t explain what happened. Was it plagiarism? Direct copy-paste? Why does News Corp think it was wronged?

In reality, Perplexity made a website that told people what another website said. Some people will agree with News Corp that telling users what another website says is an offensive misappropriation, but other people will argue that describing the content of other sites should be allowed speech. Both positions are interesting! But by using the vague phrase “ripping off” instead of describing the situation to people, this headline is actively obfuscating the question at hand and instead focusing on the “feeling” of offense. Framing the story as “News Corp feels offended” instead of describing the event in question turns the conversation into the team sports “who do you like more” contest, which is worthless.

Conclusion§

Don’t talk past each other!

Encourage an understanding of the topics you care about!

Don’t reduce complex questions down to team sports!

Precision of language!

  1. this is another xerox-of-a-xerox article; it’s mostly just an unnecessary summary of actual reporting by The Telegraph. ↩

  2. Hey, look at that byline, she’s another crypto skeptic who naturally pivoted to AI skepticism. We just talked about that! ↩

⚖ Game Patent Grab Bag

This was originally something I was going to talk about in Corporations have Rejected Copyright, back when that series was going to just be one long post (really!). But since I saw Nintendo apparently sued Palworld today, I wanted to put this up as background information.

You should definitely read You’ve Never Seen Copyright first, particularly the explanation of what patents are, because this conversation directly follows from that. The most important thing to pick up on is how the Doctrine of Equivalents lets companies use patents that are supposedly very specific to threaten other implementations that are similar, even if they aren’t using the patented design.

Game patents are revelatory, because game rules as a category explicitly do not fall within the realm of patent rights, but companies have managed to file and defend fraudulent patents anyway.

đŸ–± Is AI eating all the energy? Part 2/2

  • Posted in cyber

Part 2: Growth, Waste, and Externalities§

The AI tools are efficient according to the numbers, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean there isn’t a power problem. If we look at the overall effects in terms of power usage (as most people do), there are some major problems. But if we’ve ruled out operational inefficiency as the reason, what’s left?

The energy problems aren’t coming from inefficient technology, they’re coming from inefficient economics. For the most part, the energy issues are caused by the AI “arms race” and how irresponsibly corporations are pushing their AI products on the market. Even with operational efficiency ruled out as a cause, AI is causing two killer energy problems: waste and externalities.

đŸ–± Is AI eating all the energy? Part 1/2

  • Posted in cyber

Recent tech trends have followed a pattern of being huge society-disrupting systems that people don’t actually want. Worse, it then turns out there’s some reason they’re not just useless, they’re actively harmful. While planned obsolescence means this applies to consumer products in general, the recent major tech fad hypes — cryptocurrency, “the metaverse”, artificial intelligence
 — all seem to be comically expensive boondoggles that only really benefit the salesmen.

Monorail!

The most recent tech-fad-and-why-it’s-bad pairing seems to be AI and its energy use. This product-problem combo has hit the mainstream as an evocative illustration of waste, with headlines like Google AI Uses Enough Electricity In 1 Second To Charge 7 Electric Cars and ChatGPT requires 15 times more energy than a traditional web search.

It’s a narrative that’s very much in line with what a disillusioned tech consumer expects. There is a justified resentment boiling for big tech companies right now, and AI seems to slot in as another step in the wrong direction. The latest tech push isn’t just capital trying to control the world with a product people don’t want, it’s burning through the planet to do it.

But, when it comes to AI, is that actually the case?

What are the actual ramifications of the explosive growth of AI when it comes to power consumption? How much more expensive is it to run an AI model than to use the next-best method? Do we have the resources to switch to using AI on things we weren’t before, and is it responsible to use them for that? Is it worth it?

These are really worthwhile questions, and I don’t think the answers are as easy as “it’s enough like the last thing that we might as well hate it too.” There are proportional costs we have to weigh in order to make a well-grounded judgement, and after looking at them, I think the energy numbers are surprisingly good, compared to the discourse.

⚖ Copyright Abusers Lost Their Claim

or, the many people who said movies like Coyote v. Acme that were killed for a tax write-off should be forced into the public domain were right, and here’s why

A healthy system of creative rights, including a balanced form of copyright, is a reciprocal arrangement between creators, consumers, and the commons. Creators are granted some temporary exclusive rights by the government over qualifying intellectual work in order to incentivize creativity. These privileges are granted in exchange for creating valuable new information — the existence of which is a contribution to the public good — and for providing it in such a way that others will be able to build on it in the future. It’s an incentive for providing a specific social good, one which the market alone might not reward otherwise. Fortunately, this is actually how US copyright was designed; see You’ve Never Seen Copyright.

The takeaway from that, though, is not just that there’s a fair version of copyright, but that copyright must look like that fair model. The fact that such a thing as “good copyright” exists as a sound philosophy is not a broad defense of the word “copyright” itself, it’s an imperative requirement for the legitimacy of any system of power that claims to enforce copyright. The soundness of the philosophy doesn’t legitimate the system of power that shares its name, it damns it for failing its requirements.

