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Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished
- tristanj 28d agoDon't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda, trying to convince you that copyright is bad so they can avoid copyright lawsuits and use everyone's data without paying licensing fees. Without copyright, they can use your data for free.
- tossandthrow 28d agoPaying license? What small scale author receives license payments for anything they have authored from bug tech? To me it appears that individuals and large companies benefit from copyright asymmetrically, which is the core of the argument.
- palmotea 28d ago> To me it appears that individuals and large companies benefit from copyright asymmetrically, which is the core of the argument. The correct response to that is to fix the asymmetry, not blow the rights up entirely. Quoth the OP: > It doesn't protect the livelihood of individuals and small businesses in practice. Instead, it's a weapon wielded by large corporations to protect their monopolies. Post Citizens United, you could say the same thing about free speech. Does the OP want to abolish that, too? The fact that the wealthy (corporations and individuals), with massive teams of lawyers and propagandists, can often better take advantage of the rights I also enjoy is not a compelling reason for abolishing my rights.
- darkwater 28d agoPartially agree but on the free speech side, if you are common people you are also "protected" by being a small fish. It's very very rare that somebody sues you because you posted some hot take on X and you have to defend your free speech right (it happens sometimes yes, but it's - for now - statistically irrelevant). See what happens if a Big Corp posts some shit on their social media account. The copyright law is instead in spirit - at least in its current form - heavily skewed towards Big Corps, because they are the only ones that have all the right machinery to exploit over and over IP from 70 years ago. A mildly successful writer (equivalent of a "mum&pop shop") will not generate enough royalties in the future for their grandson to never work.
- mcv 28d agoThis is true, but is it unique to copyright? Don't large companies benefit asymmetrically from most things?
- kolinko 28d agoAd hominem? Also it's big tech (MS, Amazon) that is against this more than anyone.
- hn993302 28d agoSometimes ad hominem is a totally valid argument
- derkades 28d agoI agree with you, but unfortunately it seems big tech can already scrape people's data without permission and without paying license fees.
- Retro_Dev 28d ago"can" is different from "do" - they do scrape our data without permission, but it doesn't mean they can (are morally correct in doing so)
- cocoto 28d ago“do” imply “can”, but “can” do not imply “do”.
- my-huge-pony 28d agoSo this means that the law is only enforced partially and only benefits big corporations which van ignore it. So yet another reason to abolish copyright.
- deleted 28d ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 28d agoMy data is a privacy concern, not a copyright concern. I have no way to stop them from using my data on a copyright basis. This makes no sense to me. That said let's cut copyright back to 28 years.
- mm263 28d agoYou know who also wants to avoid a copyright lawsuit? Me! I remixed some music and would like to show it to the other people. Too bad that if they like it, I will never ever be able to monetize it or will even have to delete it. While we are at it, I’d also like Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere to make another Disco Elysium game. While we are at it, I think Sci Hub is the greatest invention of the modern science and many scientists would agree - you can just look up how many papers thank Alexandra Elbakyan and her efforts. While we are at it, I’d love if companies could use each other’s discoveries to speed up tech advancements rather than hoarding patents. Have you heard about patent trolling? Is that a good system that encourages good and moral behaviour? I could go on. You paint such a black and white picture - copyright is good because tech giants bad - I can only assume that you are driven by blind ideology and not what’s actually good for us as peers. Ask yourself what’s better for common good
- flexagoon 28d ago> While we are at it, I think Sci Hub is the greatest invention of the modern science Maybe a while ago it was. It no longer accepts new papers since 2020 and there are much better alternatives available are this point (STC Nexus)
- saaaaaam 28d agoSo actually, your remixed music you could play live, as a DJ. But to SELL it you’d need the permission of the songwriters and record labels, and probably agree some sort of split on the royalties. But is that actually so unreasonable, given it is their work you’re using? Have you sent them your remixes and asked if you can release them?
- Amezarak 28d ago> So actually, your remixed music you could play live, as a DJ. No, you can't. You have to procure a license to DJ publicly. A Public Performance License is offered by most of the major music conglomerates, or you have to find a venue that has or will pay for such a license. Profiting off infringement worsens your situation legally, but any copying and distribution by any means of copyrighted material is illegal without a license.
- joegibbs 28d agoAre pro-copyright articles also big tech propaganda? Oracle would hate it if copyright was abolished
- voxelghost 28d agoOracle is Old-Tech ;-) The AI companies are the ones that want copyright gone.
- OroPla 28d agoI want it gone for decades already, but no one listens to me. It has always been my hope that AI can finally make it happen by incentivizing people with bottomless pits full of money to solve the problem.
