Independend of AI I am fully supporting the idea to abolish copyright in general, full stop. Allowing cheap duplication and tweaking is what leads to fast innovation and culture changes. Explicit (costly) patents can remain in place to secure industrial-grade research processes, but the general everyday stuff, incluing music and literature and code and so on is something to strip default rights away to allow faster progress. and oh the poor artists: next to none percentage wise gets much royalties anymore, streaming income is close to zero usually even if popular, the only real world industry to defend are the parasites that do not create art to begin with but siphon production/distribution channels. you might disagree with me, just wanna make clear that some people like me are against this copyright theater before AI blew up in popularity.
I’m just not convinced that most artists would change their behavior under no copyright, so somewhat agree. But the main issue is length of time.
The fact that copyright is longer than patents makes no sense. Patents prove that a shorter period is sufficient to stimulate large investment. And you have to pay for patents!
If you assume reasonable discount rates, the economic value plummets over time for an asset producing the same income (a bad assumption for copyright work in general).
At an 8% discount rate, extending copyright from 32 years to infinity adds less than 10% to its total present-day value. There are many good reform proposals, but mine would be something like 15ish years of free copyright, followed by 1 paid renewal for 15 years that is modest in price (eg $1000) and one extra 10 year renewal that is something like $1M. Meaning you have most economically neutral work free up at year 15, small business types having it affordable through 30 years, and the big Hollywood productions can go from 30-40 years for a modest (to them) fee to incentivize investments in expensive works. Movies come to mind. Give existing work a 20 year buffer on top of that to transition and there is a very small economic effect on everyone.
Removing copyright will benefit parasites and big players more than small artists and businesses. Big businesses won’t have to eg obtain any licensing to publish someone else’s novel or technical book.
I'm not an artist and might be entirely wrong, but my understanding is that for 99% of artists, over 99% of their revenue is from concerts tickets, merch and other physical products, rather than digital/broadcast plays, so changing this to zero wouldn't really affect them, but would act to reduce the power of the labels and other intermediaries over them.
I have the same understanding regarding YouTubers and writers.
There’s so much competition nowadays, almost no indie can achieve nearly enough sales for a living wage. And ironically, the best way to get more attention is to make your product free, hence more and more artists doing free + paid merch.
Going full time on YouTube as a primary and only job is unlikely to work out.
The YouTube income for most small creators get folded back into the channel. Getting a $100 check from YouTube isn’t going to pay your rent, but it makes purchasing some better lighting or a new microphone for the channel an easy choice, which in turn helps them grow and enjoy their hobby channel more.
The argument that the dollar amount is low and therefore it’s okay if we push it all the way to $0 is unconvincing for anyone familiar with how small time creators grow.
It wouldn’t be $0, because creators make money without selling their work: Patreon, commissions, even ads/sponsorships (though not ideal). Most creators I know, all their main work is already free.
The artist still owns their right to distribute their videos. If someone copies their videos and uploads them to a place with no ads or no patreon subscription that eats into the profit the creator of the art could be making, because someone else is essentially giving it away for free. Only the artist has the right to copy their art.
Ad revenue is also subverted by seeing the original video with uBlock, which I think is fair, because I think ads are harmful and unsustainable - like copyright, only a small minority of indie creators get sustainable revenue from ads, and I'd be surprised if the number wasn't decreasing.
Not linking the author's name and patreon is a problem, but I don't think it needs laws and definitely not copyright; if somebody gets the video on the other place to link the original author's patreon, even if they're not who uploaded it, it benefits them and I don't see any serious issue.
It seems like you really only know about how the affects people who make music and TV.
What about illustrators who license their work? Knitters and crocheters who create patterns? There are countless people who sell creative output on a license-basis which would no longer exist in a world without copyright.
Already people who make visual art are demotivated by AI, follow literally any visual artist on Instagram and you’ll see this. Taking away copyright would make that look tiny in comparison.
People who are well-versed in fields like fashion will create original designs which include yarn requirements, needle size, measurements, stitch instructions, construction steps, etc etc and sell them in online marketplaces like Etsy or Revelry.
Oh, I'm familiar with that; I thought that the parent meant that there are people who make money directly from the copyright on the patterns rather than the artifacts they sell. Are there?
Yes, that’s correct. There are people who make money directly from the copyright on the patterns. The parent commenter means that the people referenced are selling the patterns, not the garments.
Is this some kind of trick question or am I just misunderstanding your reply?
As far as I know they sell the patterns, not the finished knitted artifact. Aspiring knitters buy them to enjoy knitting. The physical representation of the pattern isn't worth anything (just a piece of paper), what you're buying is a license to use their intellectual property, so I'd say they're making money from copyright.
They’ll come across some talented little band playing some nice new tune in a tiny club, record it on their phone and give it to one of the existing boy-bands to play.
No need to sign up aspiring artists any more - just take their songs.
Of course it’s the boy band that will sell the merch and the concert tickets.
What? That'd mean 99% of artists are touring musicians giving live performances.
Moviemakers, authors, graphic designers, stone masons, song writers, ...
Not every artists is a musician.
Not every musician performs in venues to such an extent that it makes up most or all of their revenue.
Not every musicians output lends themselves to live performances, so they don't do them.
I'd be surprised if even 10% of artists in the EU or US are making their revenue as live musicians. Whatever the number, it ain't 99%.
Brief anecdote, currently working on a personal project and have commissioned an artist to design a few icons. Was a great experience, fun to work with them, more than happy with the result. Exclusive exploitation/usage rights were only transferred after full compensation was received.
If copyright were not a thing in both their and mine countries, screwing over commissioned artists would be even easier than it already and unfortunately tends to be (having done freelance work myself) as this idea that the artist retains their rights before that point wouldn't be the default and any protections/claims solely based on individual contracts.
Copyright can be flawed, yes, but taking away the core that is artists having their creations protected by default, without needing to manually apply or otherwise seek protection, I feel that shouldn't happen. Copyright, even today, does have merit in my book, though the lobbying efforts by Disney and co. along with post War western Europe loving to just copy US legislation wholesale without reflection have extended copyright further then I feel it should have been.
Without copyright, artist B could perform artist A's original work without penalty. If artist B is better at astroturfing social media than A (maybe because they pay a firm to do it) , then B makes money and A does not.
artists sell live experiences and original merchandise to actually make money these days. only a rare subset of megastars are living off royalties to begin with, and I am totally fine if some tailor swift has less millions to begin with.
people support/pay real artists if they want more of it, else there is no way I see a right to get paid a wage for just being an artist in itself. if youre not original enough so you get copycats in a day well thats also a signal of artistic value. you cannot separate art from the artist, even if some people are okay with knockoffs after all. there is a difference between art and just content production, the latter is already worthless today with AI speedrunning the decline for mass producing mediocre slop people think is good enough.
It’s not Taylor Swift who is hurt by this, it’s the solo creatives who cannot afford other mechanisms (e.g. trademark enforcement) to protect their work.
Trademark != copyright: trademark is attributing indies whenever their work appears (which is very doable), copyright is preventing others from seeing or reshowing their work (even with attribution). Copyright is about protecting their sales, which are practically nonexistent, hence (because it has big downsides) why it should be abolished.
You have to explicitly legally defend trademark, that's completely our of reach for someone who sells knitting patterns on Etsy. OTOH, DMCA can (and does) work for that group.
I also dislike US IP law but I think it needs to be improved with nuance. What you propose is survivable for big IP owners but would wipe out swaths of small business owners.
Copyright is described by its proponents as a "Monopoly held by the creator". Considering how much we take from the Public Domain, I'd argue that Copyright should only last as long as Patents do, up to a maximum of 20 years.
Anything beyond that is not personal property, but a literal monopoly which impedes creativity, seeing the many, many, many sequels which are terrible often made to keep a studio's grasp on an IP. It happens so often those are often called "ashcan copy" or "rights-retention" films, which wouldn't happen if Copyright law expired as naturally as Patents do.
Authors and artists are not (and souldn't be) making Art for money. It is not a 'job' where effort goes in and product comes out. It's more like a religious calling, they often have no other option. That's true, but it's also the reason people are paid less than their technical peers.
It is difficult in the current climate to prevent industrial actors from cultivating genetic lines instantiated by Artists in Art. In a different future, the seperation between small and large-scale genetic agriculture would be recognised, and the abolition of copyright may proceed.
In a world where money is devalued, genetic lines and mental constituency will become even more powerful.
See: the mental constituency of sci-fi books in E. Musk's brain
Not sure if you really mean it, but you're kind of making the argument that a person that mindlessly shovels dirt from one hole to another in a circle should be paid. People are paid for the result, not for their labor.
Not at all. You're presuming that nobody can be taken off this hypothetical salary once they're on it, and that they would be placed on it indiscriminately.
Simple safeguards are already in practice in today's economy to prevent such circumstances.
I'm using "research" broadly. People can privately research and publish under whatever arrangement they wish. Academics too. For those that sell their copyright, that would be valued based on projections of what the copyright buyer expects to sell. For those whose research was funded by the copyright buyer prior to writing because they didn't want to bear the risk or lacked the funds, that's going to be less, but everything stems from how the books are expected to sell.
Yes they do. As a kid our (admittedly not particularly lavish) family summer holiday was paid for each year by the modest royalties my father, an academic, received from a couple of academic textbooks he had authored.
Right, that was worded too universally, but this is what I mean: royalties here are supplementary to a salary, not a wage in themselves. The research was funded before publication.
The part this analysis misses is that the author's "dream" of doing that full time is almost never realized -- 25% percent of authors identify as "full-time", but only 10% of those authors can actually make ends meet. Only 30% of books ever pay back the advance. The best shot is to be a "romance" author, which earns more than other genres, pretty much because sex sells. Copyright isn't doing a great job at its stated purpose, and yet we endure endless fights over it. The juice isn't worth the squeeze, and writers are mostly supporting themselves with other jobs anyway.
Copyright does not guarantee you an audience. Nothing guarantees you an audience, authors know this, everyone who creates anything ought to know this?
Copyright just says that if you DO manage to create a work that truly connects with an audience, you're in a position to make money off it because it cannot be stolen from you.
Novels aren't the only thing with copyright, and aren't really even the main thing that copyright protects. It also covers engineering reports, technical specs, journalism, blog posts, emails, internal memos, marketing copy, academic papers, user manuals, legal briefs, and a lot more.
Even in the particular case of novels, I would prefer to live in a world where some authors are making money than live in one with no novels at all.
I understand copyright covers lots of things. It doesn't do a good job with any of them, sadly.
> Even in the particular case of novels, I would prefer to live in a world where some authors are making money than live in one with no novels at all.
That's not the choice. Novels will be written regardless, and there are ways to make money that are not copyright-related: Substack and Patreon are doing more to fund small authors than the publishing industry as a whole, and people pay because they want to support the author, and to get early, exclusive access to the author's work. None of those authors are surviving and making money because someone can't copy their work and distribute it. Piracy is a fact, and that people give money to these authors in the presence of piracy shows that copyright is not necessary to support these artists.
> None of those authors are surviving and making money because someone can't copy their work and distribute it.
