7 ms·

What about the copyrights purpose of furthering the arts and sciences?

JoshTriplett 2y ago
Copyright has utterly failed to serve that purpose for a long time, and has been actively counterproductive. But if you want to argue that copyright is counterproductive, I completely agree. That's an argument for reducing or eliminating it across the board, fairly, for everyone; it's not an argument for giving a free pass to AI training while still enforcing it on everyone else.
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  Could these "free passes" for AI training serve as a legal wedge to increase the scope of fair use in other cases? Pro-business selective enforcement sucks, but so long as model weights are being released and the public is benefiting then stubbornly insisting that overzealous copyright laws be enforced seems self-defeating.
- adra 2y ago
  Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Just because their lobbies tend to push the boundary of copyright into the absurd doesn't mean these industries aren't worth saving. There should be actually respectful lawmakers who seek for a balance of public and commercial interests.
  - pdonis 2y ago
    > Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Citation needed. There are many ways to make money from producing content other than restricting how copies of it can be distributed. The owner should be able to choose copyright as a means of control, but that doesn't mean nobody would create any content at all without copyright as a means of control.
    - boplicity 2y ago
      There's nothing preventing people from producing works and releasing them without copyright restriction. If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often. As it is now, especially in the creative fields (which I am most knowledgeable about), the current system has allowed for a incredible flourishing of creation, which you'd have to be pretty daft to deny.
      - TylerE 2y ago
        Given that copyrighting is automatic at the instant of creation, that is, um, debatable. Slapping 3 lines in LICENSE.TXT doesn’t override the Berne convention.
        trogdor 2y ago
        Are you claiming that an author cannot place their work in the public domain?
        pdonis 2y ago
        Yes, they can't, because there is no legally reliable way to do it (briefly, because the law really doesn't like the idea of property that doesn't have an owner, so if you try to place a work of yours in the public domain, what you're actually doing is making it abandoned property so anyone who wants to can claim they own it and restrict everyone else, including you, from using it). The best an author can do is to give a license that basically lets anyone do what they want with the work. Creative Commons has licenses that do that.
        tpush 2y ago
        In most of the world no, they can't.
      - chii 2y ago
        > If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often. that's not the argument. The fact that there currently are restrictions on producing derivative works is the problem. You cannot produce a star wars story, without getting consent from disney. You cannot write a harry potter story, without consent from Rowling.
  - cvwright 2y ago
    So true! Copyrights that last 20 years would be completely reasonable. Maybe with exponentially increasing fees for successive renewals, for super valuable properties like Disney movies.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    For that matter, if you think China ripping everyone else off is bad now… well, just wait until every company can do that.
    - Qwertious 2y ago
      If everyone could do it, it wouldn't be as big a deal - small western businesses would be on a more level playing field, since they would be almost as immune from being sued by big businesses as Chinese businesses are. As it is, small businesses aren't protected by patents (because a patent is a $10k+ ticket to a $100k+ lawsuit against a competitor with a $1M+ budget for lawyers) while still being bound by the restrictions of big business's patents. It's lose/lose.
    - DoItToMe81 2y ago
      Trademark isn't copyright, so no.
  - matheusmoreira 2y ago
    Nobody cares anymore. We're sick of their rent seeking, of their perpetual monopolies on culture. Balance? Compromise? We don't want to hear it. Nearly two hundred years ago one man warned everyone this would happen. Nobody listened. These are the consequences. "At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as “Robinson Crusoe” or the “Pilgrim’s Progress” shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living." https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyright/ https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
  - Zambyte 2y ago
    Books, music, and games are a lot older than copyright.
    - adra 2y ago
      Have you looked at who created these things by and large? For the most part, you have: - aristocrats that were wealthy that didn't need to "work" to survive and put food on the table - crafts people supported through the patronage of a rich person (or religious order) who deign to support your art - (kinda modern world) national governments who want to support their national art often as a fear that other larger nations cultural influences will dwarf their Are you implying that these three pillars will be able to produce anywhere near the current amount of content we produce? How in the world where digital copies are effectively free to copy and infinitum would a creator reap any benefits from that network effect? A modern equivalent would be famous YouTubers who all they do all day is "watch" other people's hard earned videos. The super lazy ones will not direct people to the original, don't provide meaningful commentary, just consumes the video as 'content' to feed their own audience and provides no value to the original creator. The position to kill copyright entirely would amplify this "just bypass the original source" to lower value of the original creator to zero.
      - Zambyte 2y ago
        > Are you implying that these three pillars will be able to produce anywhere near the current amount of content we produce? Do you think the vast "amount of content we produce" is actually propped up by copyright? Have you ever heard of someone who started their career on YouTube due to copyright? On the contrary, how often have you heard of people stopping their YouTube career due to copyright, or explicitly limiting the content they create? I have only heard of cases of the latter. In fact, the latter partially happened to me. > How in the world where digital copies are effectively free to copy and infinitum would a creator reap any benefits from that network effect? You are making an assumption that people should reap (monetary) benefits for creating things. What you are ignoring is that the world where digital copies are effectively free is also the world where original works are insanely cheap as well. In this world, people create regardless of monetary gain. To make this point: how much money did you make from this comment that you posted? It's covered by copyright, so surely you would not have created it if not for your own benefit.
