if theres just one good thing coming out of ai its breaking copyright law forever. no one should be able to "own" ideas. royalties for commercial use is another thing and i support it but what we know as (non commercial) piracy and unlicensed fan art should be 100% legal
Then go ahead and abolish copyright for everyone. Instead we're stuck in an even worse system where the hypercorporations gleefully plagiarize everyone else while sending SWAT teams to kill anyone who pirates a movie.
Jesus is just an uncopyrighted Mickey Mouse if you have no morals. People have been abusing that fact for a long time and have made some pretty abhorrent products.
Obviously there's an ideal middle ground, but what LLMs do is allow free transfer of knowledge while still (mostly) preserving the protections that copyright should be protecting. For example, I can have an LLM give me the entire plot of a book (which is fine), but it won't spit out an exact copy of the book.
The problem is that something like (say) a song is much more than an idea. It’s an idea + work (arrangement, production, performance, etc. depending on the situation). The argument for owning work, at least for X number of years in a limited way (vs. our current system), seems reasonable to me.
Copyright specifically doesn't and never did protect "ideas", it protects expression.
This is an incredibly naive view of intellectual property. If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things. Do you think any of your favorite movies and TV shows ever get made without copyright protections? Of course not, because money needs to change hands for those things to be funded.
> If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things
How do you explain the creative works of writing, music, and art that existed in the millennia of human history between the Mesopotamians and the Enlightenment era?
They tended to be solo productions, or sponsored by aristocratic patrons. Anyone suggesting that we could create movies, TV, music, or games on the scale we do today, without copyright, does not seem worth taking seriously.
I support copyright reform, but that history has a large portion of "get lucky while sucking-up to the local rich dudes for a patron", which... isn't ideal either.
Copying was prohibitively expensive.
The original statement was about there being little incentive to create a work you don't "own"
Difficulty in copying is irrelevant to owning it.
Moreover, this does not address music or spoken word. A pre-copyright musician can just listen to a piece and play it in the next town over. A poet or storyteller can just memorize a work and retell it.
Is it the pursuit accumulating capital (incentive to profit) or merely to fund something? You switch from the former to the latter. Why do you believe that profit is reliant on copyright? Piracy is so widespread that copyright may as well not exist (in the context of the consumption of media) outside of moralizing rhetoric, and yet insane profits are made all the same.
I cannot at all relate to being so devoid of passions in all categories but the accumulation of capital. If we are to justify copyright and the concept of intellectual property writ large, then as far as I can see its only real usecase is in defending against precisely the people who are possessed by an obsession with capital, those dragons who merely care to see their hoard grow larger. Unfortunately, that's not how these systems are structured in our society. The transferability of intellectual property all but warps the idea into something that instead empowers those it should disarm.
Accumulation of capital is the engine by which this stuff runs. You aren't going to get a staff of full-time writers, actors, set designers, costume designers, composers, and editors to create something great off of passion alone. These creatives may love what they do but at the end of the day they need to eat. The promise of future returns are why works like movies and tv shows receive the massive funding necessary to be produced.
You should check out this thing called open source software
> You should check out this thing called open source software
Open source actually demonstrates that copyright serves a purpose. There are still customers for non-open software, even when open alternatives exist, so the ability to monetize brings new offerings to the economy.
Open source software is unique in that it takes little to no capital investment to create. People post free art too. It doesn't mean that Game of Thrones didn't cost anything to produce.
Writing books and creating music also takes no capital investment
And people do do those things out of passion, and many of them are happy to share it so you can listen to it for free. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't own the right to control what happens to what they made.
Sure, but you said that open source software is unique because it doesn't take capital. It isn't unique, as demonstrated by the two other examples (out of many) that I posted.
Whether someone should own the right to control is a separate issue. Your previous response made it seem like the lack of capital requirement was the distinction, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
You argued that if you didn't own the copyright, there would be no incentive for creating and sharing work. Someone said that open source software shows that you can have creative work without needing to maintain ownership. You then said that was only applicable to software.
