Yann LeCun: Only a small number of book authors make significant money from book sales. This seems to suggest that most books should be freely available for download. The lost revenue for authors would be small, and the benefits to society large by comparison.
That’s right. He thinks that if you write a book that isn’t a huge hit that means we should make it available for free and give you nothing.
I think this representation of LeCun’s beliefs is not very accurate. He clarified his (possibly partly revised) take in multiple follow up tweets posted Jan 1 and Jan 2.
The clarified take (paraphrased by me) is something more like “For a person that expects not to make much from sales, the extra exposure from making it free can make up for the lack of sales later on” and “the social benefits of making information freely available sometimes outweigh the personal costs of not making a few hundred/thousand bucks off of that information”.
I think this representation of LeCun’s beliefs is not very accurate. He clarified his (possibly partly revised) take in multiple follow up tweets posted Jan 1 and Jan 2.
The clarified take (paraphrased by me) is something more like “For a person that expects not to make much from sales, the extra exposure from making it free can make up for the lack of sales later on” and “the social benefits of making information freely available sometimes outweigh the personal costs of not making a few hundred/thousand bucks off of that information”.