I am not a lawyer but I thought it was pretty well established that (a) the library of congress is part of the legislature, not an executive branch office and (b) that the president can remove some people but can't install people in the other branches without confirmation (e.g. when a SCOTUS justice dies or retires, the president can't name a temporary justice).
https://www.govtrack.us/posts/503/2025-05-13_president-trump...
https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/05/09/carla-hayden-remo...
Since the George W. Bush administration, Congress has used pro forma sessions[1] to prevent recess appointments. Both the House and Senate would have to agree on a time to adjourn Congress per Article I, Section 5, Clause 4. If they disagree but one of them wants to adjourn, the President can adjourn them under Article II, Section 3. But no president has ever done this. President Trump talked about doing it to ram through his appointments both in 2020 and last year during the transition period. But so far it hasn't been deemed necessary because the Senate has, surprisingly to me, confirmed his cabinet in a timely manner and without significant pushback even on the less conventionally conservative choices like the DNI and the HHS Secretary. In all likelihood, the threat of adjourning Congress and of using his billion dollars plus of fundraising for 2026 to primary uncooperative Republican members of Congress has forced them to largely fall in line for now.
Recess appointments to the Supreme Court were common in the old days when the Court was less politically contentious. Justice William J. Brennan was recess appointed by Eisenhower and later confirmed by the Senate. A recess appointment who is not confirmed by the Senate would be null and void at the start of the next Congress on January 3rd of the next odd numbered year. I doubt any president would recess appoint a Supreme Court justice today both because it would be likely derail their nomination and also because a recess Justice might get to hear at most 1 term of cases depending on timing. Recess appointing somebody to run the FDA or the Justice Department or even to be a district court judge would be much more useful to a President's agenda.
[0]: "The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session."
[1]: These are sessions where they immediately adjourn by unanimous consent after doing the formalities to open the session. C-SPAN broadcasts them live and they only last a few minutes at most.
AI is way better at mass oppression, however, and copyright is a threat to it, so it (copyright) will be dismantled.
[0]: Not just or fake videos or comments. Do you have someone on the internet you consider a friend but have never met in person? In the future, rich people or governments will be able to plant ideas in people and influence their thinking by generating fake friends.
5 paperclips:
• Iron in an adult: ~5 grams
• Weight of a steel paperclip: ~1 gram
Copyright in its current form is ridiculous, but I support some (much-pared-back) version of copyright that limits rights further, expands fair use, repeals the DMCA, and reduces the copyright term to something on the order of 15-20 years (perhaps with a renewal option as with patents).
I've released a lot of software under the GPL, and the GPL in its current form couldn't exist without copyright.
What copyright should do is protect individual creators, not corporations. And it should protect them even if their work is mixed through complex statistical algorithms such as LLMs.
LLMs wouldn't be possible without _trillions_ of hours of work by people writing books, code, music, etc. they are trained on. The _millions_ of hours of work spent on the training algorithm itself, the chat interface, the scraping scripts, etc. is barely a drop in the bucket.
There is 0 reason the people who spent mere millions of hours of work should get all the reward without giving anything to the rest of the world who put in trillions of hours.
Your point remains, but the problem of the division of responsibility and financial credit doesn't go away with that alone. Do you know if the openAI lawsuits have laid this out?
It can be as simple as "you cannot train on someone's work for commercial uses without a license", It can be as complex as setting up some sort of model like Spotify based on the numbers of time the LLM references those works for what it's generating. The devil's in the details, but the problem itself isn't new.
>Dividing equal share based on inputs would require the company to potentially expose proprietary information.
I find this defense ironic, given the fact that a lot of this debate revolves around defining copyright infringement. The works being trained on are infringed upon, but we might give too many details about the tech used to siphon all these IP's? Tragic.
>Do you know if the openAI lawsuits have laid this out?
IANAL, but my understanding of high profile cases is going more towards the "you can't train on this" litigation over the "how do we setup a payment model" sorts. If that's correct, we're pretty far out from considering that.
With code, some licenses are compatible, for example you could take a model trained on GPL and MIT code, and use it to produce GPL code. (The resulting model would _of course_ also be a derivative work licensed under the GPL.) That satisfies the biggest elephant in the room - giving users their rights to inspect and modify the code. Giving credit to individual authors is more difficult though.