- opan 28d agoI'm not a fan of AI if that's what you're talking about, I still want copyright dead or drastically shortened. I'd say most people with an interest in free (as in freedom) software or computers in general should want similar.
- fedeb95 28d agothis is bullshit, your data is protected by privacy laws and not copyright laws.
- jml78 28d agoIt is bullshit also because it hasn’t protected anyone. Copyright only protects massive corporations. It gives the false sense to individuals that they are protected but they steal from individuals all the time and have the resources to define themselves from us. They can stall in court for years to bankrupt you. At least without copyright it puts us on equal footing
- fedeb95 28d agothat's correct, I am against copyright in any form of sorts. I know this is unpopular, but I really can't think of a logical argument that justifies it (I have read plenty; luckily I have no decision making power). Copyright in my view is simply an obsolete concept that tries to coerce private property of scarce resources in the realm of ideas. But ideas aren't scarce, neither are digital copies. It's like private property of air.
- rikroots 28d agoAgreed. While copyright timescales are currently over-extended, copyright was introduced for a very practical reason: "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned"[1]. Personally, I Copyleft my poetry, and make it available to others to use, even for commercial purposes, from 15 years after the poem's publication. I see no reason to keep them locked in a cage long after I'm done with them. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
- OroPla 28d agoIf that was the reason, it should be completely abolished as the exact opposite was achieved. See for example this article [1] > unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century. > it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom. >Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire. For a more contemporary view look at what became of China by ignoring copyright. [1]: https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
- Planktonne 28d ago> in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom How do you account for the industrial revolution under this framing, or the global dominance of the British Empire? Its really hard to argue that 1710 onwards marked the downfall of Britain, given everything that happened in history after that.
- OroPla 28d agoHow did the industrial revolution relate to copyright? Seems related to patents instead. In the context of copyright we are talking about books in that century. Shakespeare predates copyright. Though, we are not only talking fiction, but also non-fiction. It's no coincidence that British inventors of that time were on to wealthy side, for the poor people couldn't afford to buy a whole lot of books. And neither did they write them.
- DeepSeaTortoise 28d agoI love how almost everyone in here seems to confuse the DMCA with copyright itself and that there seems to be such a wide spread opinion that copyright does more harm than good. As if an online community of mostly software developers had never heard of such obscure writings like the GPL, AGPL, LGPL, and so on. I get it, the person running GrapheneOS happens to be ... special, but there could hardly be any community that has benefited more off copyright than the free software one.
- zarzavat 28d agoMany people don't like the GPL for exactly that reason. Free software (i.e. copyleft) benefits from copyright at the expense of the wider open source community. Were it not for copyright then BSDs could take code from Linux and perhaps there'd be less of a monoculture, for example.
- DeepSeaTortoise 28d agoIf it were not for copyright and copyleft software licenses there would be no open source software of any significance. All these projects only took off because people were forced to contribute back. Want an example? Look at the state of opensource boot firmware on x86. The "open source" version heavily relies on proprietary firmware blobs and the only actual open source alternative had been heavily ridiculed for pursuing that goal and trading basically any significant compatibility for it. Copyleft licenses make software basically self-regulating utilities. You can draw power from the grid and in return help finance it for everyone else, or you could build your own power plants. You can draw excellent pre-made software and tooling from copylefted repositories and contribute back, helping to make the software even better for everyone else, or you could build all of it yourself. Or, you could put in the work to replace all major copyleft software with non-copyleft versions, eventually gaining the ability to pull up the ladder behind you.
- iamnothere 28d agoWithout copyright, all software becomes “open source” as long as you can acquire the code somehow. Finding creative ways to “liberate” and publish code becomes imperative.
- charlieyu1 28d agoprobably still better than You won’t download a car propaganda
- drstewart 28d agoThe real propaganda is pretending people weren't complaining about copyright for decades and crying "Pirating isn't stealing!!" when it came to them getting GTA for free. Suddenly, you really seem to care about copyright laws though.
- sophrosyne42 28d agoAh yes, the big tech propaganda that undermines their entire business model. Without copyright, you would be free to modify or alter any data collection capabilities of tech you purchase.
- glimshe 28d agoYou are confusing privacy with copyright.
- pibaker 28d agoYep. What Stallman and his friends call "free software" would not exist if not for the copyright system. The company legal team who tell you to not touch any GPL code would love to see the licensing enforcement mechanism be abolished.
- OtomotO 28d agoCopyright isn't, patents in their current form are though.