I tend to agree with your sentiment but this line made me think you’re underestimating the degree to which the law stops the powerful from doing evil. They see the law as a hassle to be calculated against and if there is no legal friction to stealing and using others’ creations they just will.
So it’s not that Amazon would take your novel, short story, etc and redistribute it. It’s that they’d make a whole series of movies or TV series using your creations and give you nothing and have to give you nothing.
Copyright being eliminated is among my more “idealistically anarchistic” wishes I think but so long as we’re in a society as legalistic and with such an imbalance of power generally, copyright protects more than it hurts I think.
Yes, I agree with this. I think your correct to point out that the leverage a legitimate corporation has to push ripped-off works far exceeds what the piracy community's ability to do so when it is infringement.
That said, I increasingly see writers making money directly from their audience not because the audience is not allowed to make a copy of their work, but because they treat the writers writing as a service and they want to get updates every week and so they subscribe. I think copyright was created for a less connected world where it was much more natural to print them in bulk and then sell copies.
> writers are mostly supporting themselves with other jobs anyway.
Skill issue. This is common for low-barrier careers that look like anyone can do them, but only a minority break-even. Others include porn/Onlyfans, social media "influencers",and hordes of aspiring actors who flock to Los Angeles.
What % of new authors today make full-time salary on writing?
And what % of those do by selling, vs giving away their work for free (to get non-negligible attention) then getting their real money through donations, merch, etc.?
The more successful "self published" authors writing web novels make significant money from patreon (>$20k/month); this relies on copyright protection (but interestingly, just a few months would be sufficient for that business model).
My understanding is that most of these web novels are free, and patreon grants early access at best, which is enforced by trust anyways (the creator doesn’t have the time or resources to track and sue someone posting the early access on a pirate site, when it will be public a week or month later, but the people who pay to get something a week or month early mostly aren’t the type who would pirate even if it was easy).
In what way does that business model rely on copyright protection? "Get the next chapter early" requires a source of chapters, so all you need is for paying clients to not be motivated to redistribute the chapters in an organised way, or would-be paying clients to not be motivated to use such organised "slightly more chapters of that webnovel you follow" services instead. Humans aren't amoral ideal rational economic actors.
The authors I'm aware of making >$20k don't do any significant gating. That practice is only really common with people republishing through Amazon (which probably demands it).
> so all you need is for paying clients to not be motivated to redistribute the chapters in an organised way
This is exactly what copyright is.
I agree that you could work around this in a world without copyright (e.g. by watermarking content and blacklisting), but it would be difficult and make the whole profession less viable.
Mass distribution and payment becoming accessible/low overhead was an extremely helpful development for authors in my view, and removing copyright would have the opposite effect (but cutting it down even to several years would change surprisingly little).
I don't think anyone has the right to take work I create, for free.
In the same way I have no right to walk into your house and use it for free.
In the same way you cannot expect me to turn up and work at your business for free.
I don't care what half delusional rubbish you come up with to justify your theft.
It's theft, you want to steal something you put zero effort into creating and use it as you see fit. No fuck you. If I want to give it away for free, that's my prerogative not your expectation, if I can monetise via merch or other means, that's my prerogative not your right.
It matters because copyright is widely abused and hurts neutral sites which must constantly check for copyrighted content, and it would’ve hampered AI if it was enforced.
Your analogy doesn’t fit because a house is physical, but “intellectual property” is digital. If we lived in the metaverse and I could just copy your house and live in it without affecting you, why should you care? Theft is bad because the victim no longer has the original.
Today, practically zero new indies make a living from selling digital copies of a thing they created. That income is eclipsed by giving away their main work, then asking for donations, maybe selling merchandise, early access, tailored commissions, or some other token (and sponsorships but those unfortunately hurt quality).
So abolish copyright, and indies still make money from creating digital works - at least almost as much as they do now, but probably more, because it will further normalize the alternate incomes.
Copyright maybe used to help indies, but every copyright case I’ve heard anywhere in the last decade, the plaintiff is a publisher with more than enough revenue. Meanwhile, in many cases the defendant hasn’t actually infringed, but regardless suffers from the DMCA, C&D, or lawsuit. Copyright relies on wishful thinking to provide an illusion of helping small-time creators, in reality far more often it hurts them.
Please go tell those people they should be happy for someone else to steal their work and charge for it even after they've given it away for free.
It doesn't matter whether "few" people make a living from it. Copyright does not guarantee you an audience. Copyright going away would not guarantee you more of an audience.
The only thing it guarantees is that if you manage to write something that resonates with an audience you have the potential to earn a living from it. That is what you want to take away.
These only further my point. Everything published on RoyalRoad is already free; the issue the authors face is trademark, not copyright, violation, because their works are republished under a different name. Also, while OP found resolution, most of the other commenters did not, demonstrating that IP laws don’t reliably protect indies anyways.
IMO the solution to protecting trademark is to ensure anyone who discovers a repackaged work (like those examples) also discovers the original author and their free version, so they know it’s a ripoff. It doesn’t require the finicky legal system.
I am not a fan of complete removal of copyright, but I also consider its current duration absurd and extreme - saying this as someone who wrote 10 books so far, so I have actual skin in the game. Some person in 2130 should not be able to profit from something I am writing now, that is just feudalism in a new cloak.
Any creative person whose ego is not overinflated accepts the fact that no art emerges from a vacuum, that they themselves were inspired by others and their work, and that they should pay this forward to the coming generations.
For me, the worst aspect of long copyright is the de-facto ban on derived works. Work derivation is how civilization and culture came to be.
People arguing against parent are Property Thieves.
see 5th amendment which requires "private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation".
It's your property. Do what you want with it. In a free society, the public isn't compelled to buy your books.
A variant where the copyright would be automatic but very limited (say, 10 years), with a necessity to pay some growing fee for extended protection, would solve most situations.
The vast majority of stories do not make any money ever. Some do, but only briefly so. The true money makers should have no problem paying the fees.
Only very rare cases of authors who get discovered decades later would not be covered by this, and this is less likely to happen with the Internet. There are no publishing gatekeepers anymore.
many people commenting have never tried to earn a living from independently created works of authorship. The NAPSTER-fans say "more for me, what is your problem". Other economies (China) do not have commerce law that protects original works of authorship, but the Western tradition has enabled this.
Blinded by corporate abuse, calls for removal of copyright law are often naive or ill-willed IMHO
That is not a given. I have earned a living from created works of authorship.
I think copyright suppresses creation and does very little to support creators in general. It has enabled businesses to choose a few winning creators that reap the benefits of copyright. That kingmaker position allows them to dictate what is created.
For the last few decades the median income from a creative work has been nil.
I would much rather have universal basic income and no copyright.
Just treat copyright as an engineering issue, rather than a religion. Is copyright doing more good than harm when it comes to encouraging creativity? I think everything tilted in favor of abolishing copyright around the turn of the century, and AI isn't improving things.
Your point about making a living off of creative endeavors underscores this point: if copyright were doing its job the way it's supposed to, your first sentence wouldn't be a note alluding to how damn hard it is to make a living on writing. Somehow you're twisting that to be a feature, which I get, because there's no alternative story, but at the same time, let's be honest: copyright doesn't work well, and incurs huge costs for society.
if copyrigth is abolished. amazon would publish every single boon without giving a cent to writers.
it would be reqlly hard for writers to make a living. Im not a fan of copyrigth and how is being used at the moment but I don't really see an alternative where writers still get paid.
Maybe the strategy is to try to build up some steam behind the abolish copyright movement to move the Overton window a bit.
If IP owners see actual support behind abolishing copyright, maybe rolling back to min(30, life of author) years of protection would seem like a more reasonable compromise.
> if copyrigth is abolished. amazon would publish every single boon without giving a cent to writers. it would be reqlly hard for writers to make a living.
How about a unified social platform that allows people to donate to the authors/artists/creators/projects of their choosing? It could allow feedback similar to goodreads, and also be more longterm focused than the traditional kickstarter, etc. The social aspect would give people a pat on the back for sending money somewhere.
We could do that with all kinds of IP! Use a feature in software or in a Meta app, just donate to the minimum amount wage (for legal reasons) workers who developed it. And Meta and Google themselves could be forbidden to show ads, just rely on donations as well.
If it were to happen I don't think Amazon would sell any books to begin with. And even under the current system, I only buy books to pay writers, and even then they only get very little of the amount I pay. I'd much rather pay them directly through whatever system evolves through the hypothetical change.
They're not paid because access to books is limited by copyright, but because whatever eyeballs they manage to reach are willing to buy their books. I may not be a representative sample, but I think that part wouldn't change much, and discoverability would still be the deciding factor.
I hate the attention economy as much as the next person, but I don't think there's any putting that back in the bottle, the amount of media won't shrink.
> amazon would publish every single boon without giving a cent to writers. it would be reqlly hard for writers to make a living.
Not quite, Amazon would just become the publisher that buys new books/articles/whatever directly from the writers, one upfront fee. Not saying it's a sustainable living for writers, just saying that's probably what would happen.
> Explicit (costly) patents can remain in place to secure industrial-grade research processes
I keep reading about big companies i) developing very similar drugs that are different enough to avoid patents, ii) using their size to prevent litigation.
The "me too" drug still need to go through an R&D, clinical trail and approval process, so combined with patents the exclusivity period is at least several years. Abolishing patents would completely remove the exclusivity period
That is a thing (though arguably there is still value in the reformulations). A good current example would be orally administered wegovy, which received an additional patent on top of semaglutide for combining the drug with an absorption enhancer. This is a genuine advancement, and did require clinical trials (not all patentable improvements do) but it is ultimately just a variation on an existing drug.
That being said, the patent on semaglutide still expires at the same time and biosimilars (or generics in other cases) can be produced at that time using the injectable formulation (or a new alternative). This seems reasonable to me
The government could always pay for results too, like $10B for something that does this. I don’t love it either and am not positive it is better than patents.
> next to none percentage wise gets much royalties anymore
While artists get paid less then many would like, royalties make up roughly 2/3rds of revenue of all the streaming giants, which is a huge amount of money. This recurring monthly, mostly passive income is still helpful for smaller professional bands in between touring.
When the indie band Xiu Xiu pulled out of Spotify many were quick to say it didn't matter that much except for exposure, but in interviews they pointed out that they lost a significant portion of they're yearly income from doing it just from the streaming royalties.
Many will say touring is where the real money is, but costs are rising and what I've heard its not as lucrative for smaller bands as it was in the past.
Some links:
Spotify's own report on payouts, obviously a biased editorial, but good data nonetheless (for example 13K artists made 100k/year from spotify royalties alone) https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/payouts/
A transparent report on tour costs from a fairly popular indie band (notably they could make more if they were less principled or were a smaller band, but I think this report is still eye opening in terms of general costs) https://stereogum.com/2497822/los-campesinos-break-down-what...
I'm a musician who has been releasing my work under CC0 / Public Domain for the last few years for these very reasons.
While I do agree in principal, it is important this is a consensual choice made by the artists themselves. That is the only way to have healthy cultural change.