I haven't been following the lawsuits much, I am powerless to influence them and having written my fair share of GPL and AGPL code, this whole LLM thing feels like being spat in the face.
It's not only about regurgitation verbatim. Doing that just means it gets caught more easily.
LLMs are just another way the uber rich try to exploit everyone, hoping that if they exploit every single person's work just a little, they will get away with it.
Nobody is 1000x more productive than the average programmer at writing code. There is no reason somebody should make 1000x more money from it either.
This isn't really how derivative works operate.
If you read Harry Potter and you decide you want to write a book about how Harry and Hermione grow up and become professors at Hogwarts, that's probably going to be a derivative work.
If you read Harry Potter and decide you want to write a book about a little Korean girl who lives with abusive parents but has a knack for science and crawls her way out of that family by inventing things for an eccentric businessman, is that a derivative of Harry Potter? Probably not, even if that was the inspiration for it.
To be a derivative work it has to be pretty similar to the original. That's actually the test, it's based on similarity. Causing it to not be one is done exactly by mixing it with so many other things that it's no longer sufficiently like any of them.
The reality of course is more complicated. Without copyright there's no GPL. Which I guess is fine if you're in the OSS camp more than the FSF camp. MIT and BSD licenses basically (functionally) give up copyright.
Copyright is also what allows for hybrids like the BSL which protect "little guys" from large cloud providers like AWS etc.
Copyright allows VC startups to at least start out life as Open Source (before pivoting later.)
Of course thus is all in the context of software copyright. Other copyrights (music, books etc) are equally nuanced.
And there are other forms of IP protections as well (patents, trademarks) which are distinct from the copyright concept.
So no, I don't think most people here are against copyright (patents are a different story.)
It would be nice of FOSS was the baseline, but I don't see that ever happening, especially in a world without an enforcement mechanism.
Sure having source code would be nice, but then again half the software nowadays is using electron and written in javascript anyway. Also plenty of examples of hardware manufacturers using software/firmware copyright as excuse and making legal threats to people who have made their own software to control hardware they bought even though they didn't have access to original source code.
There are probably more examples of people reverse engineering an reimplementing or decompiling large nontrivial software than there examples of companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library (as opposed to avoiding the GPL licensed code or violating the GPL by not releasing the source code).
This is extend-and-extinguish on rails. Raise capital, hire a team to fork a public project, develop is closed and only release inscrutable blobs. Add a marketing budget and you get to piggyback on the open-source project while keeping the monetisation.
Obfuscation techniques. Compatibility updates. Hell, hardware-enforced DRM.
Do they work against Red Hat or Intel or Google or Mozilla, once those organizations can openly distribute the reconstructed code they've assigned full-time people to decompile? For that matter, what stops any government from doing it to any foreign company?
Which hardware company is going to build your DRM if there is no law you can use to stop the same company from also selling circumvention tools, or stopping anyone else (including major corporations) from extracting keys and selling them openly?
Does not mean that GPL is ineffective. IT forces them to reimplement the functionality, thus giving copyleft more time to compete with them. Imagine if they were to free to take all public code and just use it. They would always be ahead and open source products wouldn't stand a chance competing.
Not to mention I feel like GPL being so strong is why big companies pretend to love open source but permissive licenses so much - to drown out the GPL competition they hate so much and to attract more developers to permissive rather than copyleft open source projects.
2. I generally don't like the BSL.
3. No comment. I think OSS projects that exist incidentally versus being the company's main product have always been more reliable (and less susceptible to the company pivoting to closed-only offerings).
4. Copyright has perhaps been the most evil in the music industry; books, less so. I'd rather not even talk about movies or TV right now. Nonetheless, I'd tolerate an extremely limited duration copyright, if no copyright at all isn't an option.
5. Trademarks are mostly fine, because they're primarily supposed to serve customers, not the companies. I'd like to get rid of patents now, however.
Not having sensible people steering copyright in a direction toward winding down its scope is being paired with a court that's likely to make it far more draconian, and create some massive problems that will be a problem for software development.
If I was to guess, I would imagine most on here believe in some copyright, and not total anarchy.
Funnily enough, this idea that the method matters is part of what separates Trump's supporters from sane people.
We don't like gatekeeping ideas because many people have the same ideas.
Implementation: yes, that should be protected. People seem to not like that here, though.