- VBprogrammer 28d agoThis is a completely pointless debate, because even if it's true the people who currently be benefit from copyright have far more money, power and influence than any rational argument against it.
- Sha1rholder 28d agoThis is a even more pointless debate, because the largest-scale trampling of copyright in human history has produced several of today's hottest tech companies.
- stavros 28d agoAnd now the money scale has tipped towards the people who are inconvenienced by copyright.
- intended 28d agoNot disagreeing with the post- wouldn’t this come under the category of “everything is bad for users when the corporations become too big”?
- t43562 28d agoYes, there should be some limit on the amount of IP that can be accumulated. I don't know how one would do it in a way that couldn't be perverted/abused though.
- Daedren 28d ago>It's abused to take down content that's not in violation of copyright That's a problem with DMCA in that it's applicable in an immediate and unilateral manner and any decision to resist comes after the takedown. DMCA is the problem in this context, not "copyright" itself.
- Ekaros 28d agoThe real problem is that misuse is not followed by ruinously high penalty. False claims should result in statutory damages of tens thousands per claim. That is the way to prevent misuse.
- purpleidea 28d agoMy personal website: https://purpleidea.com/ https://purpleidea.com/ has been DMCA'ed by some scammer and I still haven't gotten it back out. Google ignores the counter notices, and who knows where else the scammer (masquerading as a legitimate takedown company) has sent notices. Bing and DDG (same basically) have all delisted it.
- PaulKeeble 28d agoA lot of the problem with DMCA is how its been implemented by companies. There is a provision in the original law making it a crime to make false claims, but organisations like Youtube don't bother to make it even possible to counter claim in that way and trigger that side of the law. Everyone seems to have forgotten it was even part of it, I have never seen it enforced.
- jeroenhd 28d ago> don't bother to make it even possible to counter claim in that way and trigger that side of the law It's not their responsibility. For that part of the law, you need to get your lawyer involved. And your lawyer will probably tell you not to waste your money, because the way the DMCA was written makes it practically impossible to find enough proof to actually win. I don't think the "internet is a series of pipes" politicians could've foreseen Youtube or TikTok, but had I believed that the authors of early internet legislation had that foresight, I would've accused the law of being intentionally written to lead to these implementations.
- bruce511 28d ago"Copyright" covers a lot of areas, from films to books to software etc. So blanket statements about it are not helpful. From the mention of LLMs I guess he means software copyright. But then refers to takedowns, which I don't see much of in the copyright space. And possibly he's confusing copyright with patents? For software, copyright I the only thing that protects Free Software. Without it GPL would not exist, and all GPL software could be used wherever without releasing sources. Copyright most certainly protects small business against big business. It is the model on which most small software businesses are built. Patents are bad, and if you replace the term "cooyright" with patent in the original article it makes more sense. But to be fair it's hard to put much credibility into a post that doesn't even understand that difference.
- deleted 28d ago[deleted]
- opan 28d agoCopyleft licenses like the GPL are doing the best they can in the current world. Abolishing copyright would not harm the free software movement. I wouldn't bother to treat music and art separately from software either. It's a shame when a game is free software but not free culture and a distro has to package it in a non-working state and ask you to separately provide some files from elsewhere. Re-releases of proprietary games often run into issues with music licensing as well and end up removing some of the old iconic music and upsetting the players.
- solatic 28d agoYou'll throw Hollywood and most of the publishing industry out of business overnight if you "abolish" copyright. Not a good idea to throw so many people out of work. Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.
- happymellon 28d agoHollywood was created by ignoring copyrights.
- ronsor 28d agoHollywood was created by ignoring (Edison) patents, not copyright. On the other hand, Disney's success is largely owed to public domain adaptations, and for a century, it did its best to shrink the public domain and expand copyright.
- happymellon 28d agoHollywood was created by ignoring copyrights. https://penntoday.upenn.edu/2012-05-10/research/bumpy-history-hollywood-and-copyright-law https://penntoday.upenn.edu/2012-05-10/research/bumpy-histor... They may have ignored patents too, but they build their work on copyright infringement.
- ronsor 28d agoI stand corrected. They apparently ignored copyright too (in retrospect, using existing screenplays made sense for the early industry).
- solatic 28d agoYour argument is non-sequitur and nihilist. America was created by colonizing Native land, so should we somehow evict hundreds of millions of people in the name of justice? (/rhetorical) Original sin is a sunk cost. If you want to make the world better, you focus on what's right for tomorrow, not what was right for a century ago.