At the moment, we have e.g. Suno's CEO, who has publicly stated "people never really liked making music in the first place" - this is the kind of detached and exploitative person that we are seeing trying to force copyright changes on the rest of us.
How do you make a feature film - budget ranging from low millions to hundreds of millions of dollars - if anyone can copy it and view it without paying for it?
I'm struggling to see how the issues regarding low compensation from streaming services is going to be positively affected by abolishing copyright wholesale. That'd take the one way a creative can truly claim a stake towards their art.
Before the advent of LLMs, as now, my position on copyright is that what was had prior to Disneys lobyying efforts (which also then lead to similar laws being adopted outside the US showcasing the type of soft power and legislative inspirations the States previously could cause/the US does something so then Western Europe did the same) of roughly 25 years plus one extension was a fair compromise. One could also mirror patents and their length, seems like a solid avenue as well.
Lest we forget, while enforcement is far to limited, any success in defending FOSS projects and their licenses are only possible because we have copyright.
Incidentally, the Statute of Anne was pushed by a printing guild after they lost their monopoly on printing. It was so unpopular[1] for them to get the monopoly back that they had to pivot and come up with some other way. So they figured they could do it in the name of writers. That worked!
I'd say shorter but with renewals. Say, 15 years with two or three renewals of equal length, but require that the original protected work is still for sale to get the renewal. This would clear up things like retro games being stuck in limbo or small press books being impossible to buy. It would still allow rights holders to make their exclusive money if they are actually making money on the original. It wouldn't allow a Disney, where they extend the copyright on a century-old work without selling it just so they can make money on sequels or moving back and forth among animation, stage, TV series, and live action movies.
I am against renewals. It is just additional layer of complication. Having to look up and track possibly poorly informed state of work is unnecessary extra step.
Straight up x years from identified release year of edition you have on hand is most reasonable.
From my perspective from reading and watching fan fiction, these unofficial derived works are typically significantly more distinct and interesting than the official sequels, and I'd be cool with these getting bigger budgets.
> From my perspective from reading and watching fan fiction, these unofficial derived works are typically significantly more distinct and interesting than the official sequels, and I'd be cool with these getting bigger budgets.
This suggests that copyright isn't holding back these works...
"This suggests that copyright isn't holding back these works..."
IF the copyright holders are kind enough not to harass those fans for infringement. And this kindness is quite commonplace in some contexts (people writing stories about their favorite literary characters rarely get cease-and-desisted), but much less in others ("fanfic" movies about Mickey Mouse are a no-go even for free).
Maybe not the strongest, but definitely a case. For example, it's my understanding that many scholars believe that The Odyssey is fan fiction by a separate author(s) to that/those of The Iliad.
Fanfic is subject to the Gauss curve like everything else.
The Lord of the Rings is sorta-kinda fanfic to Beowulf, the Witcher is fanfic to Slavic and Celtic mythology. Neither of these two authors started as "big published renowned authors", they were both amateurs smitten by some earlier works.
And yes, I realize again that in those particular examples, the original work was no longer protected. But that is irrelevant to the question of the derived work's quality.
There would be no movies as we know them today. Studios couldn’t support making multi-hundred million dollar movies that are immediately free to everyone. Basically movies would become YouTube.
It could potentially help theater owners, who provide a somewhat unique experience. That doesn’t seem very valued these days, though.
An exclusive theatrical window is one of the big reasons to go to a movie theater: you want to see a movie before it's available on streaming. Removing copyright seems like it would harm theaters pretty significantly.
The screen would become the thing. If anyone can watch anything anywhere at any time, having a 200 foot screen differentiates a theater from watching something on a phone. 99% of the time, people will choose the phone, will choose to watch sports on tv, etc. that remaining 1% might be a big enough market and without licensing fees, theaters have a lot more margin.
Actually, it seems surprising they haven’t moved into sports (especially with sportsbooks becoming so popular).
Some cinemas do present some sporting events. The rights negotiations for sporting events are multi-layered and complex. Your average soccer or MLB game is not likely to be negotiated for that venue, and a whole-season license is unlikely. Playoffs, championships, and the like are sometimes worthwhile but it's not going to be the corner mom & pop cinemas paying for that content. It's going to be IMAX or Regal Cinemas or someone huge.
For example the 2024 Summer Olympics, with NBC owning exclusive rights to the US market for video coverage (meaning NBC Universal, meaning Comcast) IMAX licensed the opening ceremony to be picked up from NBC and delivered to their US cinemas over IP with fixed latency. It was only the opening ceremony and no scored events. That involved NBC, IMAX, and LTN to carry the video in between. IMAX and NBC negotiated the rights and LTN got statements of agreement on that from NBC. There was involved planning and engineering work to make sure the technical part went smoothly. I'm sure the negotiations, contract writing, redlines, and final sign-off between the source and destination took longer than the tech work.
Whether removing copyright would lead to more "milking of same old topics" in movies. I think the answer is self-evidently yes.
This is not self-evident to me, at least as far as "milking" goes. Inspiration is not the same as milking. I specifically use the word "milking" for the sort of low-level repetitive quasi-effort that the cinemas are full of.
OTOH if someone takes, IDK, Don Quijote and rewrites it into a space opera, it might actually be genuine fun, even though the old idea was there as a foundation.
I'm skeptical patents play a significant role at encouraging research. No correlation between stronger patent laws and more innovation has ever been found.
I'm also in favor of very light copyright laws, e.g. I don't think anyone should claim they are Coca Cola.
I don't know about you, but in hardware startup land if you don't have a patent and your technology can be reverse engineered, you are most likely dead in the water and will never get investment.
But I guess we can count on the big companies to do the innovation?
Wait...your theory is that if we make it so I can copy and tweak any work of authorship I can find at no cost other than the actual effort it takes to make a copy and tweak it this is going to make me more likely to put in the effort to create new works?
What progress do you expect in music that would justify throwing poor musicians under the bus (the fact that they get a small portion of IP revenue doesn't explain why that portion should become even smaller)?
I am fully supporting the idea of abolishing property rights for web services. Any web service must publish its entire stack, data, collected information and so on.
This would lead to explosive innovation and the pie would be growing rapidly. #growth-mindset #disruption
FLOSS only exists because of copyright. Without it you don’t get a utopia where everything can be read and copied, you get the opposite, companies not sharing their work, artists not releasing their work. Sacrificing the whole culture built on top of copyright for a maybe faster technical progress is incredibly myopic
I believe copyright timeframes have gotten WAY out of hand and need to be reigned in to something more sensible, but I still think it's a valuable concept and don't want to see it abolished.
Patents on the other hand have become a total joke and I'd be happy to see them gone.
As it is now, it’s a joke. Essentially new laws are continuously introduced to make disney’s junk forever inaccessible. No author, no animator, no one except disney share holders wants these shit laws.
This would also mean copyleft would not work anymore. Companies would not be forced to release the source code of their modifications of (A)GPL software.
You yourself say that allowing cheap duplication and tweaking is what leads to fast innovation. Why should I be restricted from cheap use of a patent I could use to further innovation?
Im OK with limited forms of copyright. But the problem is that copyright business interests will ALWAYS pervert the original agreed-upon rules to their benefit.
Now something we saw that does work with audio, is statutory licensing. That rule alone allows spotify to be made. And thats also why a spotify-for-video cant be.
Thats why a local Jellyfin with 30TB of videos is better than all US based streaming services combined. Nobody is *legally* able to put a complete video library and pay access fees to relevent rightsholders.
Copyleft is built on copyright, do you think removing copyright protections is going to get people to release their source code?? I don't think so. Not unless you want to try and legislate some general copyleft law, but that's probably a nonstarter.
I think the asymmetry of fair use is what feels the most wrong about copyright and AI. Forever, fair use has been limited with an iron fist: you can’t rip that DVD because it’s copy-protected; You can only use 10s of that song in your school project. Then these AI companies wield fair use like a sledgehammer in a way that nobody has been able to for decades to enormously profit. Maybe it’s technically correct, but it feels like mass exploitation of a loophole that the legal system has previously taken a dim view towards (see: Aereo).
You could always do that with copyright programs. The only thing that changed was the cost. The only example of somebody doing this was with the BIOS of the original IBM PC, but it was always possible and since nothing was copied it is legal. Somebody else did all the hard work.
Patents are the only protection that should exist for this type of thing. (though finding an algorithm worth patenting is hard - most are either a small variation easy to work around, or so old that prior art exists from 50 years ago).
Yep. I've seen it happen and there's basically no recourse against it currently. And EFF is saying that it's fine… honestly not what I was expecting to read.
Copyright is broken and needs major reform, but copyright must exist in some form as long as we are operating under the current economic system. If we want a society where some people have the job of creating art, then they must be compensated for their art. The leverage that artists have to demand compensation is controlling who access to their art. Said another way, the artist owns the right to make copies of their art. That is protected by law.
I think copyright as it exists is abused by large companies and stifles culture. Broadly speaking, I think copyright should be a much shorter term, lasting more like 20 years rather than the 100+ years that is typical (life of the author + 70 years). The exact term is debateable, but the purpose should be to allow the artist sufficient time to monetize their creation for themselves, and then allowing the art to belong to the broader culture. There should be a worthwhile financial incentive to create art.
My utopian dream would be a radically restructured society where we do not expect people to have "artist" as a career. Instead, people would work 15 hours a week doing the work that must be done to contributue to society. The compensation from that 15 hours of work guarantees all their needs to live in modest comfort. People then have more leisure time to pursue whatever they find self-actualizing, which for many will mean creating art and sharing it with the world.
I think we need to adjust copyright to balance market needs and preservation needs. AI works best when we can strike a balance between the needs of the creator to get compensated and the need of the general public to use content in ways the creator didn't anticipate.
in the few books I've read about technological breakthroughs, the vast majority come from academia. I'm thinking about Eckert's adoption of IBM's ticker tape for commands rather than just rote data [0], all the inventions that came out of the NDRC [1] (for better or worse), the ENIAC, FORTRAN, how reliant solid state devices were on understanding quantum theory [2], and so many other examples. Paul E. Ceruzzi's "Computing: A Concise History" goes over much of this (including making note of the US military's heavy usage of LLMs for the Iraq War pre-empted the consumer push for LLMs)
most of the things that private enterprise contributes is cost reduction and manufacturing capacity (important in their own right for ubiquity) but having extremely well-funded R&D and universities still seem like the primary driver for truly evolutionary and revolutionary breakthroughs rather than useful but not necessary optimizations
IP law very much aims to protect the latter so that breakthroughs can be capitalized on but aren't a necessary motivator for researchers to continue frontier work
You might be right, but I think we need at least 10 years before we can really start this discussion, and the discussion itself needs to take many more years.
To be fair AI as we have it today wouldn't exist if everything was copyrighted and copyright was enforced very strictly across the web. Not sure if it's fair use and I get that it's not great if these companies try to monopolize knowledge (if they even can do that) but overall being more lax on copyright for fair use is good. Especially scientific knowledge should be openly accessibly to anyone, imagine what we could achieve if we could train LLMs on everything and make it accessible to everyone.