Copyright is protecting from copy pasting the implementation of the idea.
I'm still waiting for an update on the final removal timeline.
If you hide behind corporations and have millions of dollars, sure, but not for us normies it isn't.
And it's not like copyright outside the US is a wild west; most national and international copyright regimes in the developed world are based on the US's system (often because the US has strong-armed other countries to comply).
We see this at the patent office, where overworked patent examiners leads to more junk patents being granted. Which is utterly backwards, and stems from viewing patents as something the applicant has earned and needing a good justification to deny them the fruits of their labor, and not as what they are - an enormous restriction on everyone else.
At this point it’s a bold assumption they’ll go after people violating anything. It’s become apparent the decade of accusations of “weaponizing government” was a projection and the only people they’ll go after are people they consider enemies, whether they’re breaking any laws or not.
That’s the beautiful part of a puppet Supreme Court, you don’t actually need to worry about the laws, you can just make it up as you go.
Not as of late. The Executive office and inauguration were full of it on full display, when the year before they were influencing who gets to run for president. They are sucking as much from the nation as possible while eliminating as many jobs as possible (the main way they get defended).
They got away with a lot by being boring an overall boiling the frog. But the suffering is very explicit and immediate as of late.
One is general purpose software used by significant numbers of people. This is the sort of software that could be, should be, and often already is open source. Enough people use it to sustain a community around maintaining it, and then you don't have to deal with the overhead and rent seeking incentives created by proprietary software. Obvious advantage: No more ads in the start menu.
The other is custom code. Here "IP protection" is pretty worthless, because the company employing you is the only one that wants or uses the thing, or they're a SaaS company not interested in publishing or licensing the code to anyone else anyway.
Neither of these has a strong need for IP laws and moreover either of them would do fine under a regime where copyright terms last 14 years, there is no extrajudicial DMCA takedown process or anti-circumvention law and software patents don't exist, but you can still sue a company that violates the GPL or fails to pay you for services rendered.
That can be understandable in other communities with diehard FOSS folk. But this place is a a startup incubator. Clearly appealing more to the entrepreneurial side of industry.
May the best implementation win.
Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can artificially collect rent through a government-enforced monopoly.
Accelerate.
The rich will still abuse it, but copyright gives smaller creators some channel to fight back with. It's another means to prevent the rich from getting richer without compensating those who helped get them there. It's basically what powers places like YCombinator; Why would someone pay for your pitch instead of hearing it and going to shop for the lowest bidder to implement it?
>Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can artificially collect rent through a government-enforced monopoly.
copyright isn't on ideas, it's on implementation. And experience also tells me there's dozens of ways to skin a sheep. Especially in an industry like tech. You try to rest on your laurels protecting your idea, and someone else will just improve on the idea with a new one.
There can be a few BS copyrighted ideas, but for the most part you are only copyrighting a very small part of how something works. Not the very idea of making a rounded square phone.
If someone's unable to find anyone willing to pay them in advance for their work or purchase a subscription, is their work really creating much value to society?
A lot of the people bashing on copyright seem to have no concept of the second order effects abolishing copyright would have and no intention to game it out.
Copyright has issues. For example it protects corporations instead of individual creators and workers. But not having it means rich people who own brands and have access to massive advertising can just take someone's work and make money from it while contributing nothing of value by themselves.
a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion, advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)
or
b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?
How is advertising a book you've written and are selling different than advertising your writing or skills to potential patrons and clients with regard to being negative-sum?
b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?
Who said anything about the relative wealth or patrons and authors? People seem totally willing to subscribe to people whose creative output they value. Sometimes such patronage is barely enough to live, sometimes it's an impressive total sum.
re b) An employer ("user") is generally richer than the person they're employing ("using"). The reason they can employ people and people are willing to be employed is because they have access to tools such as trademarks, patents, other employees or advertising budgets the employee ("person used") does not. It's a relationship where power is fundamentally imbalanced.
Any copy-left code is basically free to be used in closed source software, as long as it's not a verbatim copy? Count me out.
LLMs are used to subvert the spirit of GPL, if not the letter.
That's it, they're in maintenance mode and I'm not releasing anything again in the future.
My model used to be to build products and spin off components into generic open source libraries others could use, and some caught on. Now I'm just keeping them for myself or attempting to monetize them somehow.
Now they can just copyright-wash it through AI models.