Anyway, a quick look at https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/6028... indicates that all 4 sponsors of the bill are Republicans. The Actions tab seems to indicated that the bill got only 12 minutes of debate before being passed,; I hope this is an artifact of how the page is updated rather than the actual time spent on considering it.
Unfortunately, the Democrats haven’t demonstrated themselves to be much better (at least, I’m not aware of them opposing copyright).
Some introduce awful stuff, but the party isn't run like the mafia, so they fail to pass nearly as much. Republicans are handed down orders and they follow. No attempt to represent the people that elected them. Vassals to the end.
it's so tiring.
> In a voice vote earlier this week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 6028, the “Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act.”
from wiki:
> In Congress, "the vast majority of actions decided by a voice vote" are ones for which "a strong or even overwhelming majority favors one side", or even unanimous consent. Members can request a division of the assembly (a rising vote, where each sides rise in turn to be counted), and one-fifth of members can demand a recorded vote on any question, after the chair announces the result of a voice vote.
> It is estimated that more than 95 percent of the resolutions passed by state legislatures are passed by a unanimous voice vote, many without discussion; this is because resolutions are often on routine, noncontroversial matters, such as commemorating important events or recognizing groups.
Isn’t this the important bit? IIRC this can be demanded by anyone. If it passes by a voice vote, assume your representative voted yay or abstain.
You can see a lot of difference in the way congresspeople talk based on whether it’s televised or not as well, especially in committees.
I’m just a little surprised that voice votes haven’t been replaced by some kind of digital process. A voice vote doesn’t save time compare to a modern method of tallying votes. Why avoid making records when records are so “cheap” these days?
Whenever anyone complains about Trump, remind them he’s not the cause but the product. Seventy million voted for him, and Republicans in congress let him do illegally what they cannot accomplish legislatively. And all the while they’re busy selling the country for parts, whether through tax policy, or neutering the CAFE standards, or handing copyright to Disney.
That said ...
... there are other instances in which separation of powers is not strictly followed. Examples which come to mind are:
- Administrative law judges (ALJs), notably in matters concerning Social Security and Immigration law, being a judiciary function under the executive.
- The Sergeants at Arms of the US Senate and US House, both legislative bodies, but performing executive functions. Recent history suggests that the Executive cannot be entirely relied upon to provide this function.
- Judicial Review is probably the biggest appropriation of powers, in which the US Supreme Court arrogated the right to rule on, interpret, and invalidate legislation. This is a power arguably derived absent any constitutional, legislative, or executive foundation.
And of course the present Administration has increasingly expressed a philosophy not only of Unitary Executive, but increasingly of Unitary Government, enacting law by decree, executing citizens without due process, and openly flouting courts. H.R. 6028 could be seen as part of this expansion of the Executive.
Which still leaves us with the question of how Congress ended up administering copyright.
I don't have a full history, and have only been exploring the question for the past hour or so.
The US Copyright Office itself has a history page noting that:
On July 8, 1870, Congress centralized the administration of copyright law in the Library of Congress at the encouragement of Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford.
<https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/history-...>
Which remedied the previous arrangement in which Copyright was administered by ... the Judiciary.
Why Congress ended up regulating copyright is probably largely a set of historical accidents and conveniences. The Library of Congress does in fact serve Congress (and IIUC the Judiciary, to which it is also proximate) as a legislative research tool. I've read enough of the annual reports in the latter half of the 19th century to know that the Library was growing rapidly at this time, and was constantly pressed (literally) for space, culminating in the commissioning, construction, and opening of the separate Library of Congress Jefferson Building, in which the main collection is now housed. (As I'd recently commented, there were concerns at the time of how merely moving to an adjacent building might affect retrieval time for materials.)
Arguably, the US Library of Congress had, and still has, more expertise in the management of large corpora of physical publications than virtually any other institution on Earth. Copyright registration itself served the interests of Congress by growing the collection. And as of the late 19th century, the overall size of the US government, though growing, was still comparatively small. The Executive would possibly have had neither the interest nor capacity to administer the Library, or even the Copyright office sufficiently, nor the convergence of goals in growing the Library's collection noted here. Given numerous issues with other areas of intellectual property which are administered under the executive (patents and trademark, though my criticisms are largely of the former), its also possible Things Could Have Gone Badly Wrong, though arguably as the EFF piece notes they have already. Though the House legislation seems likely to worsen that.