Guess it's time to stop donating to the EFF. They're completely off the mark this time.
The random loser generating slop in his bedroom isn't necessarily the one infringing, it's the AI company that took all of our work and is reselling it that is infringing. This is an obvious blind spot in copyright law and no reasonable person would consider that to be fair use. The challenge I think is communicating to a layman how AI training works.
For the people currently in the grips of AI psychosis: new regulation here is good for AI too. AI models will not get more creative without new human training data, but the current exploitative situation means people are not incentivized to keep creating. Human artists who create new things should be rewarded by the market, as copyright law intended. Even if their work only ever ends up feeding some gen AI model, they should still be entitled to compensation in some way (eg royalties). They worked hard so that you don't have to.™
Instead, AI companies are the ones being rewarded for it. That's not sustainable for anyone.
I consider current length of copyright to be extremely too long.
On other hand I also think that creators should be compensated when their creations are used to train AI models and this compensation should be substantial per company. And to any fallacious person telling about humans also "learning". Well humans brains are not replicated en masse just yet. And single learned person is not made to millions of copies and made to answer inane queries day and night...
I disagree with restrictions on digestive use of a work. If I legally acquire a book, I should be able to run that data through an algorithm, and I should be allowed to share the result freely as long as it's not replicating the original.
My biggest contention is the acquiring price for such use. I hold that for such use the cost such be significantly higher than just if you were buying book for reading.
I see setting such pricing to be an impossible task. What should be the fee for me sharing the computed word count of a book, an uncopyrightable figure? We'd likely agree that a large payment should not be required in that case. And now we have to somehow legally define all these shades of gray, statistics, book summaries—a mess.
This is solid guidance. "Given this range of experimentation, courts should be reluctant to decide in advance what tools do and do not foster “human creativity.”"
The EFF is in the pocket of Big-AI, and this isn't the first time.
"It is not the place of courts to say these people are not artists or that AI cannot augment human creativity in a positive way."
Yes it is. If you had ever created anything, which you have not, you would know! You are a couple of tech bureaucrats who want foundation salaries and change with the political winds.
Copyright in general, is too long, too broad, and - thanks largely to DMCA - enforced too strictly. One reason for China's success in tech is their willingness to ignore all the IP nonsense (or at least look the other way) allowing folks to rapidly iterate on ideas without running into IP rent-seekers at every turn.
Copyright is too long (thank you Disney and Pelosi) and I'm all for shortening it. Also I do agree that market dilution is not really defensible. The main reason why models should have been shut down is the sketchy way in which the models were trained.
There might need to be some calibration. The reason for copyright is (ostensibly) to compensate for the enormous cost of production. If the cost goes down, the protection should also logically go down.
The purpose of copyright under the US Constitution, a text relevant to the courts the EFF is addressing here, is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving creators temporary exclusive rights to their works"
It is not to "compensate for the cost of production", nor is it to ensure that business plans of major music publishers happen to be successful.
The EFF is correct to say here that copyright shouldn't be perverted to limiting market competition generally, but limited to protecting a specific works.
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
In what ways does an exclusive right promote the progress of science and the useful arts other than by incentivizing that creative work?
In what way can that incentive work other than by compensating for the cost of production?
Why are you being argumentative? "Promote" and "exclusive rights" was always about compensation for the time and effort invested. You just rephrased what the OP said while claiming to disagree.
It's substantively different. The level of compensation you could expect from copyright needs to be high enough that creators/inventors in general feel that it may be worthwhile to create/invent stuff. That level of compensation may be exactly enough to pay for a musician to make a track. We know this is not the case, it's more like a lottery ticket; some musicians make millions (much more than would be needed to entice them to choose this line of work) and many make almost nothing, but still persist. If you relax copyright provisions so that average compensation is halved, this would presumably have a non-linear impact. Maybe a 50% decrease in expected compensation only results in -10% new works. Maybe in -80%. For example, it is completely implausible that retroactively extending copyright (as has been done) results in any additional works being created at all - just higher profits for existing owners. This also applies to the costs; a higher cost of production (e.g. cost of living) doesn't necessarily need to lead to more stringent copyright restraints, nor lower costs to more lax restrictions.
I don't think the reason for copyright law is compensation, per se. It's ownership: being in a position where the creator is able to decide what to do with it. Compensation being one option, but also restricting use our controlling access.
Copyright has nothing to do with cost of production. What does it cost for me to doodle something on a napkin? Nothing, yet I still enjoy the full protections copyright law offers for that doodle (with the exception today being AI companies. Apparently, they can do whatever the fuck they want with it)
Because the evidence only goes in one direction. If I can get substantially more work done because of AI tools that falsifies the idea that LLMs don't help. Same as a satellite orbiting the earth once with a camera filming falsifies flat earthism. It doesn't matter how much evidence there is to say the earth is flat, it's falsified.
I recently heard a local EU politician on the radio trying to convince the listeners "things made with AI should be inherently non copyrightable, because they lack human creative labour".
I wish I could tell him there is this thing called photography where all a human does is presses a button and copyrightable artefacts are created by capturing how the world looks. For example a landscape that human had no influence over creating!
Surely this "non copyrightability" should apply to photography too.
/sarcasm
AI is just a tool. You can make slop or you can make beautiful art. Is it fair to Picasso's copyright holder that all his paintings were used for training and you can prompt "this in style of Picasso"?
No, especially if the company that trained the LLM makes money on it.
But there is a technical solution. Simply during training record who owns what training data and record how much influence on each weight this training run had.
Then during inference it could be recorded if the weights that trained on Picasso's stuff activated or not. And if someone pays for inference the original owner of tgat data should get a cut.
Maybe even blockchain tech could be used for this... Imagine the hype! AI and crypto together!
ITT: Tell me you don’t have anything worth copyrighting without telling me you don’t have anything worth copyrighting.
I worry about some of y’all.
After reading the article, I don’t disagree with the EFF. We shouldn’t rewrite copyright law to ban creative generation of {art}. AI generated images only increases competition, which is good for consumers of {art}. I do agree that copyright should still exist to prevent duplicate {art} being sold by a new individual claiming it as their own.
I think the tricky thing with AI is that as the end user, it’s still your responsibility to identify when you might be infringing on someone else’s copyright. I imagine that will be very difficult to do. Perhaps we need an AI copyright agent that can ingest your {art} and compare against all existing {art} for percent copyright infringement score.
In my opinion, the biggest thing I worry about is small creators having their work stolen, repackaged, and sold by big corporations. Which copyright protects. In fact with AI assisted lawyering, it might actually be even easier for small timers to protect their stuff, just like the big wigs do.
Abolishing copyright altogether is just such a wild, knee jerk take.
The EFF has managed to keep to the letter of its principles while discarding the spirit of them; it's now defending enormous commercial concerns that hoover up and hoard data, at the expense of people creating and sharing information.
A small number of huge corporations keeping tight control of data and access to data is not a pro-freedom stance.
We need to limit copyright to commercial use. Piracy only hurts corporate profits (CDPR proved it will never bankrupt a studio) but a media company getting an artist to work for them and not paying is seriously unfair.
This kind of breaks down with independent artists but any economic loss for them would be way less important than the benefits of a system where all culture is shared and open for modification. We can't put the interests of a small group over everyone else if the members of that group choose to be in it.
And what if that actually leads to less open-ness? If I license code under a copyleft license, users are forced to give back their changes to the public. Without copyright they would not be forced to do this, which means less work will be published.
Independend of AI I am fully supporting the idea to abolish copyright in general, full stop. Allowing cheap duplication and tweaking is what leads to fast innovation and culture changes. Explicit (costly) patents can remain in place to secure industrial-grade research processes, but the general everyday stuff, incluing music and literature and code and so on is something to strip default rights away to allow faster progress. and oh the poor artists: next to none percentage wise gets much royalties anymore, streaming income is close to zero usually even if popular, the only real world industry to defend are the parasites that do not create art to begin with but siphon production/distribution channels. you might disagree with me, just wanna make clear that some people like me are against this copyright theater before AI blew up in popularity.
I’m just not convinced that most artists would change their behavior under no copyright, so somewhat agree. But the main issue is length of time.
The fact that copyright is longer than patents makes no sense. Patents prove that a shorter period is sufficient to stimulate large investment. And you have to pay for patents!
If you assume reasonable discount rates, the economic value plummets over time for an asset producing the same income (a bad assumption for copyright work in general).
At an 8% discount rate, extending copyright from 32 years to infinity adds less than 10% to its total present-day value. There are many good reform proposals, but mine would be something like 15ish years of free copyright, followed by 1 paid renewal for 15 years that is modest in price (eg $1000) and one extra 10 year renewal that is something like $1M. Meaning you have most economically neutral work free up at year 15, small business types having it affordable through 30 years, and the big Hollywood productions can go from 30-40 years for a modest (to them) fee to incentivize investments in expensive works. Movies come to mind. Give existing work a 20 year buffer on top of that to transition and there is a very small economic effect on everyone.
Removing copyright will benefit parasites and big players more than small artists and businesses. Big businesses won’t have to eg obtain any licensing to publish someone else’s novel or technical book.
What incentive would they have when their customer also has the same option and will do it directly?
> and oh the poor artists: next to none percentage wise gets much royalties anymore, streaming income is close to zero usually even if popular
Your argument is that artists aren’t paid enough, so we should go ahead and take it all the way to zero by law?
I'm not an artist and might be entirely wrong, but my understanding is that for 99% of artists, over 99% of their revenue is from concerts tickets, merch and other physical products, rather than digital/broadcast plays, so changing this to zero wouldn't really affect them, but would act to reduce the power of the labels and other intermediaries over them.
Copyright covers a lot more than the long tail of indie music bands who stream a few thousand plays on Spotify.
This thread has a lot of arguments based entirely on beliefs about small bands and streaming services. Music is only a small part of copyright law.
I have the same understanding regarding YouTubers and writers.
There’s so much competition nowadays, almost no indie can achieve nearly enough sales for a living wage. And ironically, the best way to get more attention is to make your product free, hence more and more artists doing free + paid merch.
Going full time on YouTube as a primary and only job is unlikely to work out.
The YouTube income for most small creators get folded back into the channel. Getting a $100 check from YouTube isn’t going to pay your rent, but it makes purchasing some better lighting or a new microphone for the channel an easy choice, which in turn helps them grow and enjoy their hobby channel more.
The argument that the dollar amount is low and therefore it’s okay if we push it all the way to $0 is unconvincing for anyone familiar with how small time creators grow.
It wouldn’t be $0, because creators make money without selling their work: Patreon, commissions, even ads/sponsorships (though not ideal). Most creators I know, all their main work is already free.
The artist still owns their right to distribute their videos. If someone copies their videos and uploads them to a place with no ads or no patreon subscription that eats into the profit the creator of the art could be making, because someone else is essentially giving it away for free. Only the artist has the right to copy their art.
Ad revenue is also subverted by seeing the original video with uBlock, which I think is fair, because I think ads are harmful and unsustainable - like copyright, only a small minority of indie creators get sustainable revenue from ads, and I'd be surprised if the number wasn't decreasing.
