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[–] 200 points 1 year ago (3 children)

🙌 Communist Trump is making all textbooks free 🙌

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  • [–] 51 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    You can't defeat the fascist mental illness with logic. Fascism is a fusion of corporation and state. The only rule of law is whatever the dictator(s) believe protects their regimes/corporations profits.

    In this case, Americas big tech — of which Trump recently merged some with the military — has determined copyright laws should not apply to them, and Trump is voicing their opinion (he doesn't know how anything works).

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  • [–] 146 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 371 points 1 year ago (31 children)

    Wow so fuck college students but machines deserve free textbooks?

    Fuck this society.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Yes, one would expect human intelligence to benefit quite a lot from free access to information.

    Become a more common occurrence too. Possibly an effect much stronger than that of AI requiring lots of computation with unpredictable shittiness of the output.

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  • [–] 138 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Just tell your campus book store that you self-identify as AI. FREE BOOKS!

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  • [–] 50 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    But you aren't an oligarch of the fascist dictatorship, so you have no rights.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Bold of you to assume I'm not a fascist oligarch. Mebbe I am?

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    The fuck are you doing on fedi then? Go exploit more people or something

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I tried once. I'm hardwired with compassion and a strong moral and ethical framework.

    Last time I tried so hard at employee wage theft and I ended up giving my guys a bonus and the afternoon off. I'm just not cut-out for fascist oligarchy.

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  • [–] 73 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Just download digital copies of the textbooks and say you need them as training material for your own AI dataset when the copyright holders come after you.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago

    I'm training a neural network. It's just that the neural network is 1 layer with zero data reduction -so it's only capable of printing the text exactly as the source material on my computer! AI finally works!

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  • [+] 12 points 1 year ago (12 children)
  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Not for textbooks...

    Like, if your curious there's a bunch of info out there about why the situation is so fucked.

    But in general they release new editions almost every year, with the same information just shuffled so page numbers are different. Even really petty stuff like keeping the same practice work, but changing the order of answers so you need the most updated book every year.

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  • [+] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)
  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    And a lot of professors write their own text book.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    The cool professors used to make a "study guide" especially if it was their own book that they'd give out for free and told everyone to return the books

    It's been a minute, so not sure if it's a thing still.

    But yeah. Unregulated capitalism pretty much always ends this way.

    You have to buy the book, so they pump out new editions constantly and charge insane prices. It's a captive market

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    My univeristy library would often have one or two copies of the current textbook on course reserve in the library. This meant that 1) you had to know where the course reserves were, 2) hope you could get it before one of the other 100-150 students also taking that course got it first, and 3) hope some dickhead didn’t just take it off the shelf and hide it in their study carrel or in a quiet corner of the library. Number 3 gets worse the higher the level of degree you are studying.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    My library, you have to check out books on reserve from the circulation desk. They're for in-library use only, 3 or 6 hours at a time, and if you take it into a study room and scan the whole thing with your phone we saw nothing.

    We don't like the constant churn of textbooks, either. They eat into our budget. We really appreciate when a professor lends us their personal copies of a textbook for us to keep on reserve. We also try and steer instructions to Open Educational Resources (OER), which are available for free.

    Wealth disparity sucks and shouldn't result in different access to education.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    We do. The issue is at the college/university level, most courses require specific edition textbooks (they update them every 1-2 years) that the professors assign homework questions out of. You'll be lucky if the school library has a copy more recent than the last 8 years.
    Then on top of that, many professors will also use digital 3rd party homework services that are tied to a textbook access code that you only get with a new copy. So unless you pay up you can't do homework and fail the class.

    The whole system is fucking bullshit

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    My university (well, typically the professor) usually made sure there was at least one copy of the current course's text book in the library. Yes, that means there was exactly one copy available for us poor students to share. At least it was put on the "reference" list so no one could take it home - just study it in the library and then put it back on the shelf. I don't know if that's possible now that they are going to digital editions.

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  • [–] 116 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    Sssh. This might be the first time in the last 100 years copyright isn't EXPANDED for the benefit of publishers. I'll hold my breath until we see if they figure out a way to reduce copyright only for silicon valley corporations while expanding it for the rest of us. Or not...

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  • [–] 84 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    So what he’s saying is the billionaires funding ai can’t afford to do it legitimately

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  • [–] 68 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    So, hypothetically speaking, if I pirate a bunch of stuff and I get caught, I can claim I used it to train an AI model and all charges are dropped? (According to his statement, not current applicable laws)

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Theres a common misconception that downloading data is illegal when it's generally sharing is what gets you in trouble. There are very few people who get fined for piracy downloads around the world.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I believe it's mostly illegal for both parties, but in practice less often enforced for the downloading party, as this enforcement would require too much resources for the enforcing side.

    To give concrete examples, downloading pirated material is illegal in both the U.S and in Sweden, and afaik the latter is on par with the rest of the EU.

