9 ms·

The logical endgame of all this isn’t “stopping LLMs,” it’s Disney happening to own a critical mass of IP to be able to more or less exclusively legally train a

The logical endgame of all this isn’t “stopping LLMs,” it’s Disney happening to own a critical mass of IP to be able to more or less exclusively legally train and run LLMs that make movies, firing all their employees, and no smaller company ever having a chance in hell with competing with a literal century’s worth of IP powering a generative model. This turns the already egregiously generous backwards facing monopoly into a forward facing monopoly. None of this was ever the point of copyright. The best part about all this is that Disney initially took off by… making use of public domain works. Copyright used to last 14 years. You’d be able to create derivative works of most the art in your life at some point. Disney is ironically the proof of how constructive a system that regularly turns works over to the public domain can be. But thanks to lobbying by Disney, now you’re never allowed to create a derivative work of the art in your life. Copyright is only possible because we the public fund the infrastructure necessary to maintain it. “IP” isn’t self manifesting like physical items. Me having a cup necessarily means you don’t have it. That’s not how ideas and pictures work. You can infinitely perfectly duplicate them. Thus we set up laws and courts and police to create a complicated simulation of physical properties for IP. Your tax dollars pay for that. The original deal was that in exchange, those works would enter the public domain to give back to society. We’ve gotten so far from that that people now argue about OpenAI “stealing” from authors, when the authors most of the time don’t even own the works — their employers do! What a sad comedy where we’ve forgotten we have a stake in this too and instead argue over which corporation should “own” the exclusive ability to cheaply and blazingly fast create future works while everyone else has to do it the hard way.