The present situation though is that the Library of Congress and Copyright Office do strongly blur the separation of powers principle, affording a complex set of legislative, executive, and even judiciary roles, all under the Legislative branch.
That just my own nonexpert nutshell summary. If anyone has further information on the history of the US Copyright Office, legislation, and judicial rulings, please pitch in.
> The Congress shall have Power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
Unless your question was more, "why was that written into the constitution". In which case the answer basically boils down to the fact that the framers intended for Congress to be the most powerful branch. The modern de facto running of the country places far more power under the executive than the framers intended.
You'll also find: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." Art II, Sec 1. That establishes the Separation concept, though neither "separation of powers" nor "checks and balances" are explicitly stated in the US Constitution. They are part of the political discussion in which the Constitution was framed, however.
*
AI is essentially copy paste with more steps. The part that AI companies use to defend this is ?how are we supposed to decide how much each author deserves? They try to wave this away, but their own model can tell them. Their models work off of weights. They can determine how much each work contributed based on those weights, so it's dishonest for them to argue it isn't possible. The way the models are engineered now don't make this possible, but that's intentional and we can all recognize that. They throw up their hands and claim it's not possible because they simply don't want to pay.
The most infurating thing however is how AI companies sidestep the IP rights of authors, but then claim to own those IP rights when their own generated output leaks. Anthropic filed DMCA takedowns on the leaked claude code repos, claiming ownership over something they explicitly have stated is almost entirely AI generated as part of their marketing. They take code, mix it up just enough to scrub away the GPL or whatever license belongs on it, then try to claim ownership of the result, in spite of the Copyright Office repeatedly stating that AI generated works have no copyright protection at all.
There’s a difference between training a model and using a model. Training involves copyrighted works but fair use is not just about use of copyrighted works, it’s about whether the use is transformative and substitutes the original market. I struggle to see how is not transformative under these criteria.
The use of the model (being able to output copies of GPL software) is a different question. This depends on the circumstances: if GPL code is exactly reproduced then it very well could be subject to the license of the original work.
I don’t understand the legal objections to the fair use of protected IP. Licenses are legal documents, not moral imperatives. GPL only exists because of copyright law, and you can’t write a license that supercedes copyright law if you don’t like the law.
The Claude Code example is completely different, hosting a repo with the leaked code is clearly not fair use.
I might recall reading some interpretability paper years ago that trained a special model that could attribute each answer to a part of the corpus (like Wikipedia, ArXiV, or "Blogs") but it had a non-zero effect on performance and wasn't nearly as straightforward as weights go in, attribution comes out.
The “downside” is you may attribute similar works that weren’t inspirations, but coincidental. But I think that’s an upside: when someone discovers something novel and great but their work fails because of bad luck or non-novel details, then the discovery is finally recognized in another work, I think they should still be attributed.
It will be very possible once they become the owners of the intellectual property being infringed. Think about how it was "impossible" to implement DRM on music and movies in the early days of youtube. Now, Google owns the content and platform, and suddenly their "rolling cypher" which involves no encryption at all is supposedly enforcable DRM.
The Silicon Valley tech bros play the same game every time. They violate the law, say it's just too darn difficult to obey the law without stifling progress, and then they get away with it until they kill all the competition. At which point, the law is once again applicable to anyone that might try to challenge them.
Remember how Amazon destroyed all the other retailers when they had a decade of no sales tax while brick & mortar had to obey it. "Calculating sales tax for 50 different states?! That's impossible!!!" What a load of shit...
Now, knowing that they're going to do this playbook again, how do you think it's going to play out? We've already seen it. Anthropic steals your copyrighted code, puts together their claude code project, the code for that project leaks, but now THEY own it! They sent DMCA takedowns on that AI generated code. AI generated code enjoys no copyright protection, it cannot be DMCAed under the law, there's no copyright on it. But Anthropic claims there is, and Github will obey the takedown, and nobody has the money to step up and stop them.
See where this is going? Once they achieve market dominance, they will claim that all the code generated by claude belongs to Anthropic, your prompts belong to you, but THEIR machine generated THEIR code and you only purchase a license to it with your tokens. A limited license. It might be revokable, it might expire, maybe you need to pay an annual fee to keep using THEIR code Claude generated for you. And if you actually just write code on your own, without Claude? Well, prepare to be sued like a network printer is sued by the RIAA because that's going to happen too. They will have their robot scour your code for "fair use" training and discover that it's just too similar to something their machine generated a year earlier. Sorry open source programmer, here's your legalese nasty gram. It appears you owe Anthropic some money.
