6 ms·

Legality aside I think copyright of digital things in the digital age is a net negative to humanity.

matheusmoreira 3y ago
Completely agree. Copyright should be abolished. All intellectual work is information, information is just bits and bits are just numbers. It's quite simply delusional to believe you can own numbers in the 21st century, the age of information and ubiquitous globally networked pocket supercomputers. This is just a felony contempt of business model issue. Computers invalidated their business models and they're doing everything they possibly can to hang on for dear life. Society needs to move on already.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  This goes too far. Digital media are not only long series of numbers. They are often difficult-to-create expressions in image, video, and even interactive forms; regardless of their serialization format. Books are just strings of letters, yet copyright has still been useful to increase the volume and utility of books. All that said, I do find the life+70y an absurdly long time.
- blehn 3y ago
  That seems like a great way to destroy what is left of art as we know it. Anna Karenina is just numbers. In The Mood For Love is just numbers. Right. What do you propose is the business model for artists in the absence of copyright?
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    I propose getting paid before doing the work for the actual labor of creation. Crowdfunding, patronage, comissions, sponsorships all seem like ethical ways to get things done sustainably. That way creators get paid before they work, not after. We must strengthen these business models that don't depend on artificial scarcity because this number selling nonsense was over the second computers were invented. It's as dumb as asserting that you need permission to use memcpy or the mov CPU instruction.
    - blehn 3y ago
      How do you know what the value of the art will be before it's created? Guns N' Roses is a top 40 artist on Spotify nearly 35 years after producing an album. Should they not have been paid after 1991? If you argue that they were a popular band and therefore should have been paid accordingly up front, well what about their debut record, which sold 30 million copies? How would you predict that value before its creation (or even after)? If you're saying that only the labor has value, and all labor is valued equally, that sounds sort of like marxism, which could be fine, but it's hard to say how well artists would be supported in that case. In the US, the original copyright length was 14 years, and then 28, and eventually the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. I think the intent of the law is economically justified, but the current length is outrageous.
      - ang_cire 3y ago
        You should be paid the accurate value of the labor. The pay should not scale more when no additional labor takes place. This is how art worked for millenia; someone commissions a chapel roof painting, someone commissions a concerto, someone commissions a statue, someone buys a chair, etc. Artists still do this today, and there is no issue determining value beforehand. Artists list their commission prices, or their hourly costs, etc. This is a perfectly normal thing that happens everyday.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >You should be paid the accurate value of the labor. that's gone out the door in the digital age. Compaies at this point have spent centuries trying to enfoce this model while witholding stuff like stock and royalties to take a part of what the company enjoys by protifting for decades off of a single (underpaid) piece of labor. I don't exactly sympathize with a robot now trying to do the same. Pay your labor.
        Vicinity9635 3y ago
        Exactly. Somehow this idea that you keep getting paid for literally the same thing over and over again for work you did once is the absurdity. And ridiculously greedy. It seems to have been invented by laywers, for lawyers. Nobody else really benefits as much as they do. The whole entirety of society vs. a single profession of dubious morality.
  - Art9681 3y ago
    The market at large will determine that. If people value cheap AI generated images more than talented human curated art then that's what it will be. If a market exists to buy unique pieces where an artist put brush to canvas and priced their work at $1000 instead of the cheap $10 poster that can be mass produced then thats what it will be. If no one wants to pay $1000 for your unique piece, then the market has spoken and your art is not worth that much. Like everything else, an equilibrium ill be reached. Good artists will be fine. The other 99% of self declared artists will fade away into obscurity.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      None of that is what copyright protects. And it lessens the argument when you can argue that LLMs are essentially stealing a human art's work to be used to generate cheap images. Similar to how if you took commissioned art, printed out 1000 copies, and sold them for $1 a piece. Copyright means that you need to at least pay that artist you stole from in some way, which the government enforces so artists don't stop creating.

Completely agree. Copyright should be abolished. All intellectual work is information, information is just bits and bits are just numbers. It's quite simply delusional to believe you can own numbers in the 21st century, the age of information and ubiquitous globally networked pocket supercomputers. This is just a felony contempt of business model issue. Computers invalidated their business models and they're doing everything they possibly can to hang on for dear life. Society needs to move on already.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
This goes too far. Digital media are not only long series of numbers. They are often difficult-to-create expressions in image, video, and even interactive forms; regardless of their serialization format. Books are just strings of letters, yet copyright has still been useful to increase the volume and utility of books. All that said, I do find the life+70y an absurdly long time.
blehn 3y ago
That seems like a great way to destroy what is left of art as we know it. Anna Karenina is just numbers. In The Mood For Love is just numbers. Right. What do you propose is the business model for artists in the absence of copyright?
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  I propose getting paid before doing the work for the actual labor of creation. Crowdfunding, patronage, comissions, sponsorships all seem like ethical ways to get things done sustainably. That way creators get paid before they work, not after. We must strengthen these business models that don't depend on artificial scarcity because this number selling nonsense was over the second computers were invented. It's as dumb as asserting that you need permission to use memcpy or the mov CPU instruction.
  - blehn 3y ago
    How do you know what the value of the art will be before it's created? Guns N' Roses is a top 40 artist on Spotify nearly 35 years after producing an album. Should they not have been paid after 1991? If you argue that they were a popular band and therefore should have been paid accordingly up front, well what about their debut record, which sold 30 million copies? How would you predict that value before its creation (or even after)? If you're saying that only the labor has value, and all labor is valued equally, that sounds sort of like marxism, which could be fine, but it's hard to say how well artists would be supported in that case. In the US, the original copyright length was 14 years, and then 28, and eventually the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. I think the intent of the law is economically justified, but the current length is outrageous.
    - ang_cire 3y ago
      You should be paid the accurate value of the labor. The pay should not scale more when no additional labor takes place. This is how art worked for millenia; someone commissions a chapel roof painting, someone commissions a concerto, someone commissions a statue, someone buys a chair, etc. Artists still do this today, and there is no issue determining value beforehand. Artists list their commission prices, or their hourly costs, etc. This is a perfectly normal thing that happens everyday.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >You should be paid the accurate value of the labor. that's gone out the door in the digital age. Compaies at this point have spent centuries trying to enfoce this model while witholding stuff like stock and royalties to take a part of what the company enjoys by protifting for decades off of a single (underpaid) piece of labor. I don't exactly sympathize with a robot now trying to do the same. Pay your labor.
      - Vicinity9635 3y ago
        Exactly. Somehow this idea that you keep getting paid for literally the same thing over and over again for work you did once is the absurdity. And ridiculously greedy. It seems to have been invented by laywers, for lawyers. Nobody else really benefits as much as they do. The whole entirety of society vs. a single profession of dubious morality.
- Art9681 3y ago
  The market at large will determine that. If people value cheap AI generated images more than talented human curated art then that's what it will be. If a market exists to buy unique pieces where an artist put brush to canvas and priced their work at $1000 instead of the cheap $10 poster that can be mass produced then thats what it will be. If no one wants to pay $1000 for your unique piece, then the market has spoken and your art is not worth that much. Like everything else, an equilibrium ill be reached. Good artists will be fine. The other 99% of self declared artists will fade away into obscurity.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    None of that is what copyright protects. And it lessens the argument when you can argue that LLMs are essentially stealing a human art's work to be used to generate cheap images. Similar to how if you took commissioned art, printed out 1000 copies, and sold them for $1 a piece. Copyright means that you need to at least pay that artist you stole from in some way, which the government enforces so artists don't stop creating.