If you don't hold a patent for the use of the knowledge you published publicly, you can't prevent others from using the knowledge. You enjoy the prestige attached to the idea that you're an academic who participates in giving away their knowledge but then you play this game when that knowledge would actually be useful as opposed to being read by 3 other people in your special area who sit on your various committees in your career, now you want to forbid the use for culture war intra-elite signaling reasons.

You don't own the knowledge you put out there unless you have a limited time valid patent. The rest is absurdity. If you want to keep your findings to yourself, keep them secret.

How do you square away the idea that you do science for the increase in knowledge of human kind, but then say that a particular use of that knowledge is verboten?

I get the copyright aspect of this and I'm not arguing that here. I'm more asking about the moral / ethical idea of choosing who can benefit from your science.

Obviously there are the moral / ethical arguments about AI in general here to weigh against - those have been hashed out significantly elsewhere, and I'm not interested in debating them. What I'm asking about here is the impact on science by sharing it with tooling that distributes it in ways not generally considered when originally written.

A quick check of your post history suggests the frame that you work in strongly is privacy related research (observation - may be wrong). I'm curious how that impacts what you wrote here generally.

(Just to be perfectly clear, I'm not arguing your points here, trying to understand them better)

If it was a non profit that trained the model - would that change your mind?

As long as we are going toward a world of abundance where money doesn't mean much and the main currency is time, I can't complain. I will subsidize that with my brain power turned into ink on paper.

You mean the knowledge you gathered with public grants, with a public paid salary, yet don’t want to make freely available to the public?

Yeah, too bad

No doubt

Of course they did. There is open access to this library. These guys actually think they're offering new training data? It's kind of hilariously naive.

Since starting to use AIs seriously for search in the last 3 months I have read and referenced more published papers and academic primary sources then I think I did in the previous 5 years. They're fantastic for pointing at some claim and asking for the primary source for it, and then it does the work of following things through the layers of backref to the original, assuming it's online. Opening the library up to AI access makes it far more accessible and usable then it was before.

AIs, at least in their current form, make you more who ever you were. If you want snap, glib answers of dubious accuracy, they'll give them to you, more easily than ever before. If you want to dig back into primary sources and get the original content, they'll do that for you, more easily than ever before.

Can't speak to how the science infrastructure is going to handle them, but if it takes down the peer review system, which I think has been worthless for probably going on two decades and has just given the entire enterprise a false sense of assurance, it'll probably be a net gain in the end. Peer review is a source of more problems then it is solving right now.

> I think that LLMs are going to wreck the peer review system for all but hard-experimental papers

I think I may be shadowbanned, but at what point do we start viewing LLMs as a national security threat?

Scholarly article authors never expected royalty or permission for their scholarly works to be reused.

The real efficacy of the peer review system has always been somewhat questionable. That's a big reason why arxiv is so prominent.

Don't you grant ACM a right to distribute your work when publishing? So doesn't ACM already have the right to grant access to AI?

I don't think this is AI-generated. It is focused and direct. It reads like anodyne albeit totally human academic manager writing.

The ACM sent around a nice query to members which made it clear that they were going to do it even if 100% of the members said "No, don't do that".

I suppose they could be sued.

Do humans not have access? https://dl.acm.org/openaccess

Came to say the same thing. Now remains the time to give the public access to the ACM digital library.

This makes no sense whatsoever. How would a philosopher of science, or a social scientist who publish in the ACM apply for a patent? Or someone who builds software (software patent not so easy to get ;)). I have applied for patents before and I'm pretty sure my patent application has been fed to countless LLMs by now.

The issue is not who owns knowledge, it's how it benefits humanity.

The intellectual property law that governs ACM articles is copyright law, not patents. I don’t know who controls these (the ACM or the authors) or what rights might have been granted to the public.

The entire point of copyright law is so that people can make their writing public and still be able to control the right to make copies (for example, into your dataset for training an LLM).

Patents shouldn’t exist.

The world would be quite different if AI companies had to create the knowledge they trained on, rather than consume that knowledge freely given away. They're not known for freely giving away their produce either, I don't know why you think the ire should be pointing in this direction.

“If you don’t lock your bike, you can’t prevent others from taking it for a ride. You enjoy the mobility attached to the idea you’re a bike rider who rides a bike but then you play this game when that bike would actually be useful as opposed to sitting in the bike rack all day”.

Good question. Unfortunately, academic knowledge is widely ‘verboten’ already. Everything under paywall, researchers having to pay up to $10,000 to publish in open access in some venues, rare books unavailable even to top universities. Access to knowledge and information is increasingly difficult for everyone.