It clearly isn't, because of my examples.
You should check out this thing called GPL that is the standard license of open source projects like Linux, and heavily depends on copyright laws.
Or are you suggesting open source software is public domain?
You may want to review your history. The GPL is copyleft -it only exists to subvert copyright law by using it against itself in a sort of intellectual legal judo. If "IP" laws were not as they were, there would be no need for the GPL. Software would be Free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
A key component of the GPL is the requirement that source of code of programs that use the GPL code be made available. Without IP laws, how would you achieve that goal of the GPL?
Even if companies didn't have copyright protection on their source code, that doesn't mean they'd post it all on the internet for anybody to freely download.
No, not all of them, but some companies, many organizations, and plenty of individuals would.
Not everything has to be done for a profit. Plenty of us make software, art, and technology because we find it fun and interesting to work on, and because we want to live in a world that is richer for it.
Removing draconian intellectual property laws that mostly only benefit the giant corporations that lobbied for them isn't going to stop me from doing so, and I doubt it would stop many others.
You are not a developer so you don't understand you can compile to a binary without revealing your sources?
No copyright -> No GPL -> anyone can release their own close source version of open source software.
Why do you think GPL was create in the first place? We always had public domain you know.
My compilers work just fine? Perhaps I'm not sure what your point is.
My point is that you are unable to understand the difference between GPL and public domain.
Okay.
This is naive in the opposite. Creators gonna create.
Creators can only create as long as they can sustain the costs of creating (including opportunity cost).
Who is giving a creator millions of dollars to create something if there is no guaranteed path to recouping production costs.
Are we going the communist soviet union route where everything is decided by central committee?
That is not the only scale to create on. Also, Linux is free. There’s more than one way to make something available.
Just a fundamental disagreement then. I want to live in the world that created The Lord of the Rings.
Linux is clearly not public domain as it has a GPL license. And GPL heavily depends on copyright laws.
Capitalists who capitalize on creative outlets need capital to incentivize them to do so. It's basically circular.
Those of us who create for creation's sake need no other reason. I create because I want to, not because I want to use it to gain capital.
Sure, those lines get muddy when you want to do it professionally, but that's a separate argument.
>Those of us who create for creation's sake need no other reason. I create because I want to, not because I want to use it to gain capital.
How do you create without capital? To make a film you need a camera crew, a sound crew, set designers, caterers, a director, scriptwriters. A world without professional creatives is so much poorer than the world we already have. Why would you give it up just for some vague notion of ideological purity.
You absolutely do not need a camera crew, a sound crew, set designers, and caterers to make a film. You need a director and scriptwriters, but those can be the same person. Do many film sets have all those? Absolutely. But one can still make a film without them. Some of the best films ever created were mostly the product of one person with a budget less than half that of the average car.
Would you be able to create big-budget movies without said big budget? Of course not. I obviously like some of those too, but who's to say that the larger budget made them better? It feels like you're conflating art creation with art business, but they are not the same thing.
I suppose you are okay with all animated films being impossible to create then.
>I obviously like some of those too, but who's to say that the larger budget made them better?
If you legitimately believe something like 2001: A Space Odyssey would be as good with a budget of $10,000 then that just seems delusional.
The world you want is one in which the only people who can create things are people who are wealthy by other means, there is no pathway for a talented but poor kid to go from making home movies to working on films without IP laws. They must abandon their dreams and go work in the coal mines or whatever. It is dystopian.
I want the most amount of people possible to be able to work as professional creatives because it enriches my life and the lives of everyone in the country I live in.
> I suppose you are okay with all animated films being impossible to create then.
i quite enjoyed watching some animations made on a $10 budget over winter. www.giraffest.ca
that and everything the NFB puts together.
Art is worth putting government money into
>i quite enjoyed watching some animations made on a $10 budget over winter. www.giraffest.ca
Sure, if you want to discount the thousands of hours (and dollars) that they spent to get good enough to make those things. People are willing to spent time and money getting good at animation because there is a career pathway for them.