tzkaln 2y ago
ClosedAI etc. are certainly stealing from open source authors and web site creators, who do own the copyright. That said, I agree with putting more emphasis on individual creators, even if they have sold the copyright to corporations. I was appalled by the Google settlement with the author's guild: Why does a guild decide who owns what and who gets compensations? Both Disney and ClosedAI are in the wrong here. I'm the opposite of a Marxist, but Marx' analysis was frequently right. He used the term "alienation from one's work" in the context of factory workers. Now people are being alienated from their intellectual work, which is stolen, laundered and then sold back to them.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  I mean, not to be that guy, but multiple Marxist and Marxist-adjacent people I know and am have been out here pointing out how this was exactly and always what was going to happen since the LLM hype cycle really kicked into high-gear in mid-2023. And I was told in no uncertain terms, many times, on here, about how I was being a doomer, a pessimist, a luddite, etc. etc. because I and many like me saw the writing on the wall, immediately, that while generative AI represented a neat thing for folks to play with, that it would, like every other emerging tech, quickly become the sole domain of the monied entities that already run the rest of our lives, and this would be bad for basically everyone long term. And yeah it looks be shaping up as exactly that.
  - trinsic2 2y ago
    Yep. And people support it like "No its not going to be like that this time" bullshit.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  I don't think you need to be a Marxist to accept that his observation that people are being alienated from their work capacity is spot on. The "Marxsist" name is either about believing on the parts that aren't true or about the political philosophy (that honestly, can't stand by its own without the wrong facts). The ones that fit reality only make one a "realist".
notahacker 2y ago
If I thought that nobody had a chance in hell of competing with generative models compiled by Disney from its corpus of lighthearted family movies, I'd be even less keen to give unlimited power to create derivative works out of everything in history to the companies with the greatest amount of computing power, which in this case happens to be a subsidiary of Microsoft. All property rights depends on public funding the infrastructure to enforce them. If I believed movies derived from applying generative AI techniques to other movies was the endgame of human creativity, I'd find your endgame of it being the fiefdom of corporations who sold enough Windows licenses to own billions of dollars worth of computer hardware even more dystopian than it being invested in the corporations who originally paid for the movies...
- horsawlarway 2y ago
  Two thoughts 1. You are assuming that "greatest computing power" is a requirement. I think we're actually seeing a trend in the opposite direction with recent generative art models: It turns out consumer grade hardware is "enough" in basically all cases, and renting the compute you might otherwise be missing is cheap. I don't buy this as the barrier. 2. Given #1, I think you are framing the conversation in a very duplicitive manner by pitching this as "either Microsoft or Disney - pick your oppressor". I'd suggest that breaking the current fuckery in copyright, and restoring something more sane (like the 7 + 7 year original timespans) would benefit individuals who want to make stories and art far more than it would benefit corporations. Disney is literaly THE reason for half of the current extensions in timespan. They don't want reduced copyright - they want to curtail expression in favor of profit. This case just happens to have a convienent opponent for public sentiment. --- Further - "All property rights depends on public funding the infrastructure to enforce them" Is false. This is only the case for intellectual property rights, where nothing need be removed from one person for the other to be "in violation".
  - catlifeonmars 2y ago
    > All property rights depends on public funding the infrastructure to enforce them Still true, because people generally depend on the legal system and police departments to enforce physical property rights (both are publicly funded entities).
adventured 2y ago
AI is absolutely a further wealth concentrator by its very nature. It will not liberate the bottom 3/4, it will not free up their time by allowing them to work a lot less (as so many incorrectly predict now). Eric Schmidt for example has some particularly incorrect claims out there right now about how AI will widely liberate people from having to work so many hours, it will prove laughable in hindsight. Those that wield high-end AI, and the extreme cost of operations that will go with it, will reap extraordinary wealth over the coming century. Elon Musk style wealth. Very few will have access to the resources necessary to operate the best AI (the cost will continue to climb over what companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, etc are already spending). Sure, various AI assistants will make more aspects of your life automated. In that sense it'll buy people more time in their private lives. It won't get most people a meaningful increase in wealth, which is the ultimate liberator of time. That is, financial independence. And you can already see the ratio of people that are highly engaged with utilizing the latest LLMs, paying for them, versus either rarely or never using them (either not caring/interested in utilizing, or not understanding how to do so effectively). It's heavily bifurcated between the elites and everybody else, just as most tech advances have been so far. A decade ago a typical lower / lower middle class person could have gone to the library and learned JavaScript and over the course of years could have dramatically increased their earning potential (a process that takes time to be clear); for the same reason that rarely happens by volition, they also will not utilize LLMs to advance their lives despite the wide availability of them. AI will end up doing trivial automation tasks for the bottom 50%. For the top ~1/4 it will produce enormous further wealth from equity holdings and business process productivity gains (boosting wealth from business ownership, which the bottom 50% lacks universally).
- lupire 2y ago
  Society-scale unemployment is certainly liberating people from their work, but also their food.
  - account42 2y ago
    It really is a sad world where the prospect of there not being enough work to do for humans is a scary one.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cxr 2y ago
> Me having a cup necessarily means you don’t have it. That’s not how ideas and pictures work. You can infinitely perfectly duplicate them. This is a stupid argument, no matter how often it comes up. If I hire Alice to come to my sandwich shop and make sandwiches for customers all week and then on payday I say, "Welp, no need to pay you—the sandwiches are already made!" then Alice is definitely out something, and I am categorically a piece of shit for trotting out this line of reasoning to try to justify not paying her. If I do the same thing except I commission Alice to do a drawing for a friend's birthday, then I am no less a piece of shit if I make my own copy once she's shown it to me and try to get out of paying since I'm not using "her" copy. (Notice that in neither case was the thing produced ever something that Alice was going to have for herself—she was never going to take home 400 sandwiches, nor was she ever interested in a portrait of your friend and his pet rabbit.) If Alice senses that I'd be interested in the drawing but might not be totally swayed until I see it for myself, so she proactively decides to make the drawing upfront before approaching me, then it doesn't fundamentally change the balance from the previous scenario—she's out no less in that case than if I approached her first and then refuse to pay after the fact. (If she was wrong and it turns it I didn't actually want it because she misjudged and will not be able to recoup her investment, fair. But that's not the same as if she didn't misjudge and I come to her with this bankrupt argument of, "You already made the drawing, and what's done is done, and since it's infinitely reproducible, why should I owe you anything?") Copyright duration is too long. But the fundamental difference between rivalrous possession of physical artifacts and infinitely reproducible ideas really needs to stay the hell out of these debates. It's a tired, empty talking point that doesn't actually address the substance of what IP laws are really about.