I believe LLMs are at the very least an under-researched technology or less charitably, an ongoing effort to strip intellectual workers of their rights and privileges.
What I am saying is the reasonable demand for attribution runs counter to the nature of these systems as we know them. There is no magical "release the attribution" button Anthropic could press if they wanted to. Unlike per-state taxes, are actual PhDs working on, at universities and private labs, because transparency has been the public number one demand since day one, and yet all that exists after 4 years of funding are only the first incomplete steps.
The most likely outcome of imposing this obligation is commercial LLM providers quickly folding, finding a loophole/displaying false attribution, or settling for notably worse performance. That is of course not counting how these companies will be on the hook for a civilizational amount of licensing fees.
(Per the DRM point, I believe we can agree the goal of simultaneously displaying a piece of media in the physical world and somehow protecting the viewer from storing it is effectively impossible, without hiring a trusted guard to hold the viewer at gunpoint if they dare touch the trusted viewing apparatus or pull out their phone, at least in its strict form)
I am personally okay with shutting down an industry that cannot legally exist in its current form, especially one so openly hostile to every field of human endeavor. But no matter your position on that, we must keep in mind no "ethical" or "legal" AI industry can exist without making either adjective meaningless.
This is what's known as a category error; an LLM is a 'model', not an algorithm.
It's not even an accurate claim; LLMs predict the next token, not the next word.
> AI is essentially copy paste with more steps
What about when AI creates a limerick about a kubernetes cluster run by Buddhist Monks? Or any number of other novel creations?
Fortunately the courts recognized the transformative use involved in making a model, which is fair use of copyrighted works, in kadrey v meta platforms.
> The most infurating thing however is how AI companies sidestep the IP rights of authors
transformative use falls under fair use, permission from authors is not needed to use legally acquired copyright works for training. Kadrey v Meta Platforms and Bartz v Anthropic.
> but then claim to own those IP rights when their own generated output leaks.
Corporations gonna do corporate things. Blatant hypocrisy is par for the course. Organize and take them to court.
I don’t know about impossible but it’s definitely not a straightforward read from the post-training weights as you’re implying, unless you’re aware of some technique I’m not aware of.
The closest you could get would be the weight differential from training with a given work. But that’s massively dependent on training order, so that it’s certainly not at all a good measure of “contribution.”
Just don't like the immediate dismissal of the people's House when it comes to government affairs. When Congress does something it's important, regardless of the house it originates from.
The OP is correct that Congress implies both chambers. Yes, "Congressman" or "Congresswoman" refers to House members. But the headline says "Congress".
<https://www.eff.org/about/staff/joe-mullin>.
He's been working in that capacity with the EFF since at least 2018: <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/ipr-process-saves-80-c...>.
Your further objections are ... facile.
I'm working on a top-level comment on that point as I write this, given that this particular subthread is dead and thus invisible to most visitors to HN. My response highlights what seem to me salient points about other instances of violation of separation of powers, and of the history of the copyright office.
DMCA rulemaking is actually an example of something that would probably be constitutional if the executive did it--even if administrative agencies in general are unconstitutional. The DMCA creates civil and criminal penalties, and calls for rulemaking to define exceptions to those penalties. Defining exceptions to civil and criminal liability falls squarely within executive enforcement discretion.
It’s akin to the distinction between law and equity courts at common law.
Stepping back, both doctrines (non delegation, unitary executive) are fundamentally about the courts overstepping. If both houses of Congress pass a law creating an agency with a director that can only be fired for cause and the president signs it, the Supreme Court should stay out of it.
Enacting legislation is very difficult, the presumption of constitutionality should be taken more seriously.
That’s even worse. If that’s the case, Congress must adopt those exemptions by law. It can’t delegate lawmaking powers to its employees.
> Stepping back, both doctrines (non delegation, unitary executive) are fundamentally about the courts overstepping
Unless you toss out the concept of judicial review altogether, policing the structural rules of the constitution is exactly what the courts should be doing. The courts have no say about the merits of Congressional acts. But they should review whether Congress has allocated powers to various entities in a way that’s consistent with separation of powers.