Also there is a fundamental difference between a short experimental art film and a 90+ minute narrative feature film.
Exactly, it is the difference between creating as a hobby and creating as a profession. The latter is only possible when there are IP protections in place to ensure compensation.
The point is that without copyright you can' do it professionally. Someone will just sell whatever you created for you and you will not get a cent from it.
Yes, absolutely, and that is why history shows so few examples of any art having been created prior to the invention of copyright: nobody had any reason to do it.
Prior to the invention of copyright, it was not very cheap or easy to make a faithful copy of something. Books had to be type set by hand, before the printing press they had to be copied by hand. Photography of good enough quality to reproduce a painting is very very recent. So is ability to record a play well enough to enjoy it like you are there later.
>> If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things.
You do realize people created and shared things long before copyright became a thing, right?
Can you explain how something like the Lord of the Rings film series gets created in a world with no IP laws.
Many versions are made, the best ones get the most views. You don't need huge budgets and guaranteed revenue to make great art. In fact, I'd argue it's often the opposite. Most big budget movies suck these days.
Where is the money coming from? Who is financing the production?
The biggest problem is not the broken commercialization, but the broken attribution. People should be recognized, when they create art. Art is an important way of how we humans express ourselves.
If you penalize and stigmatize copying, you get broken attribution.
I wonder how many of the books I love would still have been written in a world where somebody could scoop them all up and post them on the internet for free (and run ads).
I wonder how many would be written if copyright was only 20 years instead of more than a century? To the point that most people will never be legally allowed to directly build off of the culture they grew up in.
Lord of the rings will be under copyright til roughly 2050. I think Tolkien's estate has gotten more than enough money from that book and it's time to let other use the word hobbit without the threat of a lawsuit.
> I wonder how many would be written if copyright was only 20 years instead of more than a century?
I expect it would not move the needle much. I support reduced copyright periods, though not in the specific way you do. But that's not what we're talking about here, is it? The comment I replied to seemed to be advocating for total abolition of copyright law, and my comment is written to be interpreted in that context.
> To the point that most people will never be legally allowed to directly build off of the culture they grew up in.
What specifically are you talking about? Every author borrows from what came before. Copyright law doesn't even enter the picture in the vast majority of cases, because you generally don't have to copy to "build off of the culture [you] grew up in".
For what it’s worth I think abolishing copyright wouldn’t have as big of an impact on art production as you do. Most artists (e.g. musicians or authors) aren’t struggling because their art is popular but copied by others (or lack of copyright). But because nobody listens to or reads their work.
Even before AI more people tried to be an author/musician than could ever hope to gain even financial success. I don’t think less copyright will dissuade them.
> every author borrows
Borrows yes. But that has changed drastically in the last 100 years because of what has become the copyright system.
I’ll be long dead and gone before people can make and publish their own LOTR, or Star Wars, or whatever franchise they grew up with. Disney would be impossible to start given the current regulations, all those tales would be locked up, and we would all be worse for it.
Simple piraciy is not even the worst possible outcome.
Without copyright, nothing stops one from simply selling a book under their own name.
Big publishers could just reprint anything and get it into brick & mortar stores. No money for authors.
Advocating for absolutely no copyright is wild.
The worthwhile ones would still be written. Even if they are not enjoyable. The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhibitable
> The worthwhile ones would still be written.
Citation needed, as well as your precise definition of "worthwhile".
> Even if they are not enjoyable.
Huh?
> The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhabitable
Yes, I understand that anti-copyright activists want to abolish copyright.
Farenheit 451 is a book with the same theme.
You are arguing in theoreticals, so you should not be surprised if your answers are hypotheticals.
In reality most art is done because the artist has something to say, and the money they get from it is only motivating in as much as it enables the artist to do more art. So I would guess in a world without copyright protection we would just find other ways to pay artists and a very similar amount of art would be produced.