- kweingar 2y ago
  This isn't really an argument though. It's an assertion that not honoring a commission agreement (or an employment contract) is equivalent to not paying for a license to an existing work. I tend to disagree. I could be persuaded otherwise, but I'd need to hear an argument other than "clearly these are the same thing."
  - cxr 2y ago
tlb 2y ago
I find "this wasn't the point of copyright", referring to the motivations of 18th century legislators, unpersuasive. They were making up rules that were good for the foreseeable future, but they didn't foresee everything and certainly not everyone being connected to a global data network. Persuasive arguments should focus on what's good for the world today.
- tolmasky 2y ago
  I hate to break it to you, but we continued that pattern of making up rules. The main difference is that we let lobbyists play a bigger role over time. The updated rules (life of the author plus 70 years) was passed in 1976, so I don't think they had global data networks in mind either. But perhaps you believe neither side has presented a persuasive argument. I will however say that I think my comment was not just an appeal to authority. Again, I think the fact that using public domain works was critical to Disney's early success is a fairly important data point, especially considering some of those works would not have allowed to be used with the current lifespans (e.g. Pinocchio's copyright would have lasted until 1960, 20 years after the film premiered). But again, the most important thing I want taken away from this is that we the "consumers" of the content should not consider ourselves bystanders, but understand that we do have an active stake here as well. You're first sentence is perhaps more important than you realize, making up the rules wasn't something one-off incidental property of being first to the table, we could choose to make up the rules too, so we should act like it, as opposed to trying to "deduce" the ownership of a sentence. This is unique, we don't have that ability with physical property. We can't simply declare that everyone gets Ferrari tomorrow and then have them magically appear in everyone's garage. But we could declare that everyone can have the rights to Superman tomorrow, and they would "magically just have them". There's no real baseline here. We should just weigh the pros and cons. The fashion industry operates more or less copyright-free. The infrastructure to enforce copyright has real costs. Not to mention there is all the collateral damage from the abuse of copyright takedowns this system brings along with it. And any sort of appeal to authorship is also highly suspicious given that authors rarely end up owning these rights. Every time one of these Marvel movies comes out there's a mini outcry when people see the guy whose comic the movie is based on is just some dude who gets nothing from the making of the movie. On the flip side we take for granted that every public domain character was of course at one point created. Robin Hood, Zorro, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes. Are we unhappy with the diversity of adaptations we've gotten from these? Would it be that Earth shattering if Harry Potter joined that list? As things stand right now no one on this website will likely ever get to legally publish "their take Harry Potter". The clock doesn't start ticking until after JK Rowling dies. It would have entered the public domain 2011 under the original rules. In case you're curious, her net worth in 2011 was $500M, if you want to factor that into whether you think that would have been "fair" (and its not like she stops making money at that point, its just other people start to be able to do stuff with the first book). I think it is worthwhile to imagine a different approach to this.
benreesman 2y ago
Sounds like it’s supposed to be hopeless to compete already: https://www.zenger.news/2023/06/10/sam-altman-says-its-hopeless-to-compete-with-openai/ https://www.zenger.news/2023/06/10/sam-altman-says-its-hopel....
marcosdumay 2y ago
Either copyrights exist, and people can't copy creative works "owned" by somebody else, or copyrights don't exist and people can copy those at will. "Copyrights exist, and people can copy others works if they have enough computing power to multiplex it with other works and demultiplex to get it back" is not a reasonable position. I'm all for limiting it to 15 or 20 years, and requiring registration. If you want to completely end them, I'd be ok with that too (but I think it's suboptimal). But "end them to rich people" isn't acceptable.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > Either copyrights exist, and people can't copy creative works "owned" by somebody else, or copyrights don't exist and people can copy those at will. Like most simple binaries, this is a false dichotomy, and not only do more options exist in possibility, but neither of those matches the overt state of the law (where copyrights exist, but so do a range of caveats and exceptions, so people can copy and otherwise make use of works by others without permission under certain circumstances, but not at will, satisfying neither of the two options you present as exhaustive of all possibilities.)
- reedciccio 2y ago
  > Either copyrights exist, and people can't copy creative works "owned" by somebody else, or copyrights don't exist and people can copy those at will. that's not how copyright works, it's not a binary thing. Also, it's similar but not the same in every legislation. You can make partial copies, you can make full copies as personal backup, you can make copies to transform copyrighted material (like create art and parodies.) These cases are going to decide whether Google Books was a fluke or indeed, there is a limit to the power of the big copyright holders (not the artists/creators: those keep on starving, except few lucky ones.)
tzs 2y ago
> But thanks to lobbying by Disney, now you’re never allowed to create a derivative work of the art in your life As far as I can tell the only copyright term extension that might have been influenced by Disney lobbying in the US is the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which extended the term from life+50 to life+70 (or from 75 to 95 years for works of corporate authorship). The switch from fixed terms to life plus+50 came with the Copyright Act of 1976 which had nothing to do with Disney. They were probably for it, but so was nearly everybody because it laid the groundwork for the US joining the Berne Convention and making its copyright system much more compatible with that of most other countries. As far as copyright law outside the US goes, most countries were on life+50 or longer before Disney even existed.
up2isomorphism 2y ago
There is no such a thing called “we” in terms of the financial consequences. If you own an IP is because you acquire it through a contractual piece, also an artist, if he works for a company he also receives the loyalty stated in the contract. You can argue the artists might not be fairly paid which I agree. But it is obviously worse to live in a world not only one CERTAINLY won’t get paid and the work can get plagiarized into something he/she does not even like. If that’s the case I think it is the end of innovation.