- Aloha 28d agoCopyright shouldn't be abolished, it should be reformed however. It should be 20 years, with right to renew, your first 10 year renewal is free, then the cost skyrockets, with proof required that you are still using the work in commerce, and after that first term, you get a flat rate 5 year extension, then it must be renewed annually with escalating fees. It allows the big IP places to hold on to their family jewels, but also would return a significant amount of orphaned work to public domain.
- Den_VR 28d agoHow many years of monopoly is enough? And why not ought works be explicitly registered for such protections?
- TulliusCicero 28d agoI don't see any reason it should be longer than patents (20 years). Why should authors be granted vastly larger IP protections than inventors?
- bell-cot 28d agoBecause Disney paying ever-increasing fees to keep Snow White is not particularly harmful. Vs. if we allowed ever-extending patents on essential medicines and foundational technologies? How much could the heirs of the Wright Brothers add to the price of every plane ticket?
- TulliusCicero 28d agoOkay, but IP protections exist to benefit society. Being less harmful isn't good enough, the justification has to be "here's how being longer than twenty years benefits society". Do movie companies or authors choose to make stuff because they'll be able to pick up more revenue 25 or 50 years from now? Seems unlikely. Both indiviudals and corporations are typically focused on the immediate future.
- bell-cot 28d ago
- blfr 28d agoAs a Linux user of over 20 years, I really don't like thinking of myself as some Aborigine barely holding on to a scrap of ancestral land. My tech preferences have become so ubiquitous that nearly the entire Internet runs them. In Angels in America Roy Cohn is given this line where he is so politically embedded he can simply guess stuff and be right "You don't know what all I know. I don't know what all I know. Half this shit I make up and I'm still right". I feel this way about tech now. I don't need to worry how it works. I take a guess of how it should work and I'm usually right. Not on Windows or some other subpar platform. But can my Android play white noise on the speaker and a podcast on the headphones? While yes, of course it can. I learned that fiddling with Pulse audio years ago and now it's just expected.
- someguynamedq 28d agoIt already de facto has been. Have you seen LLMs?
- vintagedave 28d agoI've published and sold my own software. I'm a writer (unpublished as yet, but I hope to use CC4 like Cory Doctorow - ethical copyright.) I've seen my software pirated; I've benefited financially from selling it. I know authors and their struggles with income. And I agree. Copyright in its current form does more harm than good. Copyright was introduced to counter genuine harms: there are stories of people publishing in the UK, and having what today we'd consider pirate copies of their books selling massive quantities in the US, for example, with the author seeing no revenue. I believe anyone who puts work into creating something, physical or non-physical, should be able to derive revenue from their work. But I also believe in the public good; that 'information want to be free' in that thoughts, ideas and stories are meant to be shared; and that in a fast-moving world long-term prevention of movement is harmful. I also believe that over time, protections meant for individuals become weapons for the powerful, and I believe we're there now. Further, I worry that over the past decades to today, 'rights' are being socially redefined as property rights. We consider privacy, an inalienable human right, as something for us to be paid for by Meta. This is implicitly and silently treating an inalienable essence of being human as something to be bartered away, and I think a social retreat from the concept of property rights as being anything other than localised to, well, property, would help. Reduction or abolition of copyright would be a radical positive change in a general social attitude here. Realistically, radically adjusted copyright (3 years for software, 10 years for a book or music?) gives both an opportunity for profit and allows reasonable expiration while still relevant. In the absence of that, yes, complete abolishment would be an upheaval but a net benefit to the world.
- Koffiepoeder 28d agoChanging copyright durations without touching patent law is useless. In your example we would also need to shorten software patents to e.g. 3 years. Otherwise the big fish will just create a patent maze.
- vintagedave 28d agoYes. You are right.
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- badlibrarian 28d agoThe problem with “more harm than good” arguments is that the amount of harm relative to the amount of good is rarely specified. Is it 60/40 harm/good? Then shush, it ain't gettin' fixed in your lifetime. Is it 80/20 harm/good, but the harmers have the power and the people being harmed don't? Same. Type all you want on "grapheneos.social" but you're not moving the needle. Abolishing copyright also means abolishing copyright-based licensing. GPL, Creative Commons, all that loses what makes it work. Want to give corporations a lot more power, really fast? Nuke GPL. Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense some of the worst people on earth will come up with. Before we abolish copyright, we should wait until Larry Ellison dies just to be safe.
- palata 28d ago> Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense That's a question I have: if you abolish copyright, does that mean that anyone is free to do what they please with leaked code?
