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Sure, you can make a slippery slope argument, but there is something substantially more "fictional" / artificial / unnatural about copyright/IP than currencies

Sure, you can make a slippery slope argument, but there is something substantially more "fictional" / artificial / unnatural about copyright/IP than currencies and other social constructs you are equivocating with. Storytelling is as old as language itself and might even be older than our particular species, and is basically copyright infringement. The same goes for tool-making, which is thought to be one of the sparks that gave rise to our species' vast intelligence. That's how imaginary copyright and IP in general is, let's take the thing we've been doing since literally the dawn of time, copying and sharing information for free and building upon and improving it, and portray this practice as "unnatural" and "unlicensed" and in fact let's set up a restrictive framework under which most of the technological and cultural achievements in human history and before would have been impossible or severely hampered. It reeks of artificiality, way more than money and other things do. It was created by corporations to make it easier for them to form monopolies around unchallenged control over a particular intellectual property or idea, and now that it is becoming inconvenient for them with the advent of AI, they will probably get rid of it or re-invent it in some way that even further benefits them. It also matters very little what we do because in the end we will be out-competed by other countries like China that don't draw these artificial intellectual lines that hamper progress.

xpe 3y ago
The discussion so far is rather dull and dogmatic. Wouldn't it be better to read something produced by scholars? Has anyone in this thread dedicated thousands of hours to understanding these topics deeply? (I would assign a probability estimate of less than 1%.) So, instead of swimming in the kiddie pool here, go read something substantive from people who "went pro" in these areas. I suggest: ## "Rhetoric and Reality in Copyright Law" by Stewart E. Sterk Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... > Why give authors an exclusive right to their writings? Copyright rhetoric generally offers two answers. The first is instrumental: copyright provides an incentive for authors to create and disseminate works of social value. By giving authors a monopoly over their works, copyright corrects for the underincentive to create that might result if free riders were permitted to share in the value created by an author's efforts. The second answer is desert: copyright rewards authors, who simply deserve recompense for their contributions whether or not recompense would induce them to engage in creative activity. > The rhetoric evokes sympathetic images of the author at work. The instrumental justification for copyright paints a picture of an author struggling to avoid abandoning his calling in order to feed his family. By contrast, the desert justification conjures up a genius irrevocably committed to his work, resigned - or oblivious - to living conditions not commensurate with his social contributions. The two images have a common thread: extending the scope of copyright protection relieves the author's plight. > Indeed, the same rhetoric· - emphasizing both incentives and desert - consistently has been invoked to justify two centuries of copyright expansion. Unfortunately, however, the rhetoric captures only a small slice of contemporary copyright reality. Although some copyright protection indeed may be necessary to induce creative activity, copyright doctrine now extends well beyond the contours of the instrumental justification. ... ## "Copyright Nonconsequentialism" by David McGowan Missouri Law Review. https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art... > This Article explores the foundations of copyright law. It tries to explain why those who debate copyright often seem to talk past each other. I contend the problem is that copyright scholars pay too much attention to instrumental arguments, which are often indeterminate, and too little to the first principles that affect how one approaches copyright law. > Most arguments about copyright law use instrumental language to make consequentialist arguments. It is common for scholars to contend one or another rule will advance or impede innovation, the efficient allocation and production of expression, personal autonomy, consumer welfare, the "robustness" of public debate, and so on.' Most of these instrumental arguments, though not quite all of them, reduce to propositions that cannot be tested or rejected empirically. Such propositions therefore cannot explain existing doctrine or the positions taken in debate. > These positions vary widely. Consumer advocates favor broad fair use rights and narrow liability standards for contributory infiringement; producer advocates favor the reverse.' Most of the arguments for both consumers and producers prove too much. It is easy to say that the right to exclude is needed to provide incentives for authors. It is hard to show that any particular rules provide optimal incentives. It is easy to point to deviations from the model of perfect competition. It is hard to show why these deviations imply particular rules.
mewpmewp2 3y ago
I think your point is, that copyright is whatever we decide it to be, as with other things we use in society, but we should decide by what is most useful for the society as a whole, in this case it might be that, we have to not care about it, because it might be societal danger to block AI evolvement as competitors who don't care will get ahead. This might override the usual benefit of protecting people's output so they would be more incentivised to share and create their output in the first place.
Intralexical 3y ago
> Sure, you can make a slippery slope argument, but there is something substantially more "fictional" / artificial / unnatural about copyright/IP than currencies and other social constructs you are equivocating with. I think there's probably some modern bias in this perspective, about how "natural"/"real" money is. Early human populations certainly didn't have the same concepts of currency, land ownership, etc. that we do today. Communally sharing resources to help each other/ourselves is older than our species, in fact common to multiple species, and the other social constructs like "money" get in the way of it too. > That's how imaginary copyright and IP in general is, let's take the thing we've been doing since literally the dawn of time, copying and sharing information for free and building upon and improving it, and portray this practice as "unnatural" and "unlicensed" and […] It was created by corporations to make it easier for them to form monopolies around unchallenged control over a particular intellectual property or idea, and now that it is becoming inconvenient for them with the advent of AI, they will probably get rid of it or re-invent it in some way that even further benefits them. Wikipedia says that King Diarmait Mac Cerbhaill adjudicated what was basically a copyright case over the Cathach as early as the sixth century, and the legal basis of copyright is founded in moral, economic, and property rights that existed in ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman societies. Apparently, it took the printing press for unauthorized copying to become a big enough issue to be codified in law, but the poet Martial was complaining about missed profits from unauthorized copying and "book sellers would sometimes pay a well-regarded author for first access to a text for copying" (I.E. there was something resembling IP licensing, enforced by physical access rather than law) back during Roman times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#Early_developments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#Early_dev...
- sam0x17 3y ago
  Sure, but imagine if someone had patented the wheel and decided not to license it to anyone...

