> Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior.
Intellectual property is as real as private property (which is a lot more elaborate and weird than possession and territoriality, which is the most that has any natural basis). It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished and the other this fundamental sacred thing that should be respected absolutely (as many do).
We made it up. We made all this up. We do it for an outcome.
Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property. That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely. That’s why IP rights expire at some point, or have fair use that doesn’t harm the IP rights holder, something other forms of property don’t have. Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes.
I think AI training falls most likely in the fair use category of intellectual property: there is some societal benefit* that requires no actual harm** to the IP holder, therefore it’s a good trade-off for society if we poke a hole in the social construct of property to get that benefit.
*Let’s put aside the question of whether AI is good for society or private ownership of AI models is good for society. Important questions but separate from the theory. IF IT IS GOOD, it follows the above. If it is not good, then of course it does not.
**Also not a fully settled question. Again, an important debate to have and the tradeoffs here matter. If the harms are small enough, the societal benefit could be worth it. Both notes have to be true for this to be worthy of “fair use”.
> Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property.
The idea of IP as an economic tool to foster creation comes out of the UK and subsequently the US. In mainland Europe, IP comes out of the French Revolution and the idea that copyright is like a "moral right" that you intrinsically deserve for putting in the effort to create something. This viewpoint has de facto won out because as global commerce and global culture has become more and more widespread, everybody has standardized on the longest durations (the standard has long been "life + 50 years" in Europe) so one country doesn't have to worry about freeing up its works for "exploitation" by another country.
> the idea that copyright is like a "moral right" that you intrinsically deserve for putting in the effort to create something
Nope. "[the United States Congress shall have power] 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."
The ends is promoting progress. The means for that is prescribed by a limited monopoly as an incentive to those ends.
At least in the US.
Please read the entire sentence you're quoting, then ask yourself whether that sentence is referring to the US, or to somewhere else.
This is going to blow your mind, but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed. IP laws are nothing but rent seeking.
Yes, and we lived in a world of guilds, Orders and secrets which kept their knowledge tightly within themselves.
Music and art was created by patronage. Entire periods o where the art that mattered was made by the powers that moved the world.
For my whole life the goal was to move away from that era, not to see it recreated.
Also, this is a debate that English speakers can enjoy on a website for an US based accelerator. Most of humanity doesn’t even have the standing to be heard in this conversation.
> This is going to blow your mind
No. it won't blow anyone's mind. Not a single person.
> but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed.
^^^ cherry-picked, incomplete reading of history.
^^^ unsubstantiated claim.
> That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely.
All property is fundamentally about exclusion and control to allow for private exploitation. That common bit of rhetoric about copying misses that point. The reason private property exists is not because land (for instance) can't be copied.
> Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes.
You should note that you misread me: I didn't say they were identical in every respect, I said their "reality" is the same. They're both made up social constructs. One isn't more fundamental than the other.
> It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished
Hear me out. Property rights exist to assign stewardship and use rights over rivalrous goods. goods where the use of the good precludes the use of that good for its purpose by another party. If you take my bike, I cannot ride it to work. This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons (see the highly successful fisheries rights, NOx and SOx emissions markets as propertization schemes)
"Intellectual property" (except for trademark if you want to get pedantic), is not rivalrous, and its primary purpose is to be shared, not hoarded. Therefore intellectual property isn't a thing, creating it as a legal construct was a mistake that has hamstrung society for a long time.
Copies are not rivalrous, but the underlying creativity absolutely is. If I pay someone to draw a picture, that's labor, and they've got a finite number of hours to sell. Except it's also very inconvenient to pay for creative works this way: drawings and artists are not fungible with one another. More importantly, quality and desirability of the work is incredibly variable. The buyer of the art is bearing the risk of the art being bad.
What copyright lets you do[1] is offload that risk onto a publisher[0]. Instead of having to pay to commission every piece of art, a publisher can do that, and then sell the now-monopolized copies of whatever art turns out to actually be valuable.
A lot of hay was made during the Piracy Wars over filesharing tools breaking this bargain. A bunch of data hoarders with an interest in sharing media made it possible to just get the shit for free. This created a social dynamic where artists were annoyed about it, but publishers were Fucking Pissed. You could even measure how publisher-brained an artist got by how angry they were over Napster[2].
AI generated art also breaks this bargain, by making creative labor nearly non-rivalrous. The only cost is electricity and GPUs. This has created nearly the opposite reaction: artists are pissed while publishers don't care, because AI is to publishers like tort reform is to insurance companies. A publisher that gets art for free doesn't care if everyone else has it, because they have the payola dividend: they can push whatever slop they want onto the market and the market will eat it because they're big and powerful.
> This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons
The copyright maximalists would argue that free reuse of creative works is a tragedy of the commons. I certainly remember hearing that phrase bandied about a lot during the Piracy Wars.
It's also important to note that "tragedy of the commons" is not a natural law, but a specific framing that is used to justify antisocial ends. The communal ownership so decried worked perfectly well in England for hundreds of years until the ruling classes found it inconvenient and abolished it. The kind of ecological collapse the tragedy attempts to invoke did not happen because there were already communal means of preventing overuse of the land. In fact, an emissions market is probably closer to communal management than enclosure.
Also none of this changes the underlying logic that AI companies are trying to enclose the intellectual commons, and that their business model relies on being able to replace human brains with machine intelligence they can rent out by the megatoken.
[0] Individuals who self-publish included.
[1] To be clear, copyright was created as a censorship regime, it just happens to be useful for other things.
[2] In Lars Ulrich's defense, they weren't just angry that Metallica songs were on Napster, they were specifically angry that Napster had their latest album before it was in stores.
You're confusing a primary use from a secondary (the right to make money/exchange for labor). In the case of "drawing a picture", being able to "make money from a picture" is not primary
Yes, that's why I said property (not just IP) is a social construct.
Yes, I'm agreeing with you.
OH. Cool.