- badlibrarian 28d ago[dead]
- laserbeam 28d agoHear me out. What if copyright could only be claimed by the creator/artist OR public domain. Make it non-transferable. Force big media corps license music from artists instead of owning it outright. Push negotiating power to the artist away from the organization. Avoid "Taylor Swift re-recorded all her music to own it" and similar stuff in the future.
- OroPla 28d agoThe industry can just push and promote people it picked itself and then bind them some other way. How would this work with open software, which is not public domain and often sees the original creator step away down the line?
- modeless 28d agoThe major problem with copyright is it's too long. The vast majority of revenue from copyrighted content is made in the first couple of years, and yet we extend copyright 70 years past the author's death! If copyright lasted two years instead, all the problems with it would be much less severe. Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose. We need to treat that monopoly power with more respect. We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly. Copyright is allowed in the Constitution for "limited times" and Congress has ignored that.
- jongjong 28d agoI'm still waiting to get my first revenue from copyright content I created 10 years ago. Not everyone gets instant recognition.
- pbhjpbhj 28d agoTwo years is too short because it won't protect from commercial exploition against a creators wishes.
- modeless 28d agoThe creator is not the only person to consider here. We don't grant copyrights just to give creators a funny kind of royalty-pension they can pass to their heirs. We grant copyrights to encourage production of new works for the benefit of the public. Copyright ultimately must be judged on how well it serves the public benefit, not on how much power or wealth it gives to authors directly (at the expense of others).
- bigstrat2003 28d ago> We don't grant copyrights to give authors a kind of royalty-based pension for their old age and their heirs. "We" is doing a lot of work here. I realize that it's basically impossible for an entire population to have coherent motivations, but I support copyright because I think artists have the right to control what happens with their work and to sell it if they can. I believe that this right extends, like all rights, until the end of the author's life. I don't really care one bit about encouraging the production of new works.
- Cider9986 28d agoEvery week GrapheneOS seems to come out with a good take. Monero, Authoritarianism, AI, now copyright. Very well aligned with my beliefs not to mention it's one of if not the most private OS.
- matude 28d agoFunny how copyright used to be held to such extreme value before that many governments agreed to implement the "empty cassette laws" which then got conveniently also applied to empty cd-s, even though there's no guarantee that every single empty cd would be used to burn copyrighted material. And now that the copyright has become an annoyance to AI training, suddenly there's voices and support to abolish the whole thing. I agree that it is broken and probably needs to be reformed, but abolished outright would lead to a ton of issues right?
- ketzu 28d ago> And now that the copyright has become an annoyance to AI training, suddenly there's voices and support to abolish the whole thing. My observation is the opposite. Copyright was never as popular as it is now in the public discourse I have seen. Now that the unpopular companies are against copyright, it is useful and more popular. (at least as long as the context is those companies)
- maybewhenthesun 28d agoCopyright is good. It's the justice system letting money buy it's way out of enforcement that is bad. If you create something you should have some protection of other people just blatantly ripping you off. Copyright terms are in dire need of a reset to a sane length, though. Disney (among others) has spent way to much money extending the term each time their cartoons threatened to expire. Patents on the other hand should never have been used for software. Patents have their function in preventing inventors from keeping their designs secret, but the whole system is set up to give people to invest in building large brick halls filled with steam engines and it does not match software's pace of development at all.
- ozim 28d agoLet’s face it, justice system uses money as proxy for how important things are for society not for single citizens. As a society we don’t have enough resources to tend to every dispute. I don’t think there is a solution to that. Even if ideally we want to help everyone who needs disputes solved - waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.
- maybewhenthesun 28d agoI agree that this is often the situation in practice. I feel it's kind of bleak to just accept that status quo. Democracy lost? Back to the medieval system of nobles and serfs? Where having money means having rights? We don't live (hopefully) in a complete lawless anarchy where it's just 'might makes right'. And we should certainly not strive to end up that way. > waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless. Which is a bit of an exaggeration. When someone breaks the law it doesn't take 2-3 years to get fined/punished. At least not in a functioning society.
- ozim 28d agoViolent people are getting locked up and then wait for trial in prison usually. So yes we don’t live in total anarchy but a lot depends on people being decent.
- AngryData 28d agoCopyright needs to be shorter, but also it should be non-transferable and unable to held by anybody except the individual it originates from. Corporations shouldn't have rights to start with, only restrictions, and they certainly shouldn't have rights over thoughts or ideas.
- reorder9695 28d agoHow would that work for things like films or music when it genuinely is a group of people making something? I agree that copyright is way, way too long and should be a fixed length, but there's definitely a use in corporations being able to hold it.