  - copywrong2 2y ago
    Yeah many industries like: - Big Corps that buy IP - Patent Trolls - Companies that fuck over artists
    - freejazz 2y ago
      Why would anyone make video games if they couldn't make money from selling them?
      - sham1 2y ago
        Out of passion for the art. See also: free (libre) software video games released and distributed for free (gratis). Of course, money is a huge motivator, but so is self-expression.
        freejazz 2y ago
        Well they certainly aren't on level with each other in terms of motivation, so I don't think it's fair for you to say they are both huge motivators.
      - account42 2y ago
        Video games would actually be better of if the profit incentive was removed. Modern high-budget video games have become indistinguishable from slot machines that are optimized by literal psychologists to get you to waste as much of your money (and time) as possible without providing any meaningful experience. I'd rather see much fewer games created if what remains are games focused on having artistic and/or educational value rather than investment opportunities for wall street.
        freejazz 2y ago
        This is just your own sanctimony, go to a gamestop and ask people if they think we should have an IP regime where there is no gta or football games. What a ridiculous response.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - kibwen 2y ago
    This is a specious argument. It is impossible for us to gesture at the works of art that do not exist because of draconian copyright. Humans have been remixing each others' works for millions of years, and the artificial restriction on derivative work is actively destroying our collective culture. There should be thousands of professional works (books, movies, etc.) based on Lord Of The Rings by now, many of which would surpass the originals in quality given enough time, and we have been robbed of them. And Lord Of The Rings is an outlier in that it still remains culturally relevant despite its age; most works will remain copyrighted for far longer than their original audience was even alive, meaning that those millions of flowers never get their chance to bloom.
    - eropple 2y ago
      This is all true, and in a vacuum I agree with it. There's a pretty core problem with these kinds of assertions, though: people have to make rent. Never have I seen a substantiative, pass-the-sniff-test argument for how to make practical this system when your authors and your artists need to eat in a system of modern capital. So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow?
      - uhoh-itsmaciek 2y ago
        Copyright is not optimized for making sure artists and authors get enough to eat. It's optimized for people with a lot of money to make even more money by exploiting artists and authors. I doubt there's a simple answer (I certainly don't have one), but the current system is not exactly a creators' utopia.
      - Qwertious 2y ago
        Not the person you responded to, but: >So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow? Patreon (or liberapay etc). Take a look at youtube: so many creators are actively saying "youtube doesn't pay the bills, if you like us then please support us on Patreon". Patreon works. Some of the time, at least - just like copyright. Also crowdsourcing (e.g. Kickstarter), which worked out well for games like FTL and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Although, I personally don't believe copyright should be abolished - it just needs some amendments. It needs a duration amendment - not a flat duration (fast-fashion doesn't need even 5 years of copyright, but aerospace software regularly needs several decades just to break profitable), but either some duration-mechanism or a simple discrimination by industry. Also, I think any sort of functional copyright (e.g. software copyright) ought to have an incentive or requirement to publish the functional bits - for instance, router firmware ought to require the source code in escrow (to be published once copyright duration expires) for any legal protections against reverse-engineering to be mounted. Unpublished source code is a trade secret, and should be treated as such. Also, these discussions don't seem to mention fanfiction, which demonstrates plenty of people write good works without being professionally paid and without the protection of copyright.
kelnos 2y ago
That ship sailed long ago. While copyright can and is used at times to protect the "little guy", the law is written as it is in order to protect and further corporate interests. The current manifestation of copyright is about rent-seeking, not promoting innovation and creativity. That it may also do so is entirely coincidental.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Also, if it wasn't about rent-seeking and preventing access to works, copyright wouldn't have to last for decades, many multiples of a work's useful commercial life. The fact that it does last this long shows that it's not about promoting innovation and creativity.
- DoItToMe81 2y ago
  Copyright was invented by a cartel of noblemen, the British Stationer's Company, who, due to liberal reform, were going to lose their publishing monopoly. The implementation of copyright law as they helped pen allowed them to mostly continue their position while portraying it as "protecting the little guy". Funny how both the rhetoric and intentions are the same after three hundred years.
CobrastanJorji 2y ago
You want to look at the Supreme Court case "Eldred v. Ashcroft." Eldred challenged Congress for retroactively extending existing copyrights, for extending the patent protections on existing inventions could not possibly further arts and sciences. They also argued that if Congress had the power to continually extend existing copyrights by N years every N years, the Constitutional power of "for a limited time" had no meaning. The Supreme Court's decision was a bunch of bullshit around "well, y'know, people live longer these days, and some creators are still alive who expected these to last their whole lives, and golly, coincidentally this really helps giant corporations."
teeray 2y ago
Copyright’s purpose is a cudgel to be wielded to enrich the holder for, ideally, eternity. If “eternity” is threatened, you use proceeds from copyright to change copyright law to protect future proceeds.

Copyright has utterly failed to serve that purpose for a long time, and has been actively counterproductive. But if you want to argue that copyright is counterproductive, I completely agree. That's an argument for reducing or eliminating it across the board, fairly, for everyone; it's not an argument for giving a free pass to AI training while still enforcing it on everyone else.

idle_zealot 2y ago
Could these "free passes" for AI training serve as a legal wedge to increase the scope of fair use in other cases? Pro-business selective enforcement sucks, but so long as model weights are being released and the public is benefiting then stubbornly insisting that overzealous copyright laws be enforced seems self-defeating.
adra 2y ago
Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Just because their lobbies tend to push the boundary of copyright into the absurd doesn't mean these industries aren't worth saving. There should be actually respectful lawmakers who seek for a balance of public and commercial interests.
- pdonis 2y ago
  > Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Citation needed. There are many ways to make money from producing content other than restricting how copies of it can be distributed. The owner should be able to choose copyright as a means of control, but that doesn't mean nobody would create any content at all without copyright as a means of control.
  - boplicity 2y ago
    There's nothing preventing people from producing works and releasing them without copyright restriction. If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often. As it is now, especially in the creative fields (which I am most knowledgeable about), the current system has allowed for a incredible flourishing of creation, which you'd have to be pretty daft to deny.
    - TylerE 2y ago
      Given that copyrighting is automatic at the instant of creation, that is, um, debatable. Slapping 3 lines in LICENSE.TXT doesn’t override the Berne convention.
      - trogdor 2y ago
        Are you claiming that an author cannot place their work in the public domain?
        pdonis 2y ago
        Yes, they can't, because there is no legally reliable way to do it (briefly, because the law really doesn't like the idea of property that doesn't have an owner, so if you try to place a work of yours in the public domain, what you're actually doing is making it abandoned property so anyone who wants to can claim they own it and restrict everyone else, including you, from using it). The best an author can do is to give a license that basically lets anyone do what they want with the work. Creative Commons has licenses that do that.
        tpush 2y ago
        In most of the world no, they can't.
    - chii 2y ago
      > If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often. that's not the argument. The fact that there currently are restrictions on producing derivative works is the problem. You cannot produce a star wars story, without getting consent from disney. You cannot write a harry potter story, without consent from Rowling.
- cvwright 2y ago
  So true! Copyrights that last 20 years would be completely reasonable. Maybe with exponentially increasing fees for successive renewals, for super valuable properties like Disney movies.
- TylerE 2y ago
  For that matter, if you think China ripping everyone else off is bad now… well, just wait until every company can do that.
  - Qwertious 2y ago
    If everyone could do it, it wouldn't be as big a deal - small western businesses would be on a more level playing field, since they would be almost as immune from being sued by big businesses as Chinese businesses are. As it is, small businesses aren't protected by patents (because a patent is a $10k+ ticket to a $100k+ lawsuit against a competitor with a $1M+ budget for lawyers) while still being bound by the restrictions of big business's patents. It's lose/lose.
  - DoItToMe81 2y ago
    Trademark isn't copyright, so no.
- matheusmoreira 2y ago
  Nobody cares anymore. We're sick of their rent seeking, of their perpetual monopolies on culture. Balance? Compromise? We don't want to hear it. Nearly two hundred years ago one man warned everyone this would happen. Nobody listened. These are the consequences. "At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as “Robinson Crusoe” or the “Pilgrim’s Progress” shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living." https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyright/ https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
- Zambyte 2y ago
  Books, music, and games are a lot older than copyright.
  - adra 2y ago
    Have you looked at who created these things by and large? For the most part, you have: - aristocrats that were wealthy that didn't need to "work" to survive and put food on the table - crafts people supported through the patronage of a rich person (or religious order) who deign to support your art - (kinda modern world) national governments who want to support their national art often as a fear that other larger nations cultural influences will dwarf their Are you implying that these three pillars will be able to produce anywhere near the current amount of content we produce? How in the world where digital copies are effectively free to copy and infinitum would a creator reap any benefits from that network effect? A modern equivalent would be famous YouTubers who all they do all day is "watch" other people's hard earned videos. The super lazy ones will not direct people to the original, don't provide meaningful commentary, just consumes the video as 'content' to feed their own audience and provides no value to the original creator. The position to kill copyright entirely would amplify this "just bypass the original source" to lower value of the original creator to zero.
