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Indeed it needs to happen, and even here on HN, it can be difficult for some to admit and acknowledge. It'd be great for this to be the first major relinquishm

• otterley 21d ago
  > Copyright is serving exactly nobody today Except for nearly everyone who writes anything (including software) or other artistic pursuits to make a living. This includes a majority of people here on HN.
  • cannonpr 21d ago
    I’ve written software all my life, copyright has never been relevant to my earnings at all, trade secrets have been to some extent. Frankly copyright was meant to enable more sharing and benefiting the public domain, instead it’s become a cancer…
    • otterley 21d ago
      For every rule there is an exception.
      • deleted 21d ago
        [deleted]
      • loup-vaillant 19d ago
        I love the self contradiction in this one.
  • denkmoon 21d ago
    yeah I wouldn't be able to put food on the table if my employer didn't have exclusive license to the glue we use to stick together all that open source code we rely on. Which we now generate exclusively using AI, products of which are of unclear copyright status. Modern IP law inhibits productivity more than it helps, imo. LLMs have fundamentally changed our line of work, and they have done so by completely ignoring the existing legal framework for IP. We should not defend the current implementation just because some people might suffer reduced earning potential.
    • otterley 21d ago
      Copyright was not designed to maximize productivity. It was designed to maximize creativity and inventiveness (or, as stated in the US Constitution, the progress of science and the useful arts).
      • ekianjo 21d ago
        > t was designed to maximize creativity and inventiveness If you look at outcomes it has completely failed while making big corps very rich in the process
        • furyofantares 21d ago
          Linux is a marvel of the world and a large amount of its contributions have been made by people being paid to do so for commercial purposes - and I am not sure that would be true without the GPL. Is there a convincing argument there? And outside open source there has been a staggering amount of creative work at all quality levels done for commercial purposes under the protection of copyright. Is there a convincing argument that the last century of software and music and books and etc would have been just as staggering without copyright? I would love to hear such an argument. In my youth I thought copyright was blatantly stupid and should be abolished. I still sorta think that but I don't have a convincing argument in the face of the absolutely massive amount of good work that has been produced under it.
          • 21d ago
  • ekianjo 21d ago
    People made a living juste fine before copyright stop spreading myths
  • brainwad 21d ago
    Most hackers here are not relying on copyright to make their living. Either you work on open source but make your living off services on top of the code, or your code is a trade secret protected via contracts. Not to mention that everyone using coding agents probably aren't even protected by copyright in the first place, at least in the US, since the courts are taking a pretty hard line on human authorship being required...
    • ralferoo 21d ago
      "your code is a trade secret protected via contracts" isn't enough to replace copyright because the contracts are only enforceable to the signing parties. Let's say you write some software for your employer and they sell the product to several customers with a contract not to distribute it. However, the product appears on some pirate website anyway, and you can't identify who allowed the product to be leaked. Once it's there, your contracts are worthless as nobody who downloads it from the pirate site will be bound by your contract. You need copyright laws to prevent subsequent distribution. Without copyright laws, you'd then end up in the situation where people who paid for the software then are bound by the contract and would have to keep paying, and those who just downloaded it from a pirate site would be completely fine legally and could use the software with impunity. That would create a disincentive for anybody agreeing to buy the software and entering into a contract in the first place, essentially killing the industry. You might not see a problem with that if you believe in Open Source, but most licences require copyright laws to exist to protect the software freedoms so that people don't just take the software and close source it.
      • brainwad 21d ago
        Yeah, I'm assuming most people here aren't selling proprietary code to customers directly. I assume most professionals here work somewhere that sells SaaS or uses the software they develop internally only.
        • otterley 21d ago
          That is a false assumption.
  • jMyles 21d ago
    I'm guessing you didn't click my profile before writing this knee-jerk, but I'm a professional musician. And I've worked in software engineering, across a zillion different licenses, for many years. I'm not just shooting from the hip here.
    • otterley 21d ago
      I'm a trained attorney who specialized in intellectual property law, and I happen to know a little about both the performing arts and software industries. It does serve people and power entire industries. You wrote "copyright is serving exactly nobody today." If that's not what you meant, choose your words more carefully next time. This is a forum of writing, and, much like songwriting, the right words and nuance matter.