That said, what matters here is the social contract, what do I bring to society and what do we get from tech companies. For most people around the world, access to the typical leading models is out of reach. Not many on this planet can pay the subscriptions (or even API keys) that offer access to the best models. So I'm not buying the argument that tech companies are broadening access. What we're creating is a increasingly discriminatory society where the few get access to information, and the many don't.

well, we are not, so far it is just concentrating wealth and power in smaller and smaller subset of people

The issue here is ACM focusing on licensing. A non profit would not be able to pay ACM for access. Hence why this policy is hypocritical: it gives more power to the larger players and undermines smaller actors in the field who have fewer resources.

Abundance for whom, exactly? And if the answer is everybody: who in charge has an incentive to do this?

Sorry to ruin your day, but if the people with money could have introduce equal society, you would have noticed their attempts by now.

It’s pretty clear that the premise won’t be becoming reality.

So will LLMs have premium-tier access or basic-tier access?

It seems that the "open access" is more marketing than something reality based they actually want to do.

https://dl.acm.org/openaccess ---> So how to access the content? Do I have to register or what? It the "open access" only for academic org's people or for everyone in the world?

https://dl.acm.org/ ---> Okay, nice simple search field without loggin in, but when you try to search something, you get thousands of results, even if you search specific author and the exact name of paper, you will get hundreds of results and the thing you want is buried somewhere on page 247. Filters of authors, years etc. are for Premium subscription. But just googling the thing finds the link to ACM... And want to get the actual PDF? Hope it says "free access"...

it is open like open in openai

Only if the authors pay for it.

https://authors.acm.org/open-access/acm-open-for-authors-hom...

ACM agrees I think: https://dl.acm.org/openaccess

> Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access.

They can't apply for a patent in those categories, so they have no way of preventing others from reading their text (or using a program to process the text, and compute statistical properties), and using the ideas in other contexts (without re-expressing the same text).

If someone reads a philosophical essay, has a heureka moment from it, applies the principle to their work, and makes bank (commercial profit), they never have to pay a percentage to the author of the essay.

I like open models for sure. I support free software as well. But using published knowledge to solve new problems was never disallowed, even for profit. Today, a for-profit company, e.g. a gigantic Big Pharma company can have their employees read chemistry and biology papers and use the knowledge gained from it to improve their products and processes and make more profit without paying a cent to the authors (beyond what they may get - likely nothing - due to the potential paywall).

Copyright protects against reprinting or reproducing the wording and expression, not using the idea expressed in there in novel contexts.

Patents were invented to incentivize disclosure of inventions and prevent extended secrecy. In exchange for the public disclosure (which allows others to experiment with the idea without selling yet), you get to keep exclusivity for N years.

Nope, and I'd also download cars.

Yes and then continue your reasoning... Is this sustainable? What do you think it leads to?

Well, once there is no more jobs, or once a large enough number of people are made redundant, it will mechanically happen. Future is all about research and entertainment. That is why tiktok stars and soccer players get so much money. All that being based on DARPA research, I mean the internet. People just want to have fun. Du pain et des jeux.

Non Profit != No Money

A non profit could well pay, and there are plenty of reasons frontier models should be managed by non profit. After all, why allow a for profit to benefit from free contributions?

Abundance for everyone or it is not abundance. With abundance, the field gets levelled because everything someone else can get, you can too. Society can't be equal when everyone is in survival of the fittest mode because resources (energy) are not infinite.

Made my day. Thank you! I have to remember that. Best thing I have read in the entire day.

Why did you sign off your copyright to ACM then? If you kept the copyright and prevented others from distributing your work, you could be the sole distributor and negotiate the price with the AI company yourself.

Wait, so did this already happen and it just didn’t get attention?

Nobody uses their search anyways.

Google scholar has become the way to search papers (which is somewhat worrisome). What people want from there is a download for all the stuff that does not list an author copy. Open access IMHO is just a reaction to the fact that mostly you would not need a subscription anyhow. Now the authors are paying upfront or universities are paying flat for all their researchers. The problem is now the incentives are not increasing the number of subscriptions but increasing the number of papers published.

> From January 1, 2026, all ACM publications will be published Open Access (OA), free to read, share, and reuse in the ACM Digital Library.

And?

Currently patents are predominantly used to prevent interoperability and impose costs.

AI reproduces copyrighted work exactly in many cases, so it clearly infringes copyright in this sense

The output of it is also a derivative work, and derivative works also infringe copyright. Its only not a problem if you ignore copyright entirely

Humans are the only entities that get to enjoy special idea-learning-exemptions, not AI

It was a front page story here on HN back in December 2025:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991

Because if you don't publish in academia, you might as well be dead. And the terms for most places to publish are similar.

It's a racket.

It got a lot of discussion here when it happened and before as they phased it in.

> The output of it is also a derivative work,

A short session is just retrieval, a long session is always unique. The more the user writes the more it diverges from any content in the dataset.

Are you a lawyer that has tested this in court, or is this just what you want the reality to be?

As someone with lots of open source code out there that has likely been used as LLM training data, I'm very sympathetic to this point of view, but that doesn't seem to be the legal reality. Much of this has not been fully tested in court, but it seems likely that LLM training is not copyright infringement, as long as the training material itself was acquired legally.