- izacus 28d agoSame way it works for everything else. They sell their performance and then they make something else.
- KaiserPro 28d agoDid google circa 2012 write this? All of this is a problem because someone exerted influence over the US government. Google _knew_ that openai was scraping youtube to train whisper et al. They didn't stop it because they realised that they if they sued them, they would have to pay to train. So they silently also did the same thing. With that, copyright in training went to shit. Copyright, should, allow you or me to make a living from "intellectual works" or anything else tangible/not tangible
- _davide_ 28d agoI agree, copyright is a just yet another monopolistic tool and it isn't making the market any favor. Copyright could be gradually be reduced to a few years, the market will adapt, for example collecting money before producing the content (like a movie or an album), collecting more money from concert rather than music directly (which is going to happen anyway since it's competing against generated content), etc... Having a weak copyright or having it replaced with a far lighter framework is not science fiction and i honestly believe it would improve the quality of life for the vast majority. > Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda, If LLM overlords were to stomp on copyright just to train their model, i would be happy, even if it's their doing.
- jackpepsi 28d agoFrom the perspective of "The general purpose computing device I own should be able to run any instructions written by anyone without legal issues" then copyright sucks. Massively abused by corporations to unproductively charge rent by squatting on obvious implementations. From the perspective of "I'm an artist and I want to make a living off the things I create" copyright has some utility. (Although also gets in the way at times, as in bad faith music plagiarism cases) I feel both perspectives. On a moral level not sure how to unite them in a way that doesn't enable some kind of abuse. I'm sure we can improve the current systems though.
- teiferer 28d agoFunny how people writing such things are also at the forefront of accusing LLM companies of stealing big time. Because of copyright violations. So, which one is it?
- etiennebausson 28d agoBoth, it should be brought down, but it should be the same rule for everyone. Big Tech doesn't get to ignore copyright law just because they have deeper pockets.
- teiferer 28d ago> it should be the same rule for everyone I don't think that's going to suffice. Neither for the people arguing the original point who want protection for what they are doing but don't want protection for the big players who just make big bucks and "shut everybody down whom they don't like". Nor from a philosophical big picture POV. The little innovator needs protections. The big capitalist less so. It's why labor laws are more strict with bigger corps than small shops. And why higher incomes pay more taxes. (Well that's the idea. That they find ways to circumvent the idea is a different story.)
- rossy 28d agoIt's actually pretty normal to be upset when an unjust law is enforced on you but doesn't seem to apply to someone else.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 28d agoCopyright should be commoditized. A possible first step could be giving copyright owners a single obligation: you have to sell what you own. That thing you have must be available on the market. This rules out negotiations. They imply a possible negative result, hence the thing is not really available. A public offer, however, is fine. This thing alone may change the situation quite a bit. Imagine a true market for textbooks or streaming media where every provider has the same selection of titles and has to actually compete.
- saaaaaam 28d agoBut what does “available on the market” mean? Let’s say I own the copyright to something of cultural significance. I make it “available on the market” but at a very high price. Or are you saying that the price would be enforced?
- DrScientist 28d agoWhat happens if I wrote a book - sent around to a few publishers and then personally had a change of heart - perhap it has content which I now disavow. Shouldn't it be within my right to withhold publication? Or because I refuse to publish, but the publishers have a copy - I should lose the right to control my own work and the copyright falls and the publisher can just publish freely?
- dvdkon 28d agoYou could establish contracts with publishers outside of copyright, which is how NDAs work today. It's probably a reasonable thing to do anyway, otherwise there's nothing stopping a publisher from telling everyone the plot summary of your newest novel.
- DrScientist 28d agoBy the same argument, wouldn't all the things you don't like about copyright - like restrictions with what you can do with the thing you have bought - just be put directly into the purchase agreement. Isn't the way to focus on creating consumer protection rights, rather than just leaving it to people with the best legal department and deepest pockets to control the rules?
- cat-whisperer 28d agoyes
- purpleidea 28d agoDon't fall for this trap! GrapheneOS leadership is very against Copyleft, probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors, and copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all. Proprietary software can be kept secret, and only shared as a binary, but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law. It's not perfect, and the terms are far too long, but we do want to keep it. Reduce it to 20 years and we'd be golden.
- fedeb95 28d agoI don't agree. Free software would still be free even if copyright were to be abolished, if anything it would flourish further. That is because even proprietary software could be better integrated.