      • jMyles 21d ago
        > I'm a trained attorney who specialized in intellectual property law, and I happen to know a little about both the performing arts and software industries. To be frank, it sounds like you are part of the problem, and that your income may partly be derived from rent-seeking via the intellectual property regime. Is that correct? > You wrote "copyright is serving exactly nobody today." If that's not what you meant, choose your words more carefully next time. Well, I suppose it depends what sorts of engagement we can understand as "serving". By "serving", I do not mean merely enriching. Of course we all recognize that there are massive industries which are enriched by this system; where we may disagree is whether any actual services in rendered to the folks doing the writing and recording and touring in exchange for that enrichment. At present, I think it's perfectly reasonable to observe that _musicians_ are not _served_ by this configuration. To the contrary, it has spawned a complicated system of publication, with many musicians facing the subpar customer service experience of services like distrokid and cdbaby facilitating distribution to services like spotify and apple music, while the RIAA and MPAA employ legal threats and harassment to the more musician-friendly DRM-free and direct-to-consumer counterparts. I think it's also fair to say that, since the beginning of music, no musician ever has wanted a system whose function is to call the cops of their fans. And ultimately, that's what copyright is - it lets me send the cops in to fuck with fans who... try to share my music with their friends? It's awful from first principles, even if the implementation weren't as rotten as it is. You said, "Except for nearly everyone who writes anything (including software) or other artistic pursuits to make a living" in response to this statement. So I think you have no leg to stand on in terms of demanding disambiguity; your statement is flatly and demonstrably false. Every musician I know (including, I'll bet, musicians you listen to) - and I'll bet, every one that you know too - has seething daily contempt for lawyers who make these asinine claims.
• bruce511 21d ago
  >> Copyright is serving exactly nobody today. Are you sure about that? So just to be clear; You're advocating for the end of software licensing? Ie the removal of GPL or Open Source licenses? A landscape where any source code (or binary) can be snapped up by say Amazon or Microsoft and run via a paid subscription? You're advocating for a business model which removes your access to local code and only allows access via a terminal or browser? Because removal of copyright doesn't mean corporations go away. Rather it incentivizes business models that protect their products in other ways. In the 80's and 90's, pre-internet, binary programs were distributed on media. An arms race of copiers and copy protection ensued. The copiers won, and since copyright enforcement has always been weak, business changed to favoring remote access (with subscription) over running locally via purchase. At the same time Open Source and Free Software have thrived. Copyright protects that software being used outside the terms of the license. Indeed there's even outrage when it's used within the terms of the license (by AWS etc.) Of course OSS still thrives under a copyrightless environment. (Free Software less so). But equally it means AI can simply be trained on it (probably no great loss since it's likely most of OSS will be AI generated anyway.) Business however will adapt. And the easiest way to prevent coping now is simply remote execution. With a suitable Terms Of Use declaration. Outside of software it would destroy music, movies, books etc. Basically it becomes a race to the bottom in terms of production costs (think user-generated You-Tube as the high-water mark.) But I assume you meant in the context of software. Yes, I agree, that in much less than 1000 years copyright is dead. Because by then so much is in the public domain it doesn't matter anyway. Also because by then the last human programmer is long dead. AI will write anything you want, only you won't even ask because computer interfaces and abilities will be long past where we are now. You would have no need to create software any more than you need to build a plane or car today. And those industries have taken less than 150 years to invent, explode, consolidate and commoditize. Indeed most of the complexity disappears when we go EV. In 1000 years copyright is gone. But today it serves a lot of people.
• deleted 21d ago
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• lyu07282 21d ago
  > It'd be great for this to be the first major relinquishment of nation-state power Intellectual property serves corporate interests and the idea of "nations" you are forced to have in your head are the exclusive servants the interests of capital. Ironically, tragically, that's what's holding us back from dismantling it in the first place, even a critic of it can't articulate it properly. Sorry that will be undecipherable for HN. Let me try again: The defense you get in this pigstall is the individual that copyright is protecting. You just hate the small businesses and individual artists. Instead of the trillion dollar industry holding the copyrights and the practice of exploiting copyright on works by authors who died decades ago. The commodification of copyright of something produced by the lowest bidder, crappiest AI and cheapest third world labor you can get your literal bloody hands on. Or even a vaccine against the literal plague or cure for cancer protected by intellectual property. To make something immaterial with no cost to reproduce, a commodity, to trade and invest and speculate in is the part to argue if you want to dismantle it, identify the rotten bits of the system even peasants can smell. If you are a billionaire or even trillionaire then just argue like everybody on HN always does, because it's identical.
• ElFitz 20d ago
  > Copyright is serving exactly nobody today. As a budding wannabe fiction author, I certainly hope you are wrong.