Not linking the author's name and patreon is a problem, but I don't think it needs laws and definitely not copyright; if somebody gets the video on the other place to link the original author's patreon, even if they're not who uploaded it, it benefits them and I don't see any serious issue.
It seems like you really only know about how the affects people who make music and TV.
What about illustrators who license their work? Knitters and crocheters who create patterns? There are countless people who sell creative output on a license-basis which would no longer exist in a world without copyright.
Already people who make visual art are demotivated by AI, follow literally any visual artist on Instagram and you’ll see this. Taking away copyright would make that look tiny in comparison.
> Knitters and crocheters who create patterns?
Wow, is that a thing? If you're willing to share, I'd love to hear more about these vocations and how they make money.
People who are well-versed in fields like fashion will create original designs which include yarn requirements, needle size, measurements, stitch instructions, construction steps, etc etc and sell them in online marketplaces like Etsy or Revelry.
Oh, I'm familiar with that; I thought that the parent meant that there are people who make money directly from the copyright on the patterns rather than the artifacts they sell. Are there?
Yes, that’s correct. There are people who make money directly from the copyright on the patterns. The parent commenter means that the people referenced are selling the patterns, not the garments.
Is this some kind of trick question or am I just misunderstanding your reply?
As far as I know they sell the patterns, not the finished knitted artifact. Aspiring knitters buy them to enjoy knitting. The physical representation of the pattern isn't worth anything (just a piece of paper), what you're buying is a license to use their intellectual property, so I'd say they're making money from copyright.
Sorry, yes, I genuinely took a long time to understand, and this then took me on quite the rabbit hole, thanks, to you and the others on the thread.
Search "knitting patterns".
What does making money have to do with creating art?
Do you only care about professional artists or something? Amateur artists deserve legal protection for their artwork too :/
That person clearly doesn't know any people who make art.
Why do they need 70+ years to recoup enough to make their efforts worthwhile?
A kid who grows up watching $favorite-show can never produce derivative works of that show within their lifetime.
Big studios will love this
They’ll come across some talented little band playing some nice new tune in a tiny club, record it on their phone and give it to one of the existing boy-bands to play.
No need to sign up aspiring artists any more - just take their songs.
Of course it’s the boy band that will sell the merch and the concert tickets.
They can already do that. It's called a mechanical cover license.
In fact if all of copyright operated with mechanical licenses it would be a much better system.
What? That'd mean 99% of artists are touring musicians giving live performances.
Moviemakers, authors, graphic designers, stone masons, song writers, ...
Not every artists is a musician.
Not every musician performs in venues to such an extent that it makes up most or all of their revenue.
Not every musicians output lends themselves to live performances, so they don't do them.
I'd be surprised if even 10% of artists in the EU or US are making their revenue as live musicians. Whatever the number, it ain't 99%.
Brief anecdote, currently working on a personal project and have commissioned an artist to design a few icons. Was a great experience, fun to work with them, more than happy with the result. Exclusive exploitation/usage rights were only transferred after full compensation was received.
If copyright were not a thing in both their and mine countries, screwing over commissioned artists would be even easier than it already and unfortunately tends to be (having done freelance work myself) as this idea that the artist retains their rights before that point wouldn't be the default and any protections/claims solely based on individual contracts.
Copyright can be flawed, yes, but taking away the core that is artists having their creations protected by default, without needing to manually apply or otherwise seek protection, I feel that shouldn't happen. Copyright, even today, does have merit in my book, though the lobbying efforts by Disney and co. along with post War western Europe loving to just copy US legislation wholesale without reflection have extended copyright further then I feel it should have been.
There are more kinds of art than just music.
Copyright covers that merch and physical products as well.
Without copyright, artist B could perform artist A's original work without penalty. If artist B is better at astroturfing social media than A (maybe because they pay a firm to do it) , then B makes money and A does not.
I suspect that for 99% of artists, over 99% of their income is from a day job, often minimum wage
If you're at the point where you're making money from merch and concert tickets you're probably ahead of 99% of artists
I suppose we usually just call them "aspiring artists" then, but still
No, condescending people call them "aspiring". Anyone who knows and likes art calls them artists.
artists sell live experiences and original merchandise to actually make money these days. only a rare subset of megastars are living off royalties to begin with, and I am totally fine if some tailor swift has less millions to begin with.
people support/pay real artists if they want more of it, else there is no way I see a right to get paid a wage for just being an artist in itself. if youre not original enough so you get copycats in a day well thats also a signal of artistic value. you cannot separate art from the artist, even if some people are okay with knockoffs after all. there is a difference between art and just content production, the latter is already worthless today with AI speedrunning the decline for mass producing mediocre slop people think is good enough.
So you'll reduce that to just live experiences: abolish copyright, and watch 1 million bootleg Taylor Swift T-shirts suddenly blink into existence
That's a trademark issue, not a copyright issue.
It's either or both, depending on the shirt design
It’s not Taylor Swift who is hurt by this, it’s the solo creatives who cannot afford other mechanisms (e.g. trademark enforcement) to protect their work.
Trademark != copyright: trademark is attributing indies whenever their work appears (which is very doable), copyright is preventing others from seeing or reshowing their work (even with attribution). Copyright is about protecting their sales, which are practically nonexistent, hence (because it has big downsides) why it should be abolished.
You have to explicitly legally defend trademark, that's completely our of reach for someone who sells knitting patterns on Etsy. OTOH, DMCA can (and does) work for that group.
I also dislike US IP law but I think it needs to be improved with nuance. What you propose is survivable for big IP owners but would wipe out swaths of small business owners.
It's already an epsilon away from zero.
Author: I spent six months writing this story, I hope I can make some money selling it, it would be my dream to be able to keep doing this full time.
You: I will steal this, consume it, reprint it as I see fit and you will earn nothing.
Yeah... I don't think your opinions are worth much.
Copyright is described by its proponents as a "Monopoly held by the creator". Considering how much we take from the Public Domain, I'd argue that Copyright should only last as long as Patents do, up to a maximum of 20 years.
Anything beyond that is not personal property, but a literal monopoly which impedes creativity, seeing the many, many, many sequels which are terrible often made to keep a studio's grasp on an IP. It happens so often those are often called "ashcan copy" or "rights-retention" films, which wouldn't happen if Copyright law expired as naturally as Patents do.
What do you mean by “considering how much we take from the public domain”?
Authors and artists are not (and souldn't be) making Art for money. It is not a 'job' where effort goes in and product comes out. It's more like a religious calling, they often have no other option. That's true, but it's also the reason people are paid less than their technical peers.
It is difficult in the current climate to prevent industrial actors from cultivating genetic lines instantiated by Artists in Art. In a different future, the seperation between small and large-scale genetic agriculture would be recognised, and the abolition of copyright may proceed.
In a world where money is devalued, genetic lines and mental constituency will become even more powerful.
See: the mental constituency of sci-fi books in E. Musk's brain
>> Author: I spent six months writing this story.
> Authors and artists are not (and souldn't be) making Art for money.
Hmm...
> Author: I spent some years researching a topic to write a book about it.
Authors don't just make art.
Neither do Inventors, which arguably make much more contributions to society, yet their work is only protected for 20 years tops.
What excuse do artists have?
As with academics, inventors and artists should be paid for their labour long-term, not for their result.
Not sure if you really mean it, but you're kind of making the argument that a person that mindlessly shovels dirt from one hole to another in a circle should be paid. People are paid for the result, not for their labor.
Not at all. You're presuming that nobody can be taken off this hypothetical salary once they're on it, and that they would be placed on it indiscriminately.
Simple safeguards are already in practice in today's economy to prevent such circumstances.
Academics don't collect any royalties, they're paid prior to publication, not for selling copies of books.
I'm using "research" broadly. People can privately research and publish under whatever arrangement they wish. Academics too. For those that sell their copyright, that would be valued based on projections of what the copyright buyer expects to sell. For those whose research was funded by the copyright buyer prior to writing because they didn't want to bear the risk or lacked the funds, that's going to be less, but everything stems from how the books are expected to sell.
I think there are better funding models than the precarity of copyright-dependent publishing.
Yes they do. As a kid our (admittedly not particularly lavish) family summer holiday was paid for each year by the modest royalties my father, an academic, received from a couple of academic textbooks he had authored.
Right, that was worded too universally, but this is what I mean: royalties here are supplementary to a salary, not a wage in themselves. The research was funded before publication.
The part this analysis misses is that the author's "dream" of doing that full time is almost never realized -- 25% percent of authors identify as "full-time", but only 10% of those authors can actually make ends meet. Only 30% of books ever pay back the advance. The best shot is to be a "romance" author, which earns more than other genres, pretty much because sex sells. Copyright isn't doing a great job at its stated purpose, and yet we endure endless fights over it. The juice isn't worth the squeeze, and writers are mostly supporting themselves with other jobs anyway.
That is not copyrights stated purpose?
Copyright does not guarantee you an audience. Nothing guarantees you an audience, authors know this, everyone who creates anything ought to know this?
Copyright just says that if you DO manage to create a work that truly connects with an audience, you're in a position to make money off it because it cannot be stolen from you.
What is so wrong with that?
What is wrong with making backups if the work is so important?
Novels aren't the only thing with copyright, and aren't really even the main thing that copyright protects. It also covers engineering reports, technical specs, journalism, blog posts, emails, internal memos, marketing copy, academic papers, user manuals, legal briefs, and a lot more.
Even in the particular case of novels, I would prefer to live in a world where some authors are making money than live in one with no novels at all.
I understand copyright covers lots of things. It doesn't do a good job with any of them, sadly.
> Even in the particular case of novels, I would prefer to live in a world where some authors are making money than live in one with no novels at all.
That's not the choice. Novels will be written regardless, and there are ways to make money that are not copyright-related: Substack and Patreon are doing more to fund small authors than the publishing industry as a whole, and people pay because they want to support the author, and to get early, exclusive access to the author's work. None of those authors are surviving and making money because someone can't copy their work and distribute it. Piracy is a fact, and that people give money to these authors in the presence of piracy shows that copyright is not necessary to support these artists.
> None of those authors are surviving and making money because someone can't copy their work and distribute it.
I tend to agree with your sentiment but this line made me think you’re underestimating the degree to which the law stops the powerful from doing evil. They see the law as a hassle to be calculated against and if there is no legal friction to stealing and using others’ creations they just will.
So it’s not that Amazon would take your novel, short story, etc and redistribute it. It’s that they’d make a whole series of movies or TV series using your creations and give you nothing and have to give you nothing.
Copyright being eliminated is among my more “idealistically anarchistic” wishes I think but so long as we’re in a society as legalistic and with such an imbalance of power generally, copyright protects more than it hurts I think.
Yes, I agree with this. I think your correct to point out that the leverage a legitimate corporation has to push ripped-off works far exceeds what the piracy community's ability to do so when it is infringement.
That said, I increasingly see writers making money directly from their audience not because the audience is not allowed to make a copy of their work, but because they treat the writers writing as a service and they want to get updates every week and so they subscribe. I think copyright was created for a less connected world where it was much more natural to print them in bulk and then sell copies.