- purpleidea 28d agoYou're conflating what "Free Software" means and what Copyleft means. In any case, they both need protection from people like you who want to take it and benefit for free, without having to give anything back. Copyleft was designed specifically to prevent against people with your mindset. Permissively licensed software needs copyright to protect authorship rules, although the requirements are lessened.
- fedeb95 28d agoI think the troubling mindset is that of who accuses strangers on the internet of misbehaving without knowing their opinions. Software doesn't need any protection. People want protection.
- purpleidea 28d ago> Software doesn't need any protection. People want protection. Correct, people want protection for the hard labour they put into doing something good (writing software) for the world, and to not have it co-opted for individual profit over communal profit.
- monneyboi 28d agoWhile initially a perpetual right to copying for some publishers, copyright was made into what it is today to "promote creation". Funnily enough it's used in the exactly opposite way. Culture is basically frozen, same movie and same music released every week. The fields where creativity flows the most seem to me the ones furthest away from copyright. FOSS and memes come to mind. What matters is who made something, regardless of who copied it. I think that in a ocean of AI generated content, this will become more and more important. Platforms like patreon and kofi show that people care about creators and are willing to support without 'buying a copy'
- PaulKeeble 28d agoGames are another big area where distance to copyright seems to be where the innovation is occurring. So many of the big genres of games and ultimately the "game" that started the genre begun as a mod of another game. Counterstrike from half life, the myriad of factory games from modded minecraft, Arma and DayZ spawned the survival genre and further Arma mods formed the idea of PubG as well. In sim racing mods to Assetto Corsa have influenced the successor title of Competizone which chose GT3 cars since they were the most popular online. Then the modders on AC made long journey driving modifications and this has now influenced the upcoming Evo. There are probably many more examples from Skyrim or other FPS games of ideas born first by modders. A lot of these mods break copyright of original material but with it they create an entire genre of games far outweighing the value of the initial piece of copyright.
- flaburgan 28d agoInteresting to read this while the US gov doesn't give a fuck at all and use Pikachu and Tetris to make racist hateful games...
- metalman 28d ago[flagged]
- jll29 28d agoIt could be shortened to 20 years like patents, or copyright could end with the creator's life. Also, there could be an excemption for LLM training purposes.
- bryanrasmussen 28d agoFirstly, for the Americans, yours is not the only country and so while it is true that you made laws regarding copyright for a particular purpose it is not the same reason that copyright exists in much of the rest of the world, in most of the EU it exists because it is supposed that the creator has rights to what they made and that's it, whether it benefits society or not. It has to be said basically every time one of these things comes up here. The U.S is also connected via lots of treaties regarding copyright. Essentially to do any of the things that are always suggested about copyright in these threads you would need to violate all those treaties. Good news that Trump is President I guess, because there's a real shot. While I agree that many of the problems of Copyright, especially from the American view, is its length, that is not all of them. The DMCA is not at fault for the length of copyright, and it is one of the main sources of copyright problems nowadays. When discussing the solutions to lengths of copyright, which I've noticed here go down to as little as a couple of years, it's instructive to consider the cases of outliers such as Peter Beagle and the years he had to spend to get the rights to earn money on his book https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-sad-strange-legal-battles-of-last-unicorn-author-peter-s-beagle/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-sad-strange-legal-battle... Obviously you can create a law to handle these situations, but the fact is he has spent much of his life not earning from that book. Someone will probably make the observation that outliers are not a good source for structuring laws but that's in cases for example where you are making laws regarding trade or similar things, and then the outliers have to lump it, but if you are making laws about rights you should consider the outliers. Of course the American conception does not have copyright as a right, whereas the European conception does, so it is unlikely that if the U.S shortened the term of copyright that the EU would go along, and essentially everyone would have to still keep to the EU rules for anything they sold there. So if you wanted to make use of EU copyrighted material you would essentially not be able to make money in that market, meaning it isn't going to happen if you're in the business of making money. Furthermore if you are a big moneymaking entity with copyrighted stuff and some of your stuff is in parts of the world with longer copyright terms than the U.S, then, depending on how your business is structured it might totally be possible to sue and get all the money made in the U.S for what the local courts consider copyright infringement, so if you're a big moneymaking entity you will not be doing any business with the stuff making use of things still in copyright in longer copyright terms of the world. Normally when I read HN it is refreshingly non-parochial, and knowledgeable about the world, but when copyright comes up, it is not that. Let us now go back to the DMCA and similar things that effect how copyright is policed as opposed to how long it is. I think here Beagle is instructive, although I can also find other authors. One of the reasons for the creation of copyright is so that people do not get ripped off (that is to say in America, to foster innovation you allow people to profit from it, and make it so that it is criminal for various people to profit from your work). If they have copyright for all their lives if they get ripped off they can probably recoup their losses etc. However as HN readership is generally aware, the ease with which one does DMCA takedowns etc. means that the people who have made something and own the copyright have a hard time getting their rights enforced against people who are taking advantage and screwing them over. Personally I would expect if copyright were shortened to a really short period of time that, much as was the case before copyright even existed, people would run around creating fake versions of things and selling them, and people who control distribution channels would try to screw those who had the copyright out of any money for the few years in which they had to pay the money and then it would be a free for all. Why do I expect this? Because there is already a lot of screwing of people over who make things, if you only had to worry about them for a couple of years think how easy it is to screw someone over and delay paying for a couple years and then having to pay is gone and you restructure some stuff and yippee you keep all the money!!