But in this case we have a law passed by congress and signed by the president. There’s no need to step in, the ordinary political processes are more than sufficient. If the new President and congress doesn’t like what the last ones did they have the exact same tools at their disposal to undo it.
Let them play!
The US executive branch has very limited decision making bandwidth and it should really be reserved for matters of war and peace.
Your initial comment would have been far stronger if it had dropped the irrelevant ad hom I called out previously, and had clearly stated your concern with Congress both legislating and regulating copyright, through the Library of Congress.
This also makes the question of how the Library of Congress came to be empowered with executing and* regulating copyright of interest. You've failed to explore this history. I'm somewhat familiar with both copyright law and the history of the Library, though not as a lawyer, and not specifically on the history of copyright and the Library both being effectively an executive function of the Legislative.
That also makes me wonder what other cross-branch functional contradictions exist. One that comes to mind immediately are ALJs (administrative law judges), which operate under the Executive rather than Judiciary, with one notable area being immigration law. The Senate and House each have Seargents of Arms, a nominally executive law-enforcement role under the legislative.
And of course there's the question of the present Administration's view that not only is it a unitary executive, but apparently a unitary Legislative and Judiciary as well.
On that point, Congress cannot "set things up as it sees fit." The constitution goes to great lengths to create a complex, three-branch system of government with specific powers allocated to each branch. Anytime Congress creates something new, it has to fit it into the three-branch model in a way that is consistent with the principles of that model. It's like a "pure" microkernel in computer science: there is a framework that dictates what goes in kernel space versus user space. Except with the constitution, the structural principles are legally binding. You can't delegate executive functions to mere employees of the legislative branch, just like in a pure microkernel you can't put the GUI into the kernel.
In this case, the DMCA creates civil and criminal liability. Creating exceptions for that is the exercise of a quintessential executive power--enforcement discretion. That power must be allocated to an executive-branch agency.
If you concede that it looks like an executive agency then it actually seems quite proper that the executive control it.
I can see how someone might disagree with that for various reasons (see the article) but in context "if it looks like an executive branch agency, then the Executive branch should have control over it" seems like a great argument and one that would probably carry in Congress, they have tended to put executive agencies under control of the executive in the past.
no more major questions doctrine
Such an extreme and emotional statement makes me think you've never really thought it through. For instance: without copyright the GPL is nothing. Also without copyright, all of the profit made on creative works (of a perhaps smaller pie) would get be kept by distributors like Amazon or Netflix. Authors wouldn't get a dime anymore, it'll all go to the likes of Bezos.
That’s ok, GPL’s entire purpose and only restriction is to prevent other copyrights.
> without copyright, all of the profit made on creative works (of a perhaps smaller pie) would get be kept by distributors like Amazon or Netflix
This is already true in most cases: companies own everything their employees create for them. And without copyright, studios would still pay artists, because that’s the only way art is created (which even rich people want, although you probably and I think their taste mostly sucks, so does everyone else’s…)
You sure about that? Because I'm pretty sure it's "entire purpose" is to keep open source code open.
> And without copyright, studios would still pay artists, because that’s the only way art is created
Hate to break it to you, but that's just not true. But you know what would make that true? Abolishing copyright.
Your second point seems to agree: if copyright was abolished, people (even rich) still want art, so studios would still end up paying artists, from patronage or some other system.
Yes, it would be exclusively the domain of the rich and powerful. If you're a little guy, they'll just shamelessly take what you make, because abolishing copyright abolishes the legal protections a small-time creator depends on.
Let's say you put a ton of effort into making an awesome YouTube channel people love. Copyright is what means a bunch of randos can't just copy all your work and take all the revenue from it. They can even undercut you, because they don't actually have the costs of creating anything. Copyright give you recourse.
Assuming copyright gets dismantled is a good-faith way, Netflix/Amazon remaining as gatekeepers sounds unlikely, IMO. Free software clients like Popcorn Time provide a better experience and would be able to exist without threats from copyright trolls.
It's also much more robust regarding cultural preservation (as users and organizations can keep DRM-free local copies) and censorship (being torrent-based makes it much harder to delete a movie from existence).
I won't use an argument in favor of AI training here because AI can probably still be trained by fair-use information extraction from copyrighted works.
Without copyright, we can return to a patronage based system. Both rich and poor consumers gladly offer proportional patronage for authors they truly believe in.