> writers are mostly supporting themselves with other jobs anyway.
Skill issue. This is common for low-barrier careers that look like anyone can do them, but only a minority break-even. Others include porn/Onlyfans, social media "influencers",and hordes of aspiring actors who flock to Los Angeles.
What % of new authors today make full-time salary on writing?
And what % of those do by selling, vs giving away their work for free (to get non-negligible attention) then getting their real money through donations, merch, etc.?
The more successful "self published" authors writing web novels make significant money from patreon (>$20k/month); this relies on copyright protection (but interestingly, just a few months would be sufficient for that business model).
My understanding is that most of these web novels are free, and patreon grants early access at best, which is enforced by trust anyways (the creator doesn’t have the time or resources to track and sue someone posting the early access on a pirate site, when it will be public a week or month later, but the people who pay to get something a week or month early mostly aren’t the type who would pirate even if it was easy).
In what way does that business model rely on copyright protection? "Get the next chapter early" requires a source of chapters, so all you need is for paying clients to not be motivated to redistribute the chapters in an organised way, or would-be paying clients to not be motivated to use such organised "slightly more chapters of that webnovel you follow" services instead. Humans aren't amoral ideal rational economic actors.
The authors I'm aware of making >$20k don't do any significant gating. That practice is only really common with people republishing through Amazon (which probably demands it).
> so all you need is for paying clients to not be motivated to redistribute the chapters in an organised way
This is exactly what copyright is.
I agree that you could work around this in a world without copyright (e.g. by watermarking content and blacklisting), but it would be difficult and make the whole profession less viable.
Mass distribution and payment becoming accessible/low overhead was an extremely helpful development for authors in my view, and removing copyright would have the opposite effect (but cutting it down even to several years would change surprisingly little).
This is way too much
What does it matter?
I don't think anyone has the right to take work I create, for free.
In the same way I have no right to walk into your house and use it for free.
In the same way you cannot expect me to turn up and work at your business for free.
I don't care what half delusional rubbish you come up with to justify your theft.
It's theft, you want to steal something you put zero effort into creating and use it as you see fit. No fuck you. If I want to give it away for free, that's my prerogative not your expectation, if I can monetise via merch or other means, that's my prerogative not your right.
It matters because copyright is widely abused and hurts neutral sites which must constantly check for copyrighted content, and it would’ve hampered AI if it was enforced.
Your analogy doesn’t fit because a house is physical, but “intellectual property” is digital. If we lived in the metaverse and I could just copy your house and live in it without affecting you, why should you care? Theft is bad because the victim no longer has the original.
Theft in this case is bad because you're removing the ability of someone to make a living from the thing they created.
On the basis it's digital.
I don't care if it's digital, I care if it took time and effort to create. If it did, it does not matter if it's digital or physical, it's theft.
Today, practically zero new indies make a living from selling digital copies of a thing they created. That income is eclipsed by giving away their main work, then asking for donations, maybe selling merchandise, early access, tailored commissions, or some other token (and sponsorships but those unfortunately hurt quality).
So abolish copyright, and indies still make money from creating digital works - at least almost as much as they do now, but probably more, because it will further normalize the alternate incomes.
Copyright maybe used to help indies, but every copyright case I’ve heard anywhere in the last decade, the plaintiff is a publisher with more than enough revenue. Meanwhile, in many cases the defendant hasn’t actually infringed, but regardless suffers from the DMCA, C&D, or lawsuit. Copyright relies on wishful thinking to provide an illusion of helping small-time creators, in reality far more often it hurts them.
I regularly see posts on reddit r/royalroad where people write amateur stories and have their works stolen and put up on other platforms for money.
https://www.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1uwyuf1/psa_stol...
Here is an example of the theft you endorse.
Please go tell those people they should be happy for someone else to steal their work and charge for it even after they've given it away for free.
It doesn't matter whether "few" people make a living from it. Copyright does not guarantee you an audience. Copyright going away would not guarantee you more of an audience.
The only thing it guarantees is that if you manage to write something that resonates with an audience you have the potential to earn a living from it. That is what you want to take away.
These only further my point. Everything published on RoyalRoad is already free; the issue the authors face is trademark, not copyright, violation, because their works are republished under a different name. Also, while OP found resolution, most of the other commenters did not, demonstrating that IP laws don’t reliably protect indies anyways.
IMO the solution to protecting trademark is to ensure anyone who discovers a repackaged work (like those examples) also discovers the original author and their free version, so they know it’s a ripoff. It doesn’t require the finicky legal system.
> removing the ability of someone to make a living from the thing they created.
So layoffs should be illegal?
I am not a fan of complete removal of copyright, but I also consider its current duration absurd and extreme - saying this as someone who wrote 10 books so far, so I have actual skin in the game. Some person in 2130 should not be able to profit from something I am writing now, that is just feudalism in a new cloak.
Any creative person whose ego is not overinflated accepts the fact that no art emerges from a vacuum, that they themselves were inspired by others and their work, and that they should pay this forward to the coming generations.
For me, the worst aspect of long copyright is the de-facto ban on derived works. Work derivation is how civilization and culture came to be.
People arguing against parent are Property Thieves. see 5th amendment which requires "private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation".
It's your property. Do what you want with it. In a free society, the public isn't compelled to buy your books.
A variant where the copyright would be automatic but very limited (say, 10 years), with a necessity to pay some growing fee for extended protection, would solve most situations.
The vast majority of stories do not make any money ever. Some do, but only briefly so. The true money makers should have no problem paying the fees.
Only very rare cases of authors who get discovered decades later would not be covered by this, and this is less likely to happen with the Internet. There are no publishing gatekeepers anymore.
many people commenting have never tried to earn a living from independently created works of authorship. The NAPSTER-fans say "more for me, what is your problem". Other economies (China) do not have commerce law that protects original works of authorship, but the Western tradition has enabled this.
Blinded by corporate abuse, calls for removal of copyright law are often naive or ill-willed IMHO
That is not a given. I have earned a living from created works of authorship.
I think copyright suppresses creation and does very little to support creators in general. It has enabled businesses to choose a few winning creators that reap the benefits of copyright. That kingmaker position allows them to dictate what is created.
For the last few decades the median income from a creative work has been nil.
I would much rather have universal basic income and no copyright.
Just treat copyright as an engineering issue, rather than a religion. Is copyright doing more good than harm when it comes to encouraging creativity? I think everything tilted in favor of abolishing copyright around the turn of the century, and AI isn't improving things.
Your point about making a living off of creative endeavors underscores this point: if copyright were doing its job the way it's supposed to, your first sentence wouldn't be a note alluding to how damn hard it is to make a living on writing. Somehow you're twisting that to be a feature, which I get, because there's no alternative story, but at the same time, let's be honest: copyright doesn't work well, and incurs huge costs for society.
They hate artists.
if copyrigth is abolished. amazon would publish every single boon without giving a cent to writers. it would be reqlly hard for writers to make a living. Im not a fan of copyrigth and how is being used at the moment but I don't really see an alternative where writers still get paid.
Maybe the strategy is to try to build up some steam behind the abolish copyright movement to move the Overton window a bit.
If IP owners see actual support behind abolishing copyright, maybe rolling back to min(30, life of author) years of protection would seem like a more reasonable compromise.
I thought that was always the point. A world without any copyright at all obviously doesn't function.
min(30, life of author) kinda makes a perverse incentive to kill the author, no?
I have term life insurance that provides the same incentive and I'm not particularly worried.
> if copyrigth is abolished. amazon would publish every single boon without giving a cent to writers. it would be reqlly hard for writers to make a living.
How about a unified social platform that allows people to donate to the authors/artists/creators/projects of their choosing? It could allow feedback similar to goodreads, and also be more longterm focused than the traditional kickstarter, etc. The social aspect would give people a pat on the back for sending money somewhere.
We could do that with all kinds of IP! Use a feature in software or in a Meta app, just donate to the minimum amount wage (for legal reasons) workers who developed it. And Meta and Google themselves could be forbidden to show ads, just rely on donations as well.
I sense sarcasm, but anybody serious about fixing corporate social media should read this:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
I guess my idea would easily fit into what that article proposes for a solution.
If it were to happen I don't think Amazon would sell any books to begin with. And even under the current system, I only buy books to pay writers, and even then they only get very little of the amount I pay. I'd much rather pay them directly through whatever system evolves through the hypothetical change.
They're not paid because access to books is limited by copyright, but because whatever eyeballs they manage to reach are willing to buy their books. I may not be a representative sample, but I think that part wouldn't change much, and discoverability would still be the deciding factor.
I hate the attention economy as much as the next person, but I don't think there's any putting that back in the bottle, the amount of media won't shrink.
As opposed to today, where big companies never steal from writers, and it’s not very hard for them to make a living?
(Not books, but Amazon has ripped off indie products before: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-produ..., and books are being ripped off by other companies’ LLMs.)
Is it not hard for writers to make a living? If so maybe I should do that.
Some professions should be hard to make a living in. Copyright is objectively immoral, you don’t need to go political to realise that.
> amazon would publish every single boon without giving a cent to writers. it would be reqlly hard for writers to make a living.
Not quite, Amazon would just become the publisher that buys new books/articles/whatever directly from the writers, one upfront fee. Not saying it's a sustainable living for writers, just saying that's probably what would happen.
> Explicit (costly) patents can remain in place to secure industrial-grade research processes
I keep reading about big companies i) developing very similar drugs that are different enough to avoid patents, ii) using their size to prevent litigation.
So would keeping patents help?
The "me too" drug still need to go through an R&D, clinical trail and approval process, so combined with patents the exclusivity period is at least several years. Abolishing patents would completely remove the exclusivity period
That is a thing (though arguably there is still value in the reformulations). A good current example would be orally administered wegovy, which received an additional patent on top of semaglutide for combining the drug with an absorption enhancer. This is a genuine advancement, and did require clinical trials (not all patentable improvements do) but it is ultimately just a variation on an existing drug.
That being said, the patent on semaglutide still expires at the same time and biosimilars (or generics in other cases) can be produced at that time using the injectable formulation (or a new alternative). This seems reasonable to me
The government could always pay for results too, like $10B for something that does this. I don’t love it either and am not positive it is better than patents.
> next to none percentage wise gets much royalties anymore
While artists get paid less then many would like, royalties make up roughly 2/3rds of revenue of all the streaming giants, which is a huge amount of money. This recurring monthly, mostly passive income is still helpful for smaller professional bands in between touring.
When the indie band Xiu Xiu pulled out of Spotify many were quick to say it didn't matter that much except for exposure, but in interviews they pointed out that they lost a significant portion of they're yearly income from doing it just from the streaming royalties.
Many will say touring is where the real money is, but costs are rising and what I've heard its not as lucrative for smaller bands as it was in the past.
Some links: Spotify's own report on payouts, obviously a biased editorial, but good data nonetheless (for example 13K artists made 100k/year from spotify royalties alone) https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/payouts/
A transparent report on tour costs from a fairly popular indie band (notably they could make more if they were less principled or were a smaller band, but I think this report is still eye opening in terms of general costs) https://stereogum.com/2497822/los-campesinos-break-down-what...
I'm a musician who has been releasing my work under CC0 / Public Domain for the last few years for these very reasons.
While I do agree in principal, it is important this is a consensual choice made by the artists themselves. That is the only way to have healthy cultural change.
At the moment, we have e.g. Suno's CEO, who has publicly stated "people never really liked making music in the first place" - this is the kind of detached and exploitative person that we are seeing trying to force copyright changes on the rest of us.
How do you make a feature film - budget ranging from low millions to hundreds of millions of dollars - if anyone can copy it and view it without paying for it?
I'm struggling to see how the issues regarding low compensation from streaming services is going to be positively affected by abolishing copyright wholesale. That'd take the one way a creative can truly claim a stake towards their art.
Before the advent of LLMs, as now, my position on copyright is that what was had prior to Disneys lobyying efforts (which also then lead to similar laws being adopted outside the US showcasing the type of soft power and legislative inspirations the States previously could cause/the US does something so then Western Europe did the same) of roughly 25 years plus one extension was a fair compromise. One could also mirror patents and their length, seems like a solid avenue as well.
Lest we forget, while enforcement is far to limited, any success in defending FOSS projects and their licenses are only possible because we have copyright.
Incidentally, the Statute of Anne was pushed by a printing guild after they lost their monopoly on printing. It was so unpopular[1] for them to get the monopoly back that they had to pivot and come up with some other way. So they figured they could do it in the name of writers. That worked!
1. John Locke, for example, opposed the monopoly.
Go back to the old 28 year system. Dump the renewal.
This would align it with the patent system.
> what leads to fast innovation
Content becomes cultural artifacts - the whole birthday song copyright issue should have told Americans how broken the system was.
I'd say shorter but with renewals. Say, 15 years with two or three renewals of equal length, but require that the original protected work is still for sale to get the renewal. This would clear up things like retro games being stuck in limbo or small press books being impossible to buy. It would still allow rights holders to make their exclusive money if they are actually making money on the original. It wouldn't allow a Disney, where they extend the copyright on a century-old work without selling it just so they can make money on sequels or moving back and forth among animation, stage, TV series, and live action movies.
I am against renewals. It is just additional layer of complication. Having to look up and track possibly poorly informed state of work is unnecessary extra step.
Straight up x years from identified release year of edition you have on hand is most reasonable.
> fast innovation and culture changes
Does this mean you think innovation and change in our culture is too slow? What’s you’re yardstick?
Hmm. Looking at the cinemas, almost all the top movies are prequels or sequels, milking the same topic for the tenth time.
I'd say that at least the movie industry is somehow stuck in a rut.
If you get rid of copyright, half of movies will be sequels to other people's work from the previous year.
From my perspective from reading and watching fan fiction, these unofficial derived works are typically significantly more distinct and interesting than the official sequels, and I'd be cool with these getting bigger budgets.
> From my perspective from reading and watching fan fiction, these unofficial derived works are typically significantly more distinct and interesting than the official sequels, and I'd be cool with these getting bigger budgets.
This suggests that copyright isn't holding back these works...
"This suggests that copyright isn't holding back these works..."
IF the copyright holders are kind enough not to harass those fans for infringement. And this kindness is quite commonplace in some contexts (people writing stories about their favorite literary characters rarely get cease-and-desisted), but much less in others ("fanfic" movies about Mickey Mouse are a no-go even for free).
As an aside, I don’t know that fan fiction is the strongest case for originality!
Maybe not the strongest, but definitely a case. For example, it's my understanding that many scholars believe that The Odyssey is fan fiction by a separate author(s) to that/those of The Iliad.
Fanfic is subject to the Gauss curve like everything else.
The Lord of the Rings is sorta-kinda fanfic to Beowulf, the Witcher is fanfic to Slavic and Celtic mythology. Neither of these two authors started as "big published renowned authors", they were both amateurs smitten by some earlier works.
And yes, I realize again that in those particular examples, the original work was no longer protected. But that is irrelevant to the question of the derived work's quality.
There would be no movies as we know them today. Studios couldn’t support making multi-hundred million dollar movies that are immediately free to everyone. Basically movies would become YouTube.
It could potentially help theater owners, who provide a somewhat unique experience. That doesn’t seem very valued these days, though.
An exclusive theatrical window is one of the big reasons to go to a movie theater: you want to see a movie before it's available on streaming. Removing copyright seems like it would harm theaters pretty significantly.
The screen would become the thing. If anyone can watch anything anywhere at any time, having a 200 foot screen differentiates a theater from watching something on a phone. 99% of the time, people will choose the phone, will choose to watch sports on tv, etc. that remaining 1% might be a big enough market and without licensing fees, theaters have a lot more margin.
Actually, it seems surprising they haven’t moved into sports (especially with sportsbooks becoming so popular).
Some cinemas do present some sporting events. The rights negotiations for sporting events are multi-layered and complex. Your average soccer or MLB game is not likely to be negotiated for that venue, and a whole-season license is unlikely. Playoffs, championships, and the like are sometimes worthwhile but it's not going to be the corner mom & pop cinemas paying for that content. It's going to be IMAX or Regal Cinemas or someone huge.
For example the 2024 Summer Olympics, with NBC owning exclusive rights to the US market for video coverage (meaning NBC Universal, meaning Comcast) IMAX licensed the opening ceremony to be picked up from NBC and delivered to their US cinemas over IP with fixed latency. It was only the opening ceremony and no scored events. That involved NBC, IMAX, and LTN to carry the video in between. IMAX and NBC negotiated the rights and LTN got statements of agreement on that from NBC. There was involved planning and engineering work to make sure the technical part went smoothly. I'm sure the negotiations, contract writing, redlines, and final sign-off between the source and destination took longer than the tech work.
Wouldn’t removing copyright just lead to more “milking the same topic”?
I don’t see how it would lead to a higher volume of original ideas.
I can assure you that people had original ideas before the invention of copyright 300 years ago.
> people had original ideas before the invention of copyright 300 years ago
Not in dispute but that's also not the point being argued.
The argument is:
a) whether copyright kills original ideas. I don't think it does but would love to understand what the mechanism is if you think otherwise.
b) whether removing copyright would lead to more "milking of same old topics" in movies. I think the answer is self-evidently yes.
Whether removing copyright would lead to more "milking of same old topics" in movies. I think the answer is self-evidently yes.
This is not self-evident to me, at least as far as "milking" goes. Inspiration is not the same as milking. I specifically use the word "milking" for the sort of low-level repetitive quasi-effort that the cinemas are full of.
OTOH if someone takes, IDK, Don Quijote and rewrites it into a space opera, it might actually be genuine fun, even though the old idea was there as a foundation.
> Don Quijote and rewrites it into a space opera, it might actually be genuine fun
Don Quixote is in the public domain. Copyright isn’t holding back adaptations.
I know, but my point (I could have made it clearer) is that you cannot do the same with Geralt or Frodo Baggins.
Getting rid of copyright is going to make that problem worse not better...
I'm wondering if you are reasoning correctly about this.
I'd say that random people, if they reuse a copyrighted material, are a lot more likely to veer far off the beaten path than the big studios.
Fan fiction, even if building on previous materials, seems to be much less repetitive to me.
I'm skeptical patents play a significant role at encouraging research. No correlation between stronger patent laws and more innovation has ever been found.
I'm also in favor of very light copyright laws, e.g. I don't think anyone should claim they are Coca Cola.
I don't know about you, but in hardware startup land if you don't have a patent and your technology can be reverse engineered, you are most likely dead in the water and will never get investment.
But I guess we can count on the big companies to do the innovation?
That would be trademark law.
Wait...your theory is that if we make it so I can copy and tweak any work of authorship I can find at no cost other than the actual effort it takes to make a copy and tweak it this is going to make me more likely to put in the effort to create new works?
What progress do you expect in music that would justify throwing poor musicians under the bus (the fact that they get a small portion of IP revenue doesn't explain why that portion should become even smaller)?
I am fully supporting the idea of abolishing property rights for web services. Any web service must publish its entire stack, data, collected information and so on.
This would lead to explosive innovation and the pie would be growing rapidly. #growth-mindset #disruption
FLOSS only exists because of copyright. Without it you don’t get a utopia where everything can be read and copied, you get the opposite, companies not sharing their work, artists not releasing their work. Sacrificing the whole culture built on top of copyright for a maybe faster technical progress is incredibly myopic
I believe copyright timeframes have gotten WAY out of hand and need to be reigned in to something more sensible, but I still think it's a valuable concept and don't want to see it abolished.
Patents on the other hand have become a total joke and I'd be happy to see them gone.
As it is now, it’s a joke. Essentially new laws are continuously introduced to make disney’s junk forever inaccessible. No author, no animator, no one except disney share holders wants these shit laws.
This would also mean copyleft would not work anymore. Companies would not be forced to release the source code of their modifications of (A)GPL software.
I think that would be a great loss
Why should patents stay protected?
You yourself say that allowing cheap duplication and tweaking is what leads to fast innovation. Why should I be restricted from cheap use of a patent I could use to further innovation?
Im OK with limited forms of copyright. But the problem is that copyright business interests will ALWAYS pervert the original agreed-upon rules to their benefit.
Now something we saw that does work with audio, is statutory licensing. That rule alone allows spotify to be made. And thats also why a spotify-for-video cant be.
Thats why a local Jellyfin with 30TB of videos is better than all US based streaming services combined. Nobody is *legally* able to put a complete video library and pay access fees to relevent rightsholders.
Copyleft is built on copyright, do you think removing copyright protections is going to get people to release their source code?? I don't think so. Not unless you want to try and legislate some general copyleft law, but that's probably a nonstarter.
If you go back to the original purpose of copyleft, LLMs have made it obsolete.
Partly because reverse engineering source code is now trivial.
I think the asymmetry of fair use is what feels the most wrong about copyright and AI. Forever, fair use has been limited with an iron fist: you can’t rip that DVD because it’s copy-protected; You can only use 10s of that song in your school project. Then these AI companies wield fair use like a sledgehammer in a way that nobody has been able to for decades to enormously profit. Maybe it’s technically correct, but it feels like mass exploitation of a loophole that the legal system has previously taken a dim view towards (see: Aereo).
I'm aware that my GPL3 licensed software has been rewritten using AI to get rid of the GPL license by a large weapons company.
Seems to me the EFF is entirely fine with it?
Under the current state of affairs, copyleft material can be laundered through LLMs without triggering proprietary weights from becoming open.
Something feels broken.
You could always do that with copyright programs. The only thing that changed was the cost. The only example of somebody doing this was with the BIOS of the original IBM PC, but it was always possible and since nothing was copied it is legal. Somebody else did all the hard work.
Patents are the only protection that should exist for this type of thing. (though finding an algorithm worth patenting is hard - most are either a small variation easy to work around, or so old that prior art exists from 50 years ago).
Is "only" doing a lot of work in your second sentence? Sometimes a change in degree is a change in kind.
Yep. I've seen it happen and there's basically no recourse against it currently. And EFF is saying that it's fine… honestly not what I was expecting to read.
Copyright is broken and needs major reform, but copyright must exist in some form as long as we are operating under the current economic system. If we want a society where some people have the job of creating art, then they must be compensated for their art. The leverage that artists have to demand compensation is controlling who access to their art. Said another way, the artist owns the right to make copies of their art. That is protected by law.
I think copyright as it exists is abused by large companies and stifles culture. Broadly speaking, I think copyright should be a much shorter term, lasting more like 20 years rather than the 100+ years that is typical (life of the author + 70 years). The exact term is debateable, but the purpose should be to allow the artist sufficient time to monetize their creation for themselves, and then allowing the art to belong to the broader culture. There should be a worthwhile financial incentive to create art.
My utopian dream would be a radically restructured society where we do not expect people to have "artist" as a career. Instead, people would work 15 hours a week doing the work that must be done to contributue to society. The compensation from that 15 hours of work guarantees all their needs to live in modest comfort. People then have more leisure time to pursue whatever they find self-actualizing, which for many will mean creating art and sharing it with the world.
20 years of copyright from creation, just like patents. The first two Shrek movies should be public domain by now.
I think we need to adjust copyright to balance market needs and preservation needs. AI works best when we can strike a balance between the needs of the creator to get compensated and the need of the general public to use content in ways the creator didn't anticipate.
in the few books I've read about technological breakthroughs, the vast majority come from academia. I'm thinking about Eckert's adoption of IBM's ticker tape for commands rather than just rote data [0], all the inventions that came out of the NDRC [1] (for better or worse), the ENIAC, FORTRAN, how reliant solid state devices were on understanding quantum theory [2], and so many other examples. Paul E. Ceruzzi's "Computing: A Concise History" goes over much of this (including making note of the US military's heavy usage of LLMs for the Iraq War pre-empted the consumer push for LLMs)
most of the things that private enterprise contributes is cost reduction and manufacturing capacity (important in their own right for ubiquity) but having extremely well-funded R&D and universities still seem like the primary driver for truly evolutionary and revolutionary breakthroughs rather than useful but not necessary optimizations
IP law very much aims to protect the latter so that breakthroughs can be capitalized on but aren't a necessary motivator for researchers to continue frontier work
(0)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_SSEC (1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Research_Comm... (2)https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/semiconductors/chp...
You might be right, but I think we need at least 10 years before we can really start this discussion, and the discussion itself needs to take many more years.
To be fair AI as we have it today wouldn't exist if everything was copyrighted and copyright was enforced very strictly across the web. Not sure if it's fair use and I get that it's not great if these companies try to monopolize knowledge (if they even can do that) but overall being more lax on copyright for fair use is good. Especially scientific knowledge should be openly accessibly to anyone, imagine what we could achieve if we could train LLMs on everything and make it accessible to everyone.
Guess it's time to stop donating to the EFF. They're completely off the mark this time.
The random loser generating slop in his bedroom isn't necessarily the one infringing, it's the AI company that took all of our work and is reselling it that is infringing. This is an obvious blind spot in copyright law and no reasonable person would consider that to be fair use. The challenge I think is communicating to a layman how AI training works.
For the people currently in the grips of AI psychosis: new regulation here is good for AI too. AI models will not get more creative without new human training data, but the current exploitative situation means people are not incentivized to keep creating. Human artists who create new things should be rewarded by the market, as copyright law intended. Even if their work only ever ends up feeding some gen AI model, they should still be entitled to compensation in some way (eg royalties). They worked hard so that you don't have to.™
Instead, AI companies are the ones being rewarded for it. That's not sustainable for anyone.
It's funny to hear people repeat, "AI will replace you!" Then beg for more training data of humans being humans.
I consider current length of copyright to be extremely too long.
On other hand I also think that creators should be compensated when their creations are used to train AI models and this compensation should be substantial per company. And to any fallacious person telling about humans also "learning". Well humans brains are not replicated en masse just yet. And single learned person is not made to millions of copies and made to answer inane queries day and night...
I disagree with restrictions on digestive use of a work. If I legally acquire a book, I should be able to run that data through an algorithm, and I should be allowed to share the result freely as long as it's not replicating the original.
My biggest contention is the acquiring price for such use. I hold that for such use the cost such be significantly higher than just if you were buying book for reading.
I see setting such pricing to be an impossible task. What should be the fee for me sharing the computed word count of a book, an uncopyrightable figure? We'd likely agree that a large payment should not be required in that case. And now we have to somehow legally define all these shades of gray, statistics, book summaries—a mess.
This is solid guidance. "Given this range of experimentation, courts should be reluctant to decide in advance what tools do and do not foster “human creativity.”"
The EFF is in the pocket of Big-AI, and this isn't the first time.
"It is not the place of courts to say these people are not artists or that AI cannot augment human creativity in a positive way."
Yes it is. If you had ever created anything, which you have not, you would know! You are a couple of tech bureaucrats who want foundation salaries and change with the political winds.
Copyright in general, is too long, too broad, and - thanks largely to DMCA - enforced too strictly. One reason for China's success in tech is their willingness to ignore all the IP nonsense (or at least look the other way) allowing folks to rapidly iterate on ideas without running into IP rent-seekers at every turn.
Copyright is too long (thank you Disney and Pelosi) and I'm all for shortening it. Also I do agree that market dilution is not really defensible. The main reason why models should have been shut down is the sketchy way in which the models were trained.
There might need to be some calibration. The reason for copyright is (ostensibly) to compensate for the enormous cost of production. If the cost goes down, the protection should also logically go down.
The purpose of copyright under the US Constitution, a text relevant to the courts the EFF is addressing here, is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving creators temporary exclusive rights to their works"
It is not to "compensate for the cost of production", nor is it to ensure that business plans of major music publishers happen to be successful.
The EFF is correct to say here that copyright shouldn't be perverted to limiting market competition generally, but limited to protecting a specific works.
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
In what ways does an exclusive right promote the progress of science and the useful arts other than by incentivizing that creative work?
In what way can that incentive work other than by compensating for the cost of production?
I don't get how what you said is different from what I said.
Why are you being argumentative? "Promote" and "exclusive rights" was always about compensation for the time and effort invested. You just rephrased what the OP said while claiming to disagree.
It's substantively different. The level of compensation you could expect from copyright needs to be high enough that creators/inventors in general feel that it may be worthwhile to create/invent stuff. That level of compensation may be exactly enough to pay for a musician to make a track. We know this is not the case, it's more like a lottery ticket; some musicians make millions (much more than would be needed to entice them to choose this line of work) and many make almost nothing, but still persist. If you relax copyright provisions so that average compensation is halved, this would presumably have a non-linear impact. Maybe a 50% decrease in expected compensation only results in -10% new works. Maybe in -80%. For example, it is completely implausible that retroactively extending copyright (as has been done) results in any additional works being created at all - just higher profits for existing owners. This also applies to the costs; a higher cost of production (e.g. cost of living) doesn't necessarily need to lead to more stringent copyright restraints, nor lower costs to more lax restrictions.
I don't think the reason for copyright law is compensation, per se. It's ownership: being in a position where the creator is able to decide what to do with it. Compensation being one option, but also restricting use our controlling access.
That's the US constitutional reason. Give a creator a temporary monopoly so as to compensate them for ultimately making the public domain larger.
Ownership is the proxy they could figure out. It's not more complicated than that.
Copyright has nothing to do with cost of production. What does it cost for me to doodle something on a napkin? Nothing, yet I still enjoy the full protections copyright law offers for that doodle (with the exception today being AI companies. Apparently, they can do whatever the fuck they want with it)
Do you mean production or reproduction? For instance, have you ever looked and the budget or the credits for a major film, TV, or game project?
The cost of producing decent things hasn't gone down. Also the cost of slop is not that low, just subsidised.
I'm a programmer by trade. I know you're wrong from much personal experience, and the difference between last year and today is dramatic.
If you believe the anti-AI people you will become misinformed, just as much as if you listen to the most pro-AI people.
> I'm a programmer by trade.
Me too. I don't understand what makes you think your opinion is superior to all the evidence I've seen so far.
Because the evidence only goes in one direction. If I can get substantially more work done because of AI tools that falsifies the idea that LLMs don't help. Same as a satellite orbiting the earth once with a camera filming falsifies flat earthism. It doesn't matter how much evidence there is to say the earth is flat, it's falsified.
legit
I recently heard a local EU politician on the radio trying to convince the listeners "things made with AI should be inherently non copyrightable, because they lack human creative labour".
I wish I could tell him there is this thing called photography where all a human does is presses a button and copyrightable artefacts are created by capturing how the world looks. For example a landscape that human had no influence over creating!
Surely this "non copyrightability" should apply to photography too.
/sarcasm
AI is just a tool. You can make slop or you can make beautiful art. Is it fair to Picasso's copyright holder that all his paintings were used for training and you can prompt "this in style of Picasso"?
No, especially if the company that trained the LLM makes money on it.
But there is a technical solution. Simply during training record who owns what training data and record how much influence on each weight this training run had.
Then during inference it could be recorded if the weights that trained on Picasso's stuff activated or not. And if someone pays for inference the original owner of tgat data should get a cut.
Maybe even blockchain tech could be used for this... Imagine the hype! AI and crypto together!
ITT: Tell me you don’t have anything worth copyrighting without telling me you don’t have anything worth copyrighting.
I worry about some of y’all.
After reading the article, I don’t disagree with the EFF. We shouldn’t rewrite copyright law to ban creative generation of {art}. AI generated images only increases competition, which is good for consumers of {art}. I do agree that copyright should still exist to prevent duplicate {art} being sold by a new individual claiming it as their own.
I think the tricky thing with AI is that as the end user, it’s still your responsibility to identify when you might be infringing on someone else’s copyright. I imagine that will be very difficult to do. Perhaps we need an AI copyright agent that can ingest your {art} and compare against all existing {art} for percent copyright infringement score.
In my opinion, the biggest thing I worry about is small creators having their work stolen, repackaged, and sold by big corporations. Which copyright protects. In fact with AI assisted lawyering, it might actually be even easier for small timers to protect their stuff, just like the big wigs do.
Abolishing copyright altogether is just such a wild, knee jerk take.
> it might actually be even easier for small timers to protect their stuff
It's easier to not get my stuff stolen if we add superthieves on cocaine?
The EFF has managed to keep to the letter of its principles while discarding the spirit of them; it's now defending enormous commercial concerns that hoover up and hoard data, at the expense of people creating and sharing information.
A small number of huge corporations keeping tight control of data and access to data is not a pro-freedom stance.
We need to limit copyright to commercial use. Piracy only hurts corporate profits (CDPR proved it will never bankrupt a studio) but a media company getting an artist to work for them and not paying is seriously unfair.
This kind of breaks down with independent artists but any economic loss for them would be way less important than the benefits of a system where all culture is shared and open for modification. We can't put the interests of a small group over everyone else if the members of that group choose to be in it.
And what if that actually leads to less open-ness? If I license code under a copyleft license, users are forced to give back their changes to the public. Without copyright they would not be forced to do this, which means less work will be published.