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- Yizahi 28d agoCopyright is good and should be enforced. I say this as a person who doesn't hold any copyrighted materials. Anyone pro abolishing it is deluded by the "free market" myth, which is not possible in any form.
- ButlerianJihad 28d agoYou actually do hold copyright on everything you've written. For example, your comments here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Yizahi https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Yizahi All owned by you and copyrighted by you, sublicensed to Y Combinator. Your employer may have agreements in place where you assign copyright to them for any notes or code or other works you produce while at work. But if you draw a stick-figure picture in a notebook, that's your copyright.
- Yizahi 28d agoYeah. I extremely simplified my message to the point of some minor factual mistakes, as you have correctly noticed. The reason was to emphasize that I don't directly profiting from some work and may be considered biased (which is also wrong, but I'm simplifying again). Copyright is not for some faceless megacorpos, though they do profit from it. Copyright is for us, regular tiny humansies, to defend against megacorpos. To all naysayers - just do a mental experiment and imagine a world with any copyright whatsoever. Do you think Disney would be harmed elen a little bit then? Lol, they will simply enforce their own big daddy "threat of lawsuit" (yes, they will find a reason, there people whose profession is doing just that). But will a regular writer or programmer or painter have any defence then? Course no.
- DrScientist 28d agoIn a world where copyright doesn't exist - let's say I spend two years writing a novel/or a book on the history of computers. What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published? How am I ever going to justify that two year investment?
- omnimus 28d agoI think the thinking is that in current system as solo creator you are somewhat protected by copyright but your work still gets mainly bought by your audience even if it can be pirated. On the other hand copyright has been absolutely abused by big corporations to give them immense powers. Many creators were forced to sign away their rights and don't even make money on their work. You jailbreak your phone or your TV because of it. Generally it blocks so much of the competition. And with LLMs seems to have decided that copyright doesn't matter anyway.
- jml78 28d agoIt already happens. Instead of a book look at TikTok for example. Come up with a cool product, if it sells at all, it will be immediately counterfeited. The issue is that copyright is only protecting massive corporations. Did copyright helped against AI? Nope. If copyright was eliminated, say you are a great up-and-coming filmmaker, you could go make your own marvel movie. You might break into the industry because of that. You make some one off superhero movie is far less likely to hit with an audience. Copyright doesn’t help small individuals, it only helps corporations protect themselves against us.
- DrScientist 28d agoThe fact that the laws of the land are more accessible to people/entities with deep pockets is true across the board - it's not specifically a copyright issue. That's an argument for scrapping all laws because the mechanics of administrating them are unequal. I'd prefer there to focus on making access to the law more equitable rather than simply scrapping legal protections.
- dvdkon 28d ago
- bronlund 28d agoCopyright is just formalized greed.
- po1nt 28d agoMany comments here are throwing arbitrary numbers. These are driven just by some internal feelings instead of a data driven policy. The best solution would be to abolish it completely. It's a practice that wouldn't exist without the violent backing of the state. It's a monopolistic practice abused by wealthy. (I do realize the implications for R&D heavy businesses)
- wallst07 28d agoThe irony in your post ... "driven just by some internal feelings" and "violent backing of the state. It's a monopolistic practice abused by wealthy."
- po1nt 28d agoIf you don't respect the copyright the government will use force to confiscate your money. If you can't refuse it, they will escalate their demands up to a violence. Government has a monopoly on violence which it controls and delegates. It's a monopolistic practice because it essentially enforces that only a certain party might use intellectual property, even though you can't own a thought. The only flaky part of the argument is that it is abused by wealthy, but when you look at the rate of patents corporations put out every day, the disproportionate copyright enforcements and the fact that these corporation lobby and historