> Copyright is serving exactly nobody today
Except for nearly everyone who writes anything (including software) or other artistic pursuits to make a living. This includes a majority of people here on HN.
> Copyright is serving exactly nobody today
Except for nearly everyone who writes anything (including software) or other artistic pursuits to make a living. This includes a majority of people here on HN.
yeah I wouldn't be able to put food on the table if my employer didn't have exclusive license to the glue we use to stick together all that open source code we rely on. Which we now generate exclusively using AI, products of which are of unclear copyright status.
Modern IP law inhibits productivity more than it helps, imo. LLMs have fundamentally changed our line of work, and they have done so by completely ignoring the existing legal framework for IP. We should not defend the current implementation just because some people might suffer reduced earning potential.
Copyright was not designed to maximize productivity. It was designed to maximize creativity and inventiveness (or, as stated in the US Constitution, the progress of science and the useful arts).
> t was designed to maximize creativity and inventiveness
If you look at outcomes it has completely failed while making big corps very rich in the process
Linux is a marvel of the world and a large amount of its contributions have been made by people being paid to do so for commercial purposes - and I am not sure that would be true without the GPL. Is there a convincing argument there?
And outside open source there has been a staggering amount of creative work at all quality levels done for commercial purposes under the protection of copyright. Is there a convincing argument that the last century of software and music and books and etc would have been just as staggering without copyright?
I would love to hear such an argument. In my youth I thought copyright was blatantly stupid and should be abolished. I still sorta think that but I don't have a convincing argument in the face of the absolutely massive amount of good work that has been produced under it.
I’ve written software all my life, copyright has never been relevant to my earnings at all, trade secrets have been to some extent. Frankly copyright was meant to enable more sharing and benefiting the public domain, instead it’s become a cancer…
For every rule there is an exception.
People made a living juste fine before copyright stop spreading myths