Video games are definitely an essential need for the modern leftist internet incel, so to allow capitalists to risk time and money producing games you can choose to voluntarily play, and then allow them to charge rents in exchange for you voluntarily playing their games....well that's the definition of criminality!
The government should seize the video game means of production and all video games should be government produced. Quality will definitely go up, not down, the more the government starts meddling in this highly essential market. There's zero downsides to weaponizing the guys with guns to write laws that disincentivize the creation of the thing you want created, rent control works amazing every time.
If your AI model develops the capability to manifest itself in the physical world as spinning blades and flamethrowers I'm fully open to re-evaluating the need for regulation.
Until then, I propose we use the 'unplug the server' rule. Can [insert bad thing] be prevented by unplugging the server? Then these things are fully in our control and no, we don't need to re-build hundreds of years of legal precedent from the ground up.
Liability in the event of harm is already something we have a pretty good handle on from living through the industrial revolution 150 years ago, a time when much more activity that companies did existed in the real world with real harms, as opposed to digital companies doing imagined "mental" harm to soft desk chair people who work at email jobs.
> If your AI model develops the capability to manifest itself in the physical world as spinning blades and flamethrowers I'm fully open to re-evaluating the need for regulation.
No, only metaphorical AI spinning blades and flamethrowers should be regulated. Actual AIs with spinning blades and flamethrowers will be subsidized and unleashed in your town.
I think we've reached the logical endpoint of populism.
This bill essentially can be distilled down to: "Companies are required to give me whatever I want for whatever price I want and they have to give me customer support forever."
Will just result in every game moving to a Saas model. And then a bunch of braindead people will be complaining about that as if the thing they voted for didn't cause that shift, requiring another piece of legislation that just kills the smaller publishers altogether.
Fine then let's reframe it: why can't the companies release games on their terms at their prices and allow consumers to decide whether they want to transact?
Why do you believe game companies have special rights that book and music publishers don’t? If I buy a book or CD, I can keep that copy forever, sell it, lend it, donate it, give it away, or let my kids inherit it. I own that copy.
Why can’t I do all those things with a copy of a game I bought?
You are comparing products that aren’t equivalent. If I “buy” a book on Kindle, that book might have restrictions (natural or artificial) that don’t apply to a physical book.
The product is what it is. If you don’t like it don’t buy it. If you bought a physical Xbox disc 20 years ago, you wouldn’t expect to be able to use it on PlayStation.
There's an important legal difference between books and CDs, which I'll get into at the end of this. For now let us just look talk about books.
> I can keep that copy forever, sell it, lend it, donate it, give it away, or let my kids inherit it
The works because the way most of us acquire copies of books doesn't involve entering into any kind of contractual arrangement with the copyright holder, so as long as what we want to do does not violate the copyright owner's copyright rights we can do anything with that book that we'd be legally allowed to do with a similar physical object (say a blank notebook).
Copyright law does give the copyright owner the exclusive right to distribute copies but there is an exception, the first sale doctrine, that says the owner of a particular lawfully made copy does not need permission from the copyright owner to "sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy".
If we bought our books through some channel where they could require us to agree to a contract in order to be allowed to buy they could include restrictions on what you can do with the copy, just like game companies do.
It would be hard to enforce since they would have to do it by suing people who violate the contract which would be impractical almost all the time.
Compare to digital goods, especially executable digital goods, where they can make it so using your copy requires checking in with a server of theirs which can refuse to let you use the thing if it thinks whoever bought it has broken the contract.
The important legal difference between books and CDs is that exception to the first sale doctrine, the one that says you can "sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy" without copyright owner permissions does not fully apply to CDs, has an exception to the exception.
The exception to the exception says that for copies of computer programs and musical sound recordings the outer exception does not apply to disposing of possession by "rental, lease, or lending, or by any other act or practice in the nature of rental, lease, or lending" when it is "for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage". So for CDs if you want to lend them make sure it is not for commercial advantage.
BTW, the exception to the exception also has an exception, making it not apply to embedded systems and console games. (There are also exceptions for libraries).
Everyone has an inherent right to free speech and we have only chosen to temporarly not use it to encourage the creation of more useful science and art. If we decide we are no longer getting a fair deal we can choose to excercise our right to free speech again and poof goes your copyright and other imaginary property. Or we can set reasonable limits again so that everyone benefits.
This interminable argument has been raging at least since the days of the East India Company, I'm sure even Jesus had some thoughts on the preferential relationship the money changers had with the temple. It makes the world go round. All the wealth used to train these models comes from compatible relationships between power and creativity, and we rely on that compatibility. That a regime to lock out US vendors from European infrastructure contracts was even necessary is too fresh a story to reduce it to a complaint as boring as regulatory capture, go ask the folk in Greenland for their thoughts.
As opposed to what? Companies that steal the collective intellect and intellectual property of the entire world? Yeah, what a great alternative. A world where all of your hard work is blatantly stolen.
Ah yes, a red herring, plus my favorite HN hypocrisy, all in one comment.
The 'information wants to be free' crowd complaining about protecting intellectual property now that it threatens their income stream...has to give the patent trolls and the RIAA a delicious bit of schadenfreude.
I invented this react button style with 8px border radius, ChatGPT stole it from me, I want rents!
The last 3% of the stack? They’re essentially borrowing Chinese open source distillation/innovation off the US frontier running on US/Taiwanese designed chips and calling it EU made. This is better than nothing of course.
But is sovereignty really an end in itself? So the EU becomes IT independent…cool, then what? I mean the Yugo was sovereign, it didn’t do much good when the society itself failed to produce prosperity and collapsed.
It seems to me the EU is expending enormous effort on the appearance of “sovereignty” over what is ultimately…the last-mile consumer toilet paper purchasing conversation data…of an aging, increasingly irrelevant population on the political/economic stage.
Meanwhile domestically the entire economic model is failing and the “union” is getting shakey as its 2 biggest members turn more nationalist.
Maybe this “oh you cant compete but here’s a trophy for sovereignty” attitude isnt helping. Less clapping along with the EU bureaucracy’s latest make work projects like transitioning to a new Word processor. If we want the EU to succeed, more tough love is needed imo.
it's industrial policy, which is of course the minimum for being able to even think about having independent thoughs when it comes to international relations.
hard to stand up for EU (or even national) values if some dude in Washington has the keys for most of your military
having at least some in-house expertise is the first step.
I agree, but my point is I don’t think we should be cheering on a group of 600 million highly educated people struggling to achieve the bare minimum.
We should be shaming them into contributing something useful to the rest of world in the most important development of our current time (AI) instead of clapping for domestic regulatory moats.
> We should be shaming them into contributing something useful to the rest of world
They should take a cue from the US, and brain drain the rest of the world and coast on the success of brilliant US scientists and entrepreneurs like Linus Torvalds, Yann Le Cun or Terence Tao.
They aren't struggling. They have generally outperformed all US open-weights model releases by a decent margin. OpenAI and Anthropic have no similar product.
From where I'm standing, as an American, we should be shaming OpenAI and Anthropic for both pushing towards an IPO while neither of them have profitable revenue streams. In pure game-theory terms, you could successfully argue that the US is the biggest loser of the AI race: an economy propped up on artificial Nvidia margins and terminally reliant on neoliberal trade.
Even if global war doesn't tear down the TSMC house of cards, neither the government, the banks, nor the global economy could underwrite an OpenAI IPO. They make no money!
“While Anthropic offers more to society than WeWork ever did, at a $2 trillion valuation, its IPO presents far bigger risks and is positioned to be a far bigger rip off of U.S. capital markets,” New Constructs wrote, adding that the IPO’s purpose isn’t to provide wealth for public markets investors, but rather liquidity for the company’s Wall Street backers.
FTA:
The same disclosure showed positive adjusted operating income for the period. The figures are preliminary, unaudited, and could be revised before the prospectus lands.
Like, adjusted can cover a whole host of sins. Until we see the GAAP audited numbers, nobody but Anthropic employees and investors know.
An economy “reliant on Neoliberal trade” just describes the entire global economy. Your quality of life goes back centuries in any other scenario.
The fact you’ve used the trendy populist boogieman word “neoliberal” and complained about a generational startup not being profitable during the growth phase tells me you watch a lot of internet content from people who don’t understand the topics they cover (breaking points perhaps?)
I would recommend re-evaluating who you borrow your opinions from. Global trade is not a boogieman, and OpenAI will have zero trouble building a profitable consumer advertising business, regardless of whether their IPO flops in the short term.
Ah, the current global economy. What about Russia? The goal was to liberalize post-USSR Russia... until they lost access to certain markets due to sanctions. Same for China, Iran, North Korea, they're all a shadow of what's to come.
I didn't make a mistake, or reach into the buzzword hat for that; Nvidia's trillion-dollar GPGPU products are wholly dependent on TSMC. Every single Blackwell die ever made came out of a Taiwanese factory, and the US leadership is inviting rapprochement with the CPP on the eve of Taiwan's invasion. TSMC will destroy their machines before China gets them, and then there are no more Blackwell products. US fabs do not ship a comparable fabrication node and likely won't for another ~5 years, optimistically speaking. This is not a "war will make the stocks tumble" argument, we are describing a scenario where American economic growth could slow or stop entirely if AI dominance is jeopardized. The US economy can't have an Achilles heel like that.
It gets worse! There is currently a global DRAM, SRAM, HBM and flash memory shortage that has already encouraged Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron to start fucking over their most loyal customers like Apple and Google, who have absolutely no alternative vendors. If you're packaging SOCs, neoliberalism already fucked you over! South Korea is counting beaucoup bucks for every iPhone sold at eye-watering prices. Taiwan is gouging US OEMs, making Apple and Nvidia engage in humiliating bidding contests to secure access to a single factory line. If global conflict expands, the AI economy will be chronically dependent on government (read: taxpayer) money. US taxpayers don't have trillions of apology dollars for this type of mistake.
China's got the edge on open models. Free trade does their heavy lifting, US labs are scrambling to put up defenses and beg for pathetic regulatory efforts that pull up the ladder. Yes, neoliberalism keeps them up at night, and apparently it keeps you up too.
