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The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The

The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it. These legal protections are needed by the people. To the Pirate Party's credit, undoing corporate personhood would be a good first step, so that we can focus on enforcing protections for the works of humans. Still, attributing those works to CEOs instead of corporations wouldn't result in much change.

pixl97 2y ago
>The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it. Wait, I'm still trying to figure out the difference between your imaginary world and the world we live in now?
- dragontamer 2y ago
  Thor would have red hair in the imaginary world, rather than being a Blonde man which was made to be a somewhat distinguished comic book character. The Disney or otherwise copyrighted versions allow for unique spins on these old characters to be re-copyrighted. This Thor from Disney/Marvel is distinguished from Thor from God of War.
  - runarberg 2y ago
    > “Before starting the series, we stuffed ourselves to the gills with Norse mythology, as well as almost every other type of mythology – we love it all! But you’ve got to remember that these are legendary tales – myths – and no two versions are ever exactly the same. We changed a lot of things – for example, in most of the myths Thor has red hair, Odin has one eye, etc. But we preferred doing our own version.” https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/54400/why-did-early-marvel-writers-change-thor-from-his-legendary-red-haired-appearanc#54405 https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/54400/why-did-earl... Huh, did not know that. As an Icelandic person I knew about Þór the Norse god much earlier than Thor the marvel character. I never really pictured his hair color, nor knew he had a specific hair color in the mythology. I actually always pictured him with a beard though. What mostly mattered though was his characteristics. His ill temper and drinking habits, and the fact that he was not a nice person, nor a hero, but rather a guy who starts shit that gets everyone else in trouble, he also wins every fight except one (he looses one against Elli [the personification of old age]). The little I’ve seen of him in the Marvel movies, he keeps almost none of these characteristics. EDIT: My favorite story of him is the depiction of the fall of Ásgarður, where Loki and some Jötun are about to use the gods vanity against them and con them out of stuff they cannot actually pay for a wall around Ásgarður. Þór, being the way he is, cannot be around a Jötun without fighting and killing him. So rather than paying up (which the gods cannot do) Þór is sent to see this Jötun, knowing very well that he will be murdered. This betrayal is marked as the beginning of the end in Völuspá (verse 26).
- Lerc 2y ago
  I think the main difference is if everything were freely available they may attempt to monetize the life out of it, but they will fail if they can't actually provide something people actually want. There's no more "You want a thing so you're going to buy our thing because we are the exclusive providers of it. That means we don't even have to make it very good" If anyone in the world could make a Star Wars movie, the average Star Wars movie would be much worse, but the best 10 Star Wars movies might be better that what we currently have.
  - drob518 2y ago
    I’m sure the best independent Star Wars movie would be infinitely better than what Disney has been shoveling out for the last couple decades.
    - loki-ai 2y ago
      Such a talented team would be able to make a great movie on the same theme. Saying the lack of creativity in the industry in because we can't copy things freely is completely moronic.
      - autoexec 2y ago
        It's a major hindrance. For example, if I came up with an amazing creative idea for a star wars movie I couldn't do a damn thing with it unless Disney told me I could. Disney isn't likely to accept an unsolicited pitch from a total nobody who just happened to have a great idea either. I don't see how you could doubt that there are a lot of great works of art that won't ever exist because of the fact that copyright prevents them from ever getting off the ground.
        apersona 2y ago
        You can't do a damn thing with it not because of copyright, but because you don't have the resources to make the movie in the first place. Copyright can't legally stop you from making a movie about wizards fighting each other with laser swords in space.
echelon 2y ago
The original claim is false, > intellectual property [...] used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation. There's nothing about IP which prevents you from creating your own. There are, in fact, a near infinite number of things you can create. More things than there exist stars in our galaxy. The problem with ideas is that they have to be good. They have to be refined. They have to hit the cultural zeitgeist, solve a particular problem, or just be useful. That's the hard part that takes the investment of time and money. In the old world before Gen AI, this was the hard thing that kept companies in power. That world is going away fast, and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste makers will be slinging content and we'll wind up in a land of abundance. We won't need Disney to give us their opinion on Star Wars - we can make our own. The new problem is distributing that content. > The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it. Unless the masses can create and share on equal footing, you're 100% right. If it turns out, however, that we don't need Google, OpenAI, or big tech to make our own sci-fi epics, share them with a ton of people, and interact with friends and audiences, then the corporations won't be able to profit off of it. If social networks were replaced with common carriers and protocols. If Gen AI could run at the edge without proprietary models or expensive compute. If the data of YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram didn't require hyperscaler infra to store, search, and serve. Unfortunately, there are too many technical reasons why the giants will win. And network effects will favor the few versus many. Unless those parameters change, we'll be stuck with big tech distribution. Even if the laws around IP change, the hard tech challenges keep the gatekeepers in power. The power accrues to those who can dominate creation (if creation is unilateral), or even more so, to the distributors of that content.
- dcow 2y ago
  > We won't need Disney to give us their opinion on Star Wars - we can make our own. Disney would say that you can’t. And in the current copyright regime, it’s not unlikely that they’d convince the court that they’re right.
dcow 2y ago
How do restaurants work, then? You can’t copyright a recipe. Instructions can’t generally be copyrighted, otherwise someone would own the fastest route from A to B and charge every person who used it. The whole idea of intellectual property gets really weird when you try to pinpoint what exactly is being owned. I do not agree with your conjecture that big corps would win by default. Ask why would people need protection from having their work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized copyright are the corporations. People need the freedom to wield culture without restriction, not protection from someone having the same idea as them and manifesting it.
- singleshot_ 2y ago
  It’s more reasonable to say that the idea of intellectual property is challenging for nonlawyers because of the difficulty in understanding ownership not as one thing, but as a bundle of various elements of control, exclusion, obligation, or entitlement, even some of which spring into existence out of nowhere. In other words, the challenge is not to understand “what exactly is being owned,” and instead, to understand “what exactly being owned is.”
  - Avicebron 2y ago
    > what exactly being owned is. Thank you, this is beautifully put and very astute. Does a recipe, a culmination of a lifetime of experience, technique, trials, errors, and luck constitute a form of someone/thing's person-hood such that it can be Intellectual Property.
    - singleshot_ 2y ago
      It depends. First I think we could make a distinction between not-intellectual-property and intellectual-property-with-no-protection but that doesn’t seem to be what you’re getting at. Have you taken reasonable steps to keep it secret? It could be a trade secret and if course if you steal the recipe for KFC’s herbs and spices, you will be liable for civil damages for your misappropriation of their trade secret. And if you describe a recipe in flowery prose, reminiscing about the aromas in grandmas kitchen, of course that prose is copyrightable. Should you invent a special kind of chicken fry mix and give us a fanciful name, the recipes identifier if origin - its trademark -could be protectable. But the fact that your chicken fry mix is made of corn starch and bread crumbs is a fact, like a phone book. Under most circumstances, not protectable. ianyl tinla
julianeon 2y ago
Maybe now, post-AI. But if you'd asked this question in 2015 or earlier, everyone would have said Disney -> pro-patent, average people & indie devs -> anti-patent. Microsoft was famously pro-patent, as were a number of nuisance companies that earned the label "patent troll." Honestly, this idea of "patents to protect the people" would've come across as a corporate lawyer trick pre-2015.
csallen 2y ago
This is the exact opposite of the truth. Look at YouTube. Look at SoundCloud. Look at all the fan fiction sites out there, internet mangas and manwhas and webtoons, all the podcasts, all the influencers on X and Instagram and TikTok and even OnlyFans, etc etc. Look at all the uniquely tiny distribution channels that small companies and even individuals are able to build in connection with their fans and customers. There is endless demand for the endless variety of creativity and content that's created by normal people who aren't Disney, and endless ways to get it into people's hands. It is literally impossible for any one company to hoover all of it up and somehow keep it from the people. In fact, the ONLY thing that makes it possible for them to come close to doing that is copyright. And the only reason we have such a huge variety of creativity online is because people either (a) blatantly violate copyright law, or (b) work around gaps in copyright law that allow them to be creative without being sued. The idea that we need copyrights to protect us from big companies is exactly wrong. It's the opposite. Big companies need copyright to protect their profits from the endless creativity and remixing of the people.
dragonwriter 2y ago
> The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. Disney would be among the largest beneficiaries if the right to train AI models on content was viewed as an exclusive right of the copyright holder; they absolutely do not benefit from AI training being considered fair use.
satvikpendem 2y ago
> The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people No, support open source AI and this will not happen.