    - Zambyte 2y ago
      > Are you implying that these three pillars will be able to produce anywhere near the current amount of content we produce? Do you think the vast "amount of content we produce" is actually propped up by copyright? Have you ever heard of someone who started their career on YouTube due to copyright? On the contrary, how often have you heard of people stopping their YouTube career due to copyright, or explicitly limiting the content they create? I have only heard of cases of the latter. In fact, the latter partially happened to me. > How in the world where digital copies are effectively free to copy and infinitum would a creator reap any benefits from that network effect? You are making an assumption that people should reap (monetary) benefits for creating things. What you are ignoring is that the world where digital copies are effectively free is also the world where original works are insanely cheap as well. In this world, people create regardless of monetary gain. To make this point: how much money did you make from this comment that you posted? It's covered by copyright, so surely you would not have created it if not for your own benefit.
- copywrong2 2y ago
  Yeah many industries like: - Big Corps that buy IP - Patent Trolls - Companies that fuck over artists
  - freejazz 2y ago
    Why would anyone make video games if they couldn't make money from selling them?
    - sham1 2y ago
      Out of passion for the art. See also: free (libre) software video games released and distributed for free (gratis). Of course, money is a huge motivator, but so is self-expression.
      - freejazz 2y ago
        Well they certainly aren't on level with each other in terms of motivation, so I don't think it's fair for you to say they are both huge motivators.
    - account42 2y ago
      Video games would actually be better of if the profit incentive was removed. Modern high-budget video games have become indistinguishable from slot machines that are optimized by literal psychologists to get you to waste as much of your money (and time) as possible without providing any meaningful experience. I'd rather see much fewer games created if what remains are games focused on having artistic and/or educational value rather than investment opportunities for wall street.
      - freejazz 2y ago
        This is just your own sanctimony, go to a gamestop and ask people if they think we should have an IP regime where there is no gta or football games. What a ridiculous response.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
[flagged]
- kibwen 2y ago
  This is a specious argument. It is impossible for us to gesture at the works of art that do not exist because of draconian copyright. Humans have been remixing each others' works for millions of years, and the artificial restriction on derivative work is actively destroying our collective culture. There should be thousands of professional works (books, movies, etc.) based on Lord Of The Rings by now, many of which would surpass the originals in quality given enough time, and we have been robbed of them. And Lord Of The Rings is an outlier in that it still remains culturally relevant despite its age; most works will remain copyrighted for far longer than their original audience was even alive, meaning that those millions of flowers never get their chance to bloom.
  - eropple 2y ago
    This is all true, and in a vacuum I agree with it. There's a pretty core problem with these kinds of assertions, though: people have to make rent. Never have I seen a substantiative, pass-the-sniff-test argument for how to make practical this system when your authors and your artists need to eat in a system of modern capital. So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow?
    - uhoh-itsmaciek 2y ago
      Copyright is not optimized for making sure artists and authors get enough to eat. It's optimized for people with a lot of money to make even more money by exploiting artists and authors. I doubt there's a simple answer (I certainly don't have one), but the current system is not exactly a creators' utopia.
    - Qwertious 2y ago
      Not the person you responded to, but: >So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow? Patreon (or liberapay etc). Take a look at youtube: so many creators are actively saying "youtube doesn't pay the bills, if you like us then please support us on Patreon". Patreon works. Some of the time, at least - just like copyright. Also crowdsourcing (e.g. Kickstarter), which worked out well for games like FTL and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Although, I personally don't believe copyright should be abolished - it just needs some amendments. It needs a duration amendment - not a flat duration (fast-fashion doesn't need even 5 years of copyright, but aerospace software regularly needs several decades just to break profitable), but either some duration-mechanism or a simple discrimination by industry. Also, I think any sort of functional copyright (e.g. software copyright) ought to have an incentive or requirement to publish the functional bits - for instance, router firmware ought to require the source code in escrow (to be published once copyright duration expires) for any legal protections against reverse-engineering to be mounted. Unpublished source code is a trade secret, and should be treated as such. Also, these discussions don't seem to mention fanfiction, which demonstrates plenty of people write good works without being professionally paid and without the protection of copyright.