xpe 3y ago

The discussion so far is rather dull and dogmatic. Wouldn't it be better to read something produced by scholars? Has anyone in this thread dedicated thousands of hours to understanding these topics deeply? (I would assign a probability estimate of less than 1%.) So, instead of swimming in the kiddie pool here, go read something substantive from people who "went pro" in these areas. I suggest: ## "Rhetoric and Reality in Copyright Law" by Stewart E. Sterk Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... > Why give authors an exclusive right to their writings? Copyright rhetoric generally offers two answers. The first is instrumental: copyright provides an incentive for authors to create and disseminate works of social value. By giving authors a monopoly over their works, copyright corrects for the underincentive to create that might result if free riders were permitted to share in the value created by an author's efforts. The second answer is desert: copyright rewards authors, who simply deserve recompense for their contributions whether or not recompense would induce them to engage in creative activity. > The rhetoric evokes sympathetic images of the author at work. The instrumental justification for copyright paints a picture of an author struggling to avoid abandoning his calling in order to feed his family. By contrast, the desert justification conjures up a genius irrevocably committed to his work, resigned - or oblivious - to living conditions not commensurate with his social contributions. The two images have a common thread: extending the scope of copyright protection relieves the author's plight. > Indeed, the same rhetoric· - emphasizing both incentives and desert - consistently has been invoked to justify two centuries of copyright expansion. Unfortunately, however, the rhetoric captures only a small slice of contemporary copyright reality. Although some copyright protection indeed may be necessary to induce creative activity, copyright doctrine now extends well beyond the contours of the instrumental justification. ... ## "Copyright Nonconsequentialism" by David McGowan Missouri Law Review. https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art... > This Article explores the foundations of copyright law. It tries to explain why those who debate copyright often seem to talk past each other. I contend the problem is that copyright scholars pay too much attention to instrumental arguments, which are often indeterminate, and too little to the first principles that affect how one approaches copyright law. > Most arguments about copyright law use instrumental language to make consequentialist arguments. It is common for scholars to contend one or another rule will advance or impede innovation, the efficient allocation and production of expression, personal autonomy, consumer welfare, the "robustness" of public debate, and so on.' Most of these instrumental arguments, though not quite all of them, reduce to propositions that cannot be tested or rejected empirically. Such propositions therefore cannot explain existing doctrine or the positions taken in debate. > These positions vary widely. Consumer advocates favor broad fair use rights and narrow liability standards for contributory infiringement; producer advocates favor the reverse.' Most of the arguments for both consumers and producers prove too much. It is easy to say that the right to exclude is needed to provide incentives for authors. It is hard to show that any particular rules provide optimal incentives. It is easy to point to deviations from the model of perfect competition. It is hard to show why these deviations imply particular rules.

mewpmewp2 3y ago

I think your point is, that copyright is whatever we decide it to be, as with other things we use in society, but we should decide by what is most useful for the society as a whole, in this case it might be that, we have to not care about it, because it might be societal danger to block AI evolvement as competitors who don't care will get ahead. This might override the usual benefit of protecting people's output so they would be more incentivised to share and create their output in the first place.

Intralexical 3y ago

> Sure, you can make a slippery slope argument, but there is something substantially more "fictional" / artificial / unnatural about copyright/IP than currencies and other social constructs you are equivocating with. I think there's probably some modern bias in this perspective, about how "natural"/"real" money is. Early human populations certainly didn't have the same concepts of currency, land ownership, etc. that we do today. Communally sharing resources to help each other/ourselves is older than our species, in fact common to multiple species, and the other social constructs like "money" get in the way of it too. > That's how imaginary copyright and IP in general is, let's take the thing we've been doing since literally the dawn of time, copying and sharing information for free and building upon and improving it, and portray this practice as "unnatural" and "unlicensed" and […] It was created by corporations to make it easier for them to form monopolies around unchallenged control over a particular intellectual property or idea, and now that it is becoming inconvenient for them with the advent of AI, they will probably get rid of it or re-invent it in some way that even further benefits them. Wikipedia says that King Diarmait Mac Cerbhaill adjudicated what was basically a copyright case over the Cathach as early as the sixth century, and the legal basis of copyright is founded in moral, economic, and property rights that existed in ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman societies. Apparently, it took the printing press for unauthorized copying to become a big enough issue to be codified in law, but the poet Martial was complaining about missed profits from unauthorized copying and "book sellers would sometimes pay a well-regarded author for first access to a text for copying" (I.E. there was something resembling IP licensing, enforced by physical access rather than law) back during Roman times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#Early_developments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#Early_dev...

sam0x17 3y ago
Sure, but imagine if someone had patented the wheel and decided not to license it to anyone...