Humanity will progress just fine via its scientific works which don't really require a copyright. Arxiv proves it.
The cost imposed by GPL not working will be negligible compared to the benefit of free use.
Thankfully, RMS is not my guru.
Copyright is a valuable legal technology. It should be reformed to curb abuses, but we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It is not clear to me what their political agenda is. Overall it might be good for AI if the goal is to scrape freely and use it for AI training.
Someone using a physical property can possibly deprive others of its use. This applies to the physical mediums of songs, movies, or books, but not the songs, movies, or text of the books themselves.
Intellectual property isn't real, it's a concept that exists to support copyright, which exists for this exact purpose stated in the Constitution:
"[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
I'm ok with accepting a temporary limitation on my freedom to support those who make songs, movies, or books, but life of the author + 70 years, plus the ability to assign the right to corporations which don't die, is not reasonably "limited" these days. It should be something like 5 years today.
No one is entitled to be a songwriter, movie director, or author; society needs people doing other things too.
Especially since that agreement didn't involve you.
There's no $deity-given right to control what happens to stuff you wrote / designed etc, once it's been published. Copyright is, sorry was, a legal construct meant to promote people creating artwork.
Once it overshot that intent bigtime, there's no justification for keeping it around. At least not in its current form.
I want copyright to be completely abolished and patronage to re-become normal and common. Most of my favorite artists already distribute most of their work for free and rely on the latter.
The reason is damaging someone's livelihood in the cases I mentioned. Or large scale economic damage in case you're copying money.
Does this sound profound to you? When you see yourself type it out, does it seem like you've really came up with a zinger?
What entitles them to come in and police my hard drive platters with "you can't write that sequence of bits to storage, that's our sequence of bits"? It's sort of a weird idea, sounds kind of medieval. Like King Cnut has granted them license to "the birds in the forest, and the timber, and the water that runs through the meadows".
Also, the argument that you made elsewhere about "damages" is nonsense because there is no damage from someone viewing what they were never going to pay for anyway, and there also is no deprivation.
Those who are under attack happen to also be the biggest copyrighter holders, so this would open up a new avenue of attack.
Don't threaten me with a good time
The American voter doesn't know because copyright misuse and malfeasance is on a long list of public-impacting topics that news orgs have rigorously ignored for generations.
Yes. Not only that, but to grant copyright protection only to those that are allied with/loyal to/bribe the current administration.
This would have massive, far reaching effects.
Yes.
Copyright laws are heavily enforced, only selectively.
Might be a win? The copyright system is one of the major suspects for why US industry ended up crippled and replaced by Asian labour refusing to respect US IP laws to their significant advantage. To say nothing of the corrosive influence on culture of locking down music and stories. The biggest IP success in the last 50 years seems to have been Open Source because they built a framework inside the copyright system to achieve the opposite outcome and build a thriving industry despite the lawyers trying to encourage them in alternative directions.
The people defending the copyright system should have to keep making their case until they come up with something persuasive for how they're helping.
Expand on this.
Wasn't it instead our desire to be the world's reserve currency and rely on cheap imports? You can't be both a net exporter and the world's top reserve currency.
You have to run trade deficits if you want to export dollars.
Maintaining an import-dependent economy might be a factor, economies are complicated. But there isn't a fundamental reason that taking in more stuff than gets exported should mean that Asia has to be more successful. If anything, a country in a position to import more than it exports should be seeing big jumps in living standards, rather the gains going to a country notionally taking the bad end of the bargain. And there are some easy resolutions to being a net importer and while having a strong industrial economy - import raw materials, make stuff that isn't for export as an example.
https://www.stoneslaw.net/legislative-branch-agencies-clarif...
1. Gives power to Congress to appoint/remove the librarian rather than the president (cool, great)
2. Strips the copyright power held by the Library of Congress away, library of Congress becomes a supporting resource like a consultant
3. Reassigns that same power to a different position that’s politically appointed by the president.
What you are saying is technically true, but the deck chairs have been shuffled around in a way that seems to at least partially negate the positive change.
I also find it odd that this was passed in a voice vote. It’s hard for me to tell if that means it has strong bipartisan support? I guess I’d have to watch a video recording of the proceedings to know. If I am recalling correctly, congresspeople can call for a tallied vote if they think the voice vote was too ambiguous.