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  • [–] 55 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 54 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Yep when Napster just linked people who shared files between them, it was the end of the world. So it's fine when it's bigtech / AI?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Yes, there are people who want to have authority and think that if they got to the very top - Google, Meta, whatever, or some government, - then their ideas about authority have become law.

    In fact, of course, they are just jerks who'll drop the soap at every step in prison for the rest of their lives when the problem is finally rectified, and it's being slowly rectified.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    What are you talking about? Things seem to be rapidly deteriorating to me. There are no problems being rectified.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The situation has been made possible by the enormous trust in progress and "technical fashion" that existed recently, that seems to be drying out.

    Say, 10-15 years ago offline-enabled means of communication were a matter of toys for people with no clear idea of future.

    Now people going to protests use them, and the dangers of mainstream Internet services and platforms are also common knowledge.

    So there is some immunity being formed. It's even better that this happens slowly. I would be worried if this were some fashion spreading rapidly, but now we can see one crowd using Briar, another crowd using Bridgefy, another crowd jumping on Jack Dorsey's Bitchat, LoRa and Meshtastic growing in popularity, all those things picking different approaches to the same goal, which signifies evolutionary convergence onto a commonly understood set of problems.

    People who were simping for corps no longer do. People who were simping for social media no longer do. People simping for Apple and Google and MS seem to be a rare kind now.

    The response is happening.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I hope your right. It's nice to see questioning of America tech gaint's monopolies finally now Trump is making America not seaming a safe supplier. More Europe than the UK, but even here, it's not as fringe to perceive the problem now.

    Not enough yet though. Amazon for example has a load of the market, avoids tax's and has loads of stuff that isn't really legal in the market because it doesn't meet the regs. Example, domestic socket EV chargers (granny leads) should be only up to 10A (as it consistent load and wiring quality varies), but most on Amazon are 13A and a few 16A! Hello house fire. Let alone fake CE marking and EMC emissions.

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  • [–] 52 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    So why can't I read them for free too? Only massive billion dollar companies get stuff for free?

    I would like to announce that I am pioneering a new AI program. Give me access to all of the movies for free please.

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  • [–] 52 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    How about you release the Epstein files and then go outside and go fuck yourself Trump.

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  • [–] 46 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    And that's why I have an AI training library of movies and TV stored up.

    I'll get around to training an AI on it any day now, I'm sure.

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  • [–] 40 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Hear that college students? The President just gave you permission to pirate all your textbooks.

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  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Settle down, nerds. TACO just read from the card they gave him. He doesn't think anything about AI. Of course, he'll make the wrong decisions and cause utter chaos and strife but it's not like he has an actual opinion about AI.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    What if president brainrot accidentally kills intellectual property, even glitched out cuckoo clocks are right occasionnally by chance!

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  • [–] 37 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    "I need it for my business plan to work out" is not a great legal argument for when you're trying to override others rights.

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  • [–] 72 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Remember kids: Copyright is only for the rich.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    For the poor? the rich dont pay copyright, only grandma who downloaded nothing else matter's mp3

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    Copyright means a legal protection showing you own your own works: words written, audio recorded, and artwork created.

    With exceptions for nonprofit and parody, others cannot use your work to do businesss with without your written permission.

    Poor people apparently don't get that.

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  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago

    "You can't be expected to get a successful higher education when every article, book, or anything else that you've read or studied, you're supposed to pay for."

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  • [–] 34 points 1 year ago*

    Trying to throw whatever that sticks so people would stop talking about your pedophelia

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago

    Can a human be expected to have a successful life when they have to pay for knowledge they need access to? I am not against the opinion that information should be free and freely accessible. But does this courtesy also extend to the common folk or is it exclusive to expensive machines and their owners? You wouldn’t download a United States government. da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago

    Funny that when it was about protecting profits copyright was such a cornerstone principle but when it's about protecting profits it can also be set aside.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Won’t someone think of these POOR AI companies!

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Don't worry about the AI companies, they can afford it and then make a profit (eventually).

    Worry about the open source AI models that you can run locally using solar panels. They will become defacto illegal piracy. Affordable hardware to run large models without too much power is finally appearing (Ryzen AI max), but the software will become proprietary intellectual property of those who own the world. Which is the worst case scenario.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    So Pro Piracy argument ... So no more patents or copyrights

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    I'll setup a JellAIfin server immediately. It's just the regular Jellyfin code, but I am compiling my own version - it has "AI" added as a comment to every line of code before I compiled.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    There was an episode of behind the bastards I was listening to a while back where they mentioned some dude who was using an AI tool to scrape the internet to steal other people's art, so people started doing something that prevented him from optimally stealing their art.

    I can't remember what exactly, but the guy started whining that whatever people were doing was "illegal" bc it was damaging his tool he was using to steal other people's shit for his own profit. Like somebody telling you that it's illegal to prevent them from efficiently stealing your property bc it interferes with their livelihood. How dare you!

    Anyway, that's the kind of vibes I get from this.

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