If you think about it EU is under pressure from US, China and Russia. At the same time the EU politicians are hellbent on ideological energy policies that made EU extremely vulnerable to price swings. With all that wealth and economic growth EU should have been energy independent ages ago.
At the same time France is ablaze now by younger generation asking for a better future while the public spending is 57% of the GDP in 2025[0] and stuck in a vicious cycle.
Only Germany is holding the fiscal stability by a thread and that's even questionable given the current German government is more like a zombie government that cannot agree on the important reforms and most probably would collapse before the end of this year.
It's completely valid to question how "Sovereignty" helps EU when the complete backend (chips, energy, technology, etc.) is imported from US or China, Middle East and just slapping a Sovereign sticker at the frontend on a mediocre product that even most of the europeans don't want to use given the alternatives.
Good to know, will exclusively move to Chinese models for non-coding tasks.
The idea that producing text with AI needs to be watermarked as if it's a crime by default is backwards nonsense.
To me this would actually be a counter signal.
If you're NOT primarily writing with AI (at least mildly being informed by all of human knowledge distilled), then I will assume your ideas are emotional opinion-based nonsense, like most comments on hackernews, including my own.
Government spending as a % of GDP in Germany is exactly 50%. So definitionally half of all money goes to taxes.
Are you counting in VAT on everything OP spends that money on? Are you counting capital gains taxes OP pays when investing that money? Are you counting the taxes paid by the employer for his role (which defacto come out of his pay, just before he gets it)? The property taxes he pays to live?
The employer doesn’t look at the employees salary as the only cost. Employers look at things rationally, using the all-in cost to employ someone (the combined total of all salary and government mandated taxes and benefits contributions). In many European countries this is 2X the persons salary or more.
> Are you counting in VAT on everything OP spends that money on? ...
No, I just assumed he spends all his money on rent, which is VAT-free ;-).
I also didn't account for his Kindergeld and Elterngeld, Rente, Invalidenrente, Witwenrente, Pension and whatever else that person could have. He didn't share all that information.
> Are you counting the taxes paid by the employer for his role (which defacto come out of his pay, just before he gets it)?
You may have to decide whether the payer or the payee pays the taxes, otherwise you are double-counting it.
I hire people remotely throughout Europe. When we budget for a hire we look at the all-in labor expense, not the persons salary. If the German government didn’t charge us before we even pay the employee, we would just pay it all to the employee.
So it’s a tax he pays whether you want to “brand” it that way or not. Who gets the money changes nothing about our budget for the role.
Imagine you want to buy a house. You have a budget for the house. The government takes taxes on the price, which you need to consider in your budget. Does the seller pay the taxes, or do you?
The seller does, because if the government removed that specific tax, it changes nothing about the market value of the home (competing buyers would also not have to pay that tax, buyer capacity to pay doesn't change either way).
Absent the tax, the seller would simply recoup more of the value of their property.
I think the confusion here is that there exists an economic truth, and then a separate and conflicting language/branding around this economic truth to make it more palatable to people having their money taken from them at gunpoint by the state.
I'm bringing up economic reality, you're rebutting this with the government marketing language.
Yes, I know 'employer contributions' is a clever trick to make people believe they aren't paying as much to government as they are, but in economic reality they are paying for this.
It is in general the same though for wages, as usually companies are not hiring remotely all over Europe and can choose where the tax is paid, so it is the same for every employee.
I feel like "having their money taken from them at gunpoint" is rage bait language.
Have you ever considered that you benefit from public spending? Infrastructure, etc.
This is not intended as rage bait, I am again just distilling marketing language to reality.
If you don't pay the money your government decides you owe them, they will arrest you and put you in prison if you do not comply in virtually all countries. This is fact, not emotional language.
And yes, I fully acknowledge that authoritarian centralization can achieve the most efficient outcomes in certain areas (like infrastructure, military, utilities, etc).
But let's not lie to ourselves and pretend the government is not a giant monopoly that forces you to buy its products at gunpoint whether they are good or not. Allowing too much % of the GDP be captured by this monopoly, always ends in declining living standards, runaway debts, exit controls and ultimately collapse...every single time it has been tried.
HN doesn't need more pro-government voices, as it is already a a left-leaning audience. It needs the opposite, which I'm happy to calmly provide even if constantly being downvoted.
Due to cultural/social priming, the topic cluster of "AI" allows you to wave your arms and be melodramatic and invoke science fiction and religion and philosophy.
When some kid in Nigeria does it with a 10 year old script, we're used to that idea so no social permission to invoke philosophy.
Yes its pretty clear that "unauthorized access to a computer system", is only a law depending on who you are. Same with copyright laws.
As I see it, if you rob a bank the judge throws the book at you if you rob all the banks, the judge pats you on the back and says "nice job!" and sends you on your way.
Looking at the top comments in this thread claiming a bunch of false things I see HN is essentially fully captured by anti-progress populism at this point.
It’s sad to see, for a former community of “hackers.”
HN Response: Fantastic! EU is amazing! Sovereignty over all else!
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HN Headline: US dumps Chinese tech in key area
HN Response: Booo evil USA! Evil Big Tech! Regulatory capture!!
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