tzkaln 2y ago

ClosedAI etc. are certainly stealing from open source authors and web site creators, who do own the copyright. That said, I agree with putting more emphasis on individual creators, even if they have sold the copyright to corporations. I was appalled by the Google settlement with the author's guild: Why does a guild decide who owns what and who gets compensations? Both Disney and ClosedAI are in the wrong here. I'm the opposite of a Marxist, but Marx' analysis was frequently right. He used the term "alienation from one's work" in the context of factory workers. Now people are being alienated from their intellectual work, which is stolen, laundered and then sold back to them.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
I mean, not to be that guy, but multiple Marxist and Marxist-adjacent people I know and am have been out here pointing out how this was exactly and always what was going to happen since the LLM hype cycle really kicked into high-gear in mid-2023. And I was told in no uncertain terms, many times, on here, about how I was being a doomer, a pessimist, a luddite, etc. etc. because I and many like me saw the writing on the wall, immediately, that while generative AI represented a neat thing for folks to play with, that it would, like every other emerging tech, quickly become the sole domain of the monied entities that already run the rest of our lives, and this would be bad for basically everyone long term. And yeah it looks be shaping up as exactly that.
- trinsic2 2y ago
  Yep. And people support it like "No its not going to be like that this time" bullshit.
marcosdumay 2y ago
I don't think you need to be a Marxist to accept that his observation that people are being alienated from their work capacity is spot on. The "Marxsist" name is either about believing on the parts that aren't true or about the political philosophy (that honestly, can't stand by its own without the wrong facts). The ones that fit reality only make one a "realist".

notahacker 2y ago

If I thought that nobody had a chance in hell of competing with generative models compiled by Disney from its corpus of lighthearted family movies, I'd be even less keen to give unlimited power to create derivative works out of everything in history to the companies with the greatest amount of computing power, which in this case happens to be a subsidiary of Microsoft. All property rights depends on public funding the infrastructure to enforce them. If I believed movies derived from applying generative AI techniques to other movies was the endgame of human creativity, I'd find your endgame of it being the fiefdom of corporations who sold enough Windows licenses to own billions of dollars worth of computer hardware even more dystopian than it being invested in the corporations who originally paid for the movies...

horsawlarway 2y ago
Two thoughts 1. You are assuming that "greatest computing power" is a requirement. I think we're actually seeing a trend in the opposite direction with recent generative art models: It turns out consumer grade hardware is "enough" in basically all cases, and renting the compute you might otherwise be missing is cheap. I don't buy this as the barrier. 2. Given #1, I think you are framing the conversation in a very duplicitive manner by pitching this as "either Microsoft or Disney - pick your oppressor". I'd suggest that breaking the current fuckery in copyright, and restoring something more sane (like the 7 + 7 year original timespans) would benefit individuals who want to make stories and art far more than it would benefit corporations. Disney is literaly THE reason for half of the current extensions in timespan. They don't want reduced copyright - they want to curtail expression in favor of profit. This case just happens to have a convienent opponent for public sentiment. --- Further - "All property rights depends on public funding the infrastructure to enforce them" Is false. This is only the case for intellectual property rights, where nothing need be removed from one person for the other to be "in violation".
- catlifeonmars 2y ago
  > All property rights depends on public funding the infrastructure to enforce them Still true, because people generally depend on the legal system and police departments to enforce physical property rights (both are publicly funded entities).