When they invoke the philosophy of copyright to justify thuggery, it matters that they’re wrong.

The requirements for reciprocity intrinsic in copyright are how the system must work, but it’s not what actually happens today. In practice, corporations regularly violate the fundamental principles of creative rights — both in letter and in spirit — and use copyright protections to profit without showing the required reciprocity.

I can’t possibly list all the stories of what these violations look like. Seriously, just the thought of me having to give a representative sample of companies abusing IP law made me dread writing this series, it’s such a prolific problem. But I have shown a sample: Nintendo using copyright to kill new creative work, Apple using trademarks to keep competitors from conducting trade at all, book publishers trying to destroy the idea of buying and selling books
 they’re all examples of how companies do everything they possibly can to get out of fulfilling their side of the bargain.

Case studies are fun, but just listing out a bunch of horrors isn’t what I set out to do; that’s just groundwork for thinking about the problem. What’s important is that they’re a representative sample of a kind of behavior. With all that established, you can read this with the knowledge that yes, they violate the purpose of the law as written and yes, violations are so regular they seem to define the practice.

So what does it all add up to?

Here’s what I say: If you want out of the deal, so be it. When someone won’t participate constructively — if they don’t work in good faith, or at least begrudgingly accept the limits the system of copyright puts on them — we stop respecting their claim to special privileges within it as legitimate, and understand it as the double-dealing overreach it is.

As self-evident as it sounds when I say it out loud, this argument is my nuclear option. This is what I would have to say if it ever got this bad; if, between the two of them, the courts and the corps ever broke the system beyond my last bit of tolerance. And I’ll be damned if they haven’t done just that.

Legitimacy§

In You’ve Never Seen Copyright, I talked about how the word “copyright” can refer to two very different things: either a philosophical basis that justifies copyright as a legal doctrine, or the system of power that describes how copyright is actually enforced, what enforcement looks like, and who it benefits.

But the fact that the power structure has diverged from the original philosophical intent doesn’t just create a communication issue. Yes, it becomes increasingly unclear what people who say “copyright” are talking about, but the legitimacy of the power structure depends entirely on being an implementation of a sound legal doctrine.

đŸ–± Fake Twitter Accounts

  • Posted in cyber

Remember when Elon Musk was trying to weasel out of overpaying for Twitter? During this very specific May 2022-Jul 2022 period, there was a very artificial discourse manufactured over the problem of “fake accounts” on Twitter.

The reason it was being brought up was very stupid, but the topic stuck with me, because it’s deeply interesting in a way that the conversation at the time never really addressed.

So this is a ramble on it. I think this is all really worth thinking about, just don’t get your hopes up that it’s building to a carefully-constructed conclusion. ;)

Argument is stupid§

First, to be clear, what was actually being argued at the time was exceedingly stupid. I’m not giving that any credit.

After committing to significantly overpay to purchase Twitter with no requirements that they do due diligence (yes, really!) Elon Musk tried to call off the deal.

This was a pretty transparent attempt to get out of the purchase agreement after manipulating the price, and it was correctly and widely reported as such.

Scott Nover, “Inside Elon Musk’s legal strategy for ditching his Twitter deal”

Elon Musk has buyer’s remorse. On April 25, the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, but since then the stock market has tanked. Twitter agreed to sell to Musk at $54.20 per share, a 38% premium at the time; today it’s trading around $40.

That’s probably the real reason Musk is spending so much time talking about bots.

I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details of why Elon was using this tactic, but fortunately other people wrote pages and pages about it, so I don’t have to.

⚖ CDL: The AAP is Wrong About Everything

In going through these arguments, I’ll also be drawing from a few other sources, in order to give a more comprehensive description of the arguments being made.

The Authors Guild Amici Curiae Brief is a document submitted to the court by The Authors Guild in support of the plaintiff’s argument.

Reflections from the Association of American Publishers on Hachette Book Group v. Internet Archive: An Affirmation of Publishing is a victory-lap publication from the AAP, published after the summary judgement in favor of the plaintiffs.

And there’s also EFF, Redacted Memorandum of Law In Support of Defendant Internet Archive’s Motion for Summary Judgment, written by the EFF in support of the Internet Archive, and whose arguments overlap a lot with mine.

Alright, there’s never anything more damning than their own words, so let’s just look at what it is they said here.

⚖ CDL: Publishers Against Books

Combining lending with digital technology is tricky to do within the constraints of copyright. But it’s important to still be able to lend, especially for libraries. With a system called Controlled Digital Lending, libraries like the Internet Archive (IA) made digital booklending work within the constraints of copyright, but publishers still want to shut it down. It’s a particularly ghoulish example of companies rejecting copyright and instead pursuing their endless appetite for profit at the expense of everything worthwhile about the industry.