pixl97 2y ago

>The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it. Wait, I'm still trying to figure out the difference between your imaginary world and the world we live in now?

dragontamer 2y ago
Thor would have red hair in the imaginary world, rather than being a Blonde man which was made to be a somewhat distinguished comic book character. The Disney or otherwise copyrighted versions allow for unique spins on these old characters to be re-copyrighted. This Thor from Disney/Marvel is distinguished from Thor from God of War.
- runarberg 2y ago
  > “Before starting the series, we stuffed ourselves to the gills with Norse mythology, as well as almost every other type of mythology – we love it all! But you’ve got to remember that these are legendary tales – myths – and no two versions are ever exactly the same. We changed a lot of things – for example, in most of the myths Thor has red hair, Odin has one eye, etc. But we preferred doing our own version.” https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/54400/why-did-early-marvel-writers-change-thor-from-his-legendary-red-haired-appearanc#54405 https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/54400/why-did-earl... Huh, did not know that. As an Icelandic person I knew about Þór the Norse god much earlier than Thor the marvel character. I never really pictured his hair color, nor knew he had a specific hair color in the mythology. I actually always pictured him with a beard though. What mostly mattered though was his characteristics. His ill temper and drinking habits, and the fact that he was not a nice person, nor a hero, but rather a guy who starts shit that gets everyone else in trouble, he also wins every fight except one (he looses one against Elli [the personification of old age]). The little I’ve seen of him in the Marvel movies, he keeps almost none of these characteristics. EDIT: My favorite story of him is the depiction of the fall of Ásgarður, where Loki and some Jötun are about to use the gods vanity against them and con them out of stuff they cannot actually pay for a wall around Ásgarður. Þór, being the way he is, cannot be around a Jötun without fighting and killing him. So rather than paying up (which the gods cannot do) Þór is sent to see this Jötun, knowing very well that he will be murdered. This betrayal is marked as the beginning of the end in Völuspá (verse 26).
Lerc 2y ago
I think the main difference is if everything were freely available they may attempt to monetize the life out of it, but they will fail if they can't actually provide something people actually want. There's no more "You want a thing so you're going to buy our thing because we are the exclusive providers of it. That means we don't even have to make it very good" If anyone in the world could make a Star Wars movie, the average Star Wars movie would be much worse, but the best 10 Star Wars movies might be better that what we currently have.
- drob518 2y ago
  I’m sure the best independent Star Wars movie would be infinitely better than what Disney has been shoveling out for the last couple decades.
  - loki-ai 2y ago
    Such a talented team would be able to make a great movie on the same theme. Saying the lack of creativity in the industry in because we can't copy things freely is completely moronic.
    - autoexec 2y ago
      It's a major hindrance. For example, if I came up with an amazing creative idea for a star wars movie I couldn't do a damn thing with it unless Disney told me I could. Disney isn't likely to accept an unsolicited pitch from a total nobody who just happened to have a great idea either. I don't see how you could doubt that there are a lot of great works of art that won't ever exist because of the fact that copyright prevents them from ever getting off the ground.
      - apersona 2y ago
        You can't do a damn thing with it not because of copyright, but because you don't have the resources to make the movie in the first place. Copyright can't legally stop you from making a movie about wizards fighting each other with laser swords in space.

echelon 2y ago

The original claim is false, > intellectual property [...] used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation. There's nothing about IP which prevents you from creating your own. There are, in fact, a near infinite number of things you can create. More things than there exist stars in our galaxy. The problem with ideas is that they have to be good. They have to be refined. They have to hit the cultural zeitgeist, solve a particular problem, or just be useful. That's the hard part that takes the investment of time and money. In the old world before Gen AI, this was the hard thing that kept companies in power. That world is going away fast, and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste makers will be slinging content and we'll wind up in a land of abundance. We won't need Disney to give us their opinion on Star Wars - we can make our own. The new problem is distributing that content. > The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it. Unless the masses can create and share on equal footing, you're 100% right. If it turns out, however, that we don't need Google, OpenAI, or big tech to make our own sci-fi epics, share them with a ton of people, and interact with friends and audiences, then the corporations won't be able to profit off of it. If social networks were replaced with common carriers and protocols. If Gen AI could run at the edge without proprietary models or expensive compute. If the data of YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram didn't require hyperscaler infra to store, search, and serve. Unfortunately, there are too many technical reasons why the giants will win. And network effects will favor the few versus many. Unless those parameters change, we'll be stuck with big tech distribution. Even if the laws around IP change, the hard tech challenges keep the gatekeepers in power. The power accrues to those who can dominate creation (if creation is unilateral), or even more so, to the distributors of that content.