adventured 2y ago

AI is absolutely a further wealth concentrator by its very nature. It will not liberate the bottom 3/4, it will not free up their time by allowing them to work a lot less (as so many incorrectly predict now). Eric Schmidt for example has some particularly incorrect claims out there right now about how AI will widely liberate people from having to work so many hours, it will prove laughable in hindsight. Those that wield high-end AI, and the extreme cost of operations that will go with it, will reap extraordinary wealth over the coming century. Elon Musk style wealth. Very few will have access to the resources necessary to operate the best AI (the cost will continue to climb over what companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, etc are already spending). Sure, various AI assistants will make more aspects of your life automated. In that sense it'll buy people more time in their private lives. It won't get most people a meaningful increase in wealth, which is the ultimate liberator of time. That is, financial independence. And you can already see the ratio of people that are highly engaged with utilizing the latest LLMs, paying for them, versus either rarely or never using them (either not caring/interested in utilizing, or not understanding how to do so effectively). It's heavily bifurcated between the elites and everybody else, just as most tech advances have been so far. A decade ago a typical lower / lower middle class person could have gone to the library and learned JavaScript and over the course of years could have dramatically increased their earning potential (a process that takes time to be clear); for the same reason that rarely happens by volition, they also will not utilize LLMs to advance their lives despite the wide availability of them. AI will end up doing trivial automation tasks for the bottom 50%. For the top ~1/4 it will produce enormous further wealth from equity holdings and business process productivity gains (boosting wealth from business ownership, which the bottom 50% lacks universally).

lupire 2y ago
Society-scale unemployment is certainly liberating people from their work, but also their food.
- account42 2y ago
  It really is a sad world where the prospect of there not being enough work to do for humans is a scary one.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cxr 2y ago

> Me having a cup necessarily means you don’t have it. That’s not how ideas and pictures work. You can infinitely perfectly duplicate them. This is a stupid argument, no matter how often it comes up. If I hire Alice to come to my sandwich shop and make sandwiches for customers all week and then on payday I say, "Welp, no need to pay you—the sandwiches are already made!" then Alice is definitely out something, and I am categorically a piece of shit for trotting out this line of reasoning to try to justify not paying her. If I do the same thing except I commission Alice to do a drawing for a friend's birthday, then I am no less a piece of shit if I make my own copy once she's shown it to me and try to get out of paying since I'm not using "her" copy. (Notice that in neither case was the thing produced ever something that Alice was going to have for herself—she was never going to take home 400 sandwiches, nor was she ever interested in a portrait of your friend and his pet rabbit.) If Alice senses that I'd be interested in the drawing but might not be totally swayed until I see it for myself, so she proactively decides to make the drawing upfront before approaching me, then it doesn't fundamentally change the balance from the previous scenario—she's out no less in that case than if I approached her first and then refuse to pay after the fact. (If she was wrong and it turns it I didn't actually want it because she misjudged and will not be able to recoup her investment, fair. But that's not the same as if she didn't misjudge and I come to her with this bankrupt argument of, "You already made the drawing, and what's done is done, and since it's infinitely reproducible, why should I owe you anything?") Copyright duration is too long. But the fundamental difference between rivalrous possession of physical artifacts and infinitely reproducible ideas really needs to stay the hell out of these debates. It's a tired, empty talking point that doesn't actually address the substance of what IP laws are really about.

kweingar 2y ago
This isn't really an argument though. It's an assertion that not honoring a commission agreement (or an employment contract) is equivalent to not paying for a license to an existing work. I tend to disagree. I could be persuaded otherwise, but I'd need to hear an argument other than "clearly these are the same thing."
- cxr 2y ago

tlb 2y ago

I find "this wasn't the point of copyright", referring to the motivations of 18th century legislators, unpersuasive. They were making up rules that were good for the foreseeable future, but they didn't foresee everything and certainly not everyone being connected to a global data network. Persuasive arguments should focus on what's good for the world today.