kelnos 2y ago

That ship sailed long ago. While copyright can and is used at times to protect the "little guy", the law is written as it is in order to protect and further corporate interests. The current manifestation of copyright is about rent-seeking, not promoting innovation and creativity. That it may also do so is entirely coincidental.

ryandrake 2y ago
Also, if it wasn't about rent-seeking and preventing access to works, copyright wouldn't have to last for decades, many multiples of a work's useful commercial life. The fact that it does last this long shows that it's not about promoting innovation and creativity.
DoItToMe81 2y ago
Copyright was invented by a cartel of noblemen, the British Stationer's Company, who, due to liberal reform, were going to lose their publishing monopoly. The implementation of copyright law as they helped pen allowed them to mostly continue their position while portraying it as "protecting the little guy". Funny how both the rhetoric and intentions are the same after three hundred years.

CobrastanJorji 2y ago

You want to look at the Supreme Court case "Eldred v. Ashcroft." Eldred challenged Congress for retroactively extending existing copyrights, for extending the patent protections on existing inventions could not possibly further arts and sciences. They also argued that if Congress had the power to continually extend existing copyrights by N years every N years, the Constitutional power of "for a limited time" had no meaning. The Supreme Court's decision was a bunch of bullshit around "well, y'know, people live longer these days, and some creators are still alive who expected these to last their whole lives, and golly, coincidentally this really helps giant corporations."

teeray 2y ago

Copyright’s purpose is a cudgel to be wielded to enrich the holder for, ideally, eternity. If “eternity” is threatened, you use proceeds from copyright to change copyright law to protect future proceeds.