You can see an example of this e.g. in Iceland where the market is way to small for art aimed at the domestic market to make enough money solely by selling it (possible with music; rare with books; not possible with movies). Instead the state has an extensive “artist salary“ program, which pays artist regardless of how well the art they produce sells. Unsurprisingly Iceland produces a lot of art and has many working artists.
People have been pirating books online for 20 years and in that time the number of books published per year has increased 15-fold. A number of my favorites have been released in that time.
Yeah, I think we are at the point where copyright doesn't exist anymore, at least for AI
All of human knowledge (an exaggeration, I know) at our finger tips. It's the most punk rock, anarchist thing tech has done since the internet and it's funny it's shaped as a product.
If you get the impression of punk and anarchy, it's only because you're not looking any deeper than the veneer. Underneath, it's nothing like punk or anarchy.
I'm considering the dispersement of tech. 3D printers disrupt needing to buy widgets from big companies and local llms disrupt needing to buy generalize software when you can make your own bespoke. AI will live on long after the big corporations burn out their money coffers.
I think the most punk rock, anarchist thing that could happen is someone leverages the shitty, pre-digested consumer-facing models to orchestrate a cybersecurity incident where the frontier base models are stolen and freely distributed to the public.
Sure, a few mega-corporations of the scale to upset entire markets owning all information and renting it out as they see fit is very punk. A cyberpunk dystopia specifically.
If you consider the local llm scene which is closing the gaps, mega corporations become less possessive of all information.
What? If I want to read Harry Potter or watch The Matrix an AI cannot produce something equally as good for me. So I need to pay those people, or break the law.
For lots of online knowledge/blogs I guess it is true but even here I often read explainer blogs because AI casts everything in a certain narrative/tone that isn’t always appropriate.
> If I want to read Harry Potter or watch The Matrix an AI cannot produce something equally as good for me.
Yet
This is insane. How will any intellectual or artistic work be sustainable in this world?
As a teenager I used to proclaim that "you can't own bits, maaaan" all the time. I've since grown up. Intellectual property is essential to safeguarding intellectual work. I'm not saying this out of greed – I'm a vocal advocate for the free software movement. It, too, relies on a semi-sane framework of intellectual property. So do Hollywood studios. So do the makers of AI (well, since they're not actually sustainable at all currently, I guess you can say they don't rely on anything).
That's the neat part, you won't.
Can we do that for Medical field?
Like if we know formulation of drug then drug (+ any smaller modification - through AI) could be new formulation. That will break current Medical patent system.
This is how the drug industry already works. I don’t think there’s any evidence “AI” (LLM) is capable of producing valid drug modifications.
In current status AI models cannot do that. But, if they do then it will break Medical Patent model.
The alternative to strong property rights and norms is secrecy and enforcement.
This is a strictly worse world in almost every sense. It's as if we abolished physical property rights and suggested people arm themselves to keep what is (was) theirs instead. Civilization, gone.
It’s a false equivalence to say that intellectual property is property. Taking your car deprives you of your car. Taking your idea lets civilization advance.
No. It means people don’t invest in things they can’t control or keep secret.
> Taking your car deprives you of your car. Taking your idea lets civilization advance.
Copyright is at the heart of the matter here, so let's focus on that. Copyright does not protect ideas.
Wanna rephrase so that we stay on topic?
lol, never going to happen. I remember when the RIAA was successfully able to shake down tens of thousands of individuals for pirating music in the 2000s.
If you’re a pleb, stealing copyrighted materials will get you some nasty fines, lawsuits and criminal charges. If you’re a megacorp with unlimited buckets of cash, then there is no accountability.
So if you pour your heart and soul into writing a novel over the course of years, and it becomes modestly successful earning you a little money in return for your sweat, I should be allowed to just copy it, give it away for free (hell, even say I wrote it – it's not as if it's even yours to own in your world)?
Yes.
I think you may be too optimistic about the state of affairs under capitalism. Very rarely do things change which don't benefit the owning class without direct action from the working class that puts adequate pressure on the rich, i.e actions which threatens their profits.