tolmasky 2y ago
I hate to break it to you, but we continued that pattern of making up rules. The main difference is that we let lobbyists play a bigger role over time. The updated rules (life of the author plus 70 years) was passed in 1976, so I don't think they had global data networks in mind either. But perhaps you believe neither side has presented a persuasive argument. I will however say that I think my comment was not just an appeal to authority. Again, I think the fact that using public domain works was critical to Disney's early success is a fairly important data point, especially considering some of those works would not have allowed to be used with the current lifespans (e.g. Pinocchio's copyright would have lasted until 1960, 20 years after the film premiered). But again, the most important thing I want taken away from this is that we the "consumers" of the content should not consider ourselves bystanders, but understand that we do have an active stake here as well. You're first sentence is perhaps more important than you realize, making up the rules wasn't something one-off incidental property of being first to the table, we could choose to make up the rules too, so we should act like it, as opposed to trying to "deduce" the ownership of a sentence. This is unique, we don't have that ability with physical property. We can't simply declare that everyone gets Ferrari tomorrow and then have them magically appear in everyone's garage. But we could declare that everyone can have the rights to Superman tomorrow, and they would "magically just have them". There's no real baseline here. We should just weigh the pros and cons. The fashion industry operates more or less copyright-free. The infrastructure to enforce copyright has real costs. Not to mention there is all the collateral damage from the abuse of copyright takedowns this system brings along with it. And any sort of appeal to authorship is also highly suspicious given that authors rarely end up owning these rights. Every time one of these Marvel movies comes out there's a mini outcry when people see the guy whose comic the movie is based on is just some dude who gets nothing from the making of the movie. On the flip side we take for granted that every public domain character was of course at one point created. Robin Hood, Zorro, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes. Are we unhappy with the diversity of adaptations we've gotten from these? Would it be that Earth shattering if Harry Potter joined that list? As things stand right now no one on this website will likely ever get to legally publish "their take Harry Potter". The clock doesn't start ticking until after JK Rowling dies. It would have entered the public domain 2011 under the original rules. In case you're curious, her net worth in 2011 was $500M, if you want to factor that into whether you think that would have been "fair" (and its not like she stops making money at that point, its just other people start to be able to do stuff with the first book). I think it is worthwhile to imagine a different approach to this.

benreesman 2y ago

Sounds like it’s supposed to be hopeless to compete already: https://www.zenger.news/2023/06/10/sam-altman-says-its-hopeless-to-compete-with-openai/ https://www.zenger.news/2023/06/10/sam-altman-says-its-hopel....

marcosdumay 2y ago

Either copyrights exist, and people can't copy creative works "owned" by somebody else, or copyrights don't exist and people can copy those at will. "Copyrights exist, and people can copy others works if they have enough computing power to multiplex it with other works and demultiplex to get it back" is not a reasonable position. I'm all for limiting it to 15 or 20 years, and requiring registration. If you want to completely end them, I'd be ok with that too (but I think it's suboptimal). But "end them to rich people" isn't acceptable.

dragonwriter 2y ago
> Either copyrights exist, and people can't copy creative works "owned" by somebody else, or copyrights don't exist and people can copy those at will. Like most simple binaries, this is a false dichotomy, and not only do more options exist in possibility, but neither of those matches the overt state of the law (where copyrights exist, but so do a range of caveats and exceptions, so people can copy and otherwise make use of works by others without permission under certain circumstances, but not at will, satisfying neither of the two options you present as exhaustive of all possibilities.)
reedciccio 2y ago
> Either copyrights exist, and people can't copy creative works "owned" by somebody else, or copyrights don't exist and people can copy those at will. that's not how copyright works, it's not a binary thing. Also, it's similar but not the same in every legislation. You can make partial copies, you can make full copies as personal backup, you can make copies to transform copyrighted material (like create art and parodies.) These cases are going to decide whether Google Books was a fluke or indeed, there is a limit to the power of the big copyright holders (not the artists/creators: those keep on starving, except few lucky ones.)

tzs 2y ago

> But thanks to lobbying by Disney, now you’re never allowed to create a derivative work of the art in your life As far as I can tell the only copyright term extension that might have been influenced by Disney lobbying in the US is the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which extended the term from life+50 to life+70 (or from 75 to 95 years for works of corporate authorship). The switch from fixed terms to life plus+50 came with the Copyright Act of 1976 which had nothing to do with Disney. They were probably for it, but so was nearly everybody because it laid the groundwork for the US joining the Berne Convention and making its copyright system much more compatible with that of most other countries. As far as copyright law outside the US goes, most countries were on life+50 or longer before Disney even existed.

up2isomorphism 2y ago

There is no such a thing called “we” in terms of the financial consequences. If you own an IP is because you acquire it through a contractual piece, also an artist, if he works for a company he also receives the loyalty stated in the contract. You can argue the artists might not be fairly paid which I agree. But it is obviously worse to live in a world not only one CERTAINLY won’t get paid and the work can get plagiarized into something he/she does not even like. If that’s the case I think it is the end of innovation.