The verbatim reproduction is clearly a red herring and not the main use case. Nobody reads novels (or science papers) by prompting ChatGPT to give the next paragraph.

Derivative work or transformative? It's not the same.

Ok, then next question is why are you in academia? To share knowledge with humanity, bring the Promethean light to the mortals or something I guess. But then if they use it for productive things that make money, that's too smelly, that's too practical, too dirty, or what?

I mean, its theoretically possible that a court might rule that if an LLM outputs an exact or lightly modified piece of copyrighted work, that it won't be copyright encumbered. We'll end up in a situation where copyright doesn't exist anymore, because you can always claim that its been laundered through an AI. This seems terribly unlikely to me, because 1:1 transformations (eg copying an image into memory) are already established to count as making a copy for legal purposes, there's strong precedent around piracy

There's also been court cases where material has been found to be infringingly used, eg song lyrics, so the case where copyright ceases to exist doesn't seem to be coming through yet, thankfully. It'd be the most staggering upheaval of copyright of all time if this doesn't turn out to be true

Suddenly it's "copyright infringement" to count the amount of times one word occurs after another word. I find this whole thing so amusing.

AI code generation often outputs exact copies of code that exists in the wild. I've seen it output chunks from research papers unprompted as well, its a big problem, or blending two papers together in a salad

AI works also clearly aren't transformative in many cases. If you ask it a question about a paper, it'll quote bits of the paper at you. That serves as an exact substitute of the original work. If you ask it for song lyrics, or information about the news, its content is a direct substitute for the original source it was trained on. This clearly does not fall under a transformative use case

You could argue that some uses of it are transformative, but even then - its easy to find some piece of training data in the source code that the output work supersedes. By its very nature it does not have the capacity to genuinely invent under the law (as it is not human), and a prompt isn't a significant enough part of the processing to count here

AI has the capacity to exactly reproduce its training data, just because something is a transformed representation does not mean that it isn't copying it in some fashion. The JPEG format 'just' counts the frequencies in an 8x8 block of pixels, and yes that's 100% copyright infringement

As long as it is not substantially similar to training set it should be OK to reuse ideas. Ideas should not be protected by copyright or we can't create anything. We should not accept "vibe copyrights".

Everyone treats the human user of the AI as furniture, but they steer the whole process into unique directions.

The courts don't agree with you and I don't either. Now what?

I have the capacity to exactly reproduce things I've read as well, but it's not automatically copyright infringement if I do so.

> and yes that's 100% copyright infringement

Says what court of law?

I'm kinda getting tired of this stuff. I'm someone who has been, and still to some extent is, uncomfortable with the possibility of copyright/license laundering in LLMs, but they way you are making your argument is incredibly off-putting and not sympathetic. You're throwing out wild assertions about the law that are not supported by... anything, really.

Under the law, machines are not able to create copyright, and basic human involvement is not enough to change this. Eg if you click a button saying "go", that won't create copyrightable content

You can use all the ideas you want, but AI cannot because its not a person, and does not enjoy the same protection under the law. The copyright holders by and large did not agree to you using their content like this

If we enable this, people won't create anything because all their work will immediately be stolen by the AI models. Copyright partially exists to promote the creation of new content, because theft disincentivises novel creation

You reproducing something does not have the same legal status as a tool reproducing something, as you are a human

>Says what court of law?

If you turn a png into a jpeg, and distribute it, that's copyright infringement. There isn't a court in the land that wouldn't find you guilty of that

Courts have ordered AI models to remove song lyrics from their training data, they most definitely do not agree with you

There's way too much hand waving on this topic. It is legal to produce copywritten work. If I draw Pikachu the drawing is mine. Legally. I am simply unable to make money on it. I can give it away if I want with zero liability. I could even hang the drawing up in my restaurant as a decoration. No big deal. What I can't do is use that drawing as my mascot or branding. We have an entirely separate process to determine if you are infringing on a copyright / trademark by using it to sell something. That's why whether or not an LLM can produce a picture of Pikachu is largely irrelevant. It's what you do with it that matters. Even more interestingly if I draw a picture of Pikachu and then the Pokemon Company decides they wanna use that specific picture they actually would have to pay ME for the copyright to use it.

Let's not mix copyright and trademark in mixed phrases like "infringing on a copyright / trademark". The two are very different concepts with different goals.

The main question in the "AI image generator generates a Pikachu image" is whether the AI company serving that image generator to you is violating the copyright or not. Because they make money when doing so (API / subscription cost), and so it's like selling images of Pikachu. The user is likely in the clear as long as they don't go on sell that Pikachu further. But the AI company sold the Pikachu image to the user.

Source on that?

derivative work & fair use. end of.

Not only are you not winning this one but I'm gonna laugh at you the entire time.

Ok, but courts haven't made those rulings yet so good luck with that