dcow 2y ago
> We won't need Disney to give us their opinion on Star Wars - we can make our own. Disney would say that you can’t. And in the current copyright regime, it’s not unlikely that they’d convince the court that they’re right.

dcow 2y ago

How do restaurants work, then? You can’t copyright a recipe. Instructions can’t generally be copyrighted, otherwise someone would own the fastest route from A to B and charge every person who used it. The whole idea of intellectual property gets really weird when you try to pinpoint what exactly is being owned. I do not agree with your conjecture that big corps would win by default. Ask why would people need protection from having their work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized copyright are the corporations. People need the freedom to wield culture without restriction, not protection from someone having the same idea as them and manifesting it.

singleshot_ 2y ago
It’s more reasonable to say that the idea of intellectual property is challenging for nonlawyers because of the difficulty in understanding ownership not as one thing, but as a bundle of various elements of control, exclusion, obligation, or entitlement, even some of which spring into existence out of nowhere. In other words, the challenge is not to understand “what exactly is being owned,” and instead, to understand “what exactly being owned is.”
- Avicebron 2y ago
  > what exactly being owned is. Thank you, this is beautifully put and very astute. Does a recipe, a culmination of a lifetime of experience, technique, trials, errors, and luck constitute a form of someone/thing's person-hood such that it can be Intellectual Property.
  - singleshot_ 2y ago
    It depends. First I think we could make a distinction between not-intellectual-property and intellectual-property-with-no-protection but that doesn’t seem to be what you’re getting at. Have you taken reasonable steps to keep it secret? It could be a trade secret and if course if you steal the recipe for KFC’s herbs and spices, you will be liable for civil damages for your misappropriation of their trade secret. And if you describe a recipe in flowery prose, reminiscing about the aromas in grandmas kitchen, of course that prose is copyrightable. Should you invent a special kind of chicken fry mix and give us a fanciful name, the recipes identifier if origin - its trademark -could be protectable. But the fact that your chicken fry mix is made of corn starch and bread crumbs is a fact, like a phone book. Under most circumstances, not protectable. ianyl tinla

julianeon 2y ago

Maybe now, post-AI. But if you'd asked this question in 2015 or earlier, everyone would have said Disney -> pro-patent, average people & indie devs -> anti-patent. Microsoft was famously pro-patent, as were a number of nuisance companies that earned the label "patent troll." Honestly, this idea of "patents to protect the people" would've come across as a corporate lawyer trick pre-2015.

csallen 2y ago

This is the exact opposite of the truth. Look at YouTube. Look at SoundCloud. Look at all the fan fiction sites out there, internet mangas and manwhas and webtoons, all the podcasts, all the influencers on X and Instagram and TikTok and even OnlyFans, etc etc. Look at all the uniquely tiny distribution channels that small companies and even individuals are able to build in connection with their fans and customers. There is endless demand for the endless variety of creativity and content that's created by normal people who aren't Disney, and endless ways to get it into people's hands. It is literally impossible for any one company to hoover all of it up and somehow keep it from the people. In fact, the ONLY thing that makes it possible for them to come close to doing that is copyright. And the only reason we have such a huge variety of creativity online is because people either (a) blatantly violate copyright law, or (b) work around gaps in copyright law that allow them to be creative without being sued. The idea that we need copyrights to protect us from big companies is exactly wrong. It's the opposite. Big companies need copyright to protect their profits from the endless creativity and remixing of the people.

dragonwriter 2y ago

> The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. Disney would be among the largest beneficiaries if the right to train AI models on content was viewed as an exclusive right of the copyright holder; they absolutely do not benefit from AI training being considered fair use.

satvikpendem 2y ago

> The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people No, support open source AI and this will not happen.