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Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu will utterly fold and pay $2.4M to settle its lawsuit
I saw that Tropic Haze, the company behind the Switch emulator Yuzu, will fold completely, sued into the ground by Nintendo. I'm not interested so much specifically in Nintendo's continued aggressiveness (as they unleash their packs of lawyers against not just emulators, but fan sites, etc) but in another data point in just who the laws protect. When I was younger, I had a much more idealistic view on how the law worked, and hopes that it would be used to punish the wicked, whomever that was. And like, I guess that sometimes happens? But mostly, the law is a cudgel used by those with money against those without.
Sure, we see it in obvious ways, like the lawsuit designed to obliterate Tropic Haze. But we also see it in terms of who it doesn't protect. I'm thinking in particular of OpenAI and how its datasets rely on massive copyright infringement to work at scale. Which, great - pay the people who provided your data, right? Only OpenAI won't, because, well, the short form is that it needs a metric shit ton of free data to build its models, whose compute requirements already burn through cash at a terrifying rate. And there are breathless articles about Altman making trips to billionaires and shady states around the world, trying to secure trillions in future funding to build the necessary chips to train AI using current methods at an even larger scale. I'll give Altman this: he's no visionary, his one kick at the Y Combinator can producing a company that failed to do anything of note, to make any serious amount of money. But Paul Graham likes him because he's the status quo in a bad haircut, a dead-inside extender of the present.
What could AI be? (What _should_ AI be)? Don't ask Altman. He dropped out of his computer science degree to try to make a lot of bucks; the man's a money-collector, not a researcher. I don't think he knows and I strongly suspect he doesn't care, more interested in scaling up today's incredibly inefficient methods (given the size of the training data sets), regardless of the environmental catastrophe that awaits.
Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI
All that training data comes from somewhere, and while OpenAI would probably characterize the datasets as open, or fair use, there's a strong case to be made that they're just wholesale stealing copyrighted data. That's what the New York Times (among others) are currently arguing in court. Timothy B. Lee and Jason Grimmelmann write that while OpenAI might win the various lawsuits against it, there's a real chance it might not as well. I guess we'll see; for the sake of a future internet that isn't the technological equivalent of an open sewer, I hope they get yuzued (sorry) out of existence.
Spotify will reportedly start paying less royalties to less popular artists
Spotify pays artists shit. So how come they're still using it?
And this can't help but remind me of the early days of the net, when we were all downloading MP3s off Napster, and once they got destroyed by the RIAA's lawsuits, Limewire and Kazaa. Notably, it wasn't until Apple cut a deal with the record companies for the iTunes store that they became comfortable with the idea of electronic music. And now, with Spotify, it's even better for them, though less so for the artists they claim to represent. Taylor Swift will be fine; the Stones will be fine; but it's everyone after that upper echelon who gets screwed. In an article on rootsmusic.ca, Heather Kitching writes about an anecdote of Peter Frampton making $1700 for 55M streams of "Baby I Love Your Way". And that's Peter Frampton! More and more artists have to tour, and tour hard, because they're not going to have a hope of making money on album sales.
I guess when you're a tech company, the key is just to sit on a bigger pile of cash than your opponents, either to preemptively intimidate them and avoid a lawsuit, or come to some sort of agreement that benefits both of you (but mostly you), and screws everyone else.
Speaking of [waves hands wildly], I've got tickets with my partner to see Cory Doctorow in a little while. It looked like an interesting lecture, and God knows I should probably get out of the house more, so even if it reworks a lot of what I've read by him and others online the last year or two, I think it'll still be good. My partner was intrigued as well, and she's about the furthest thing from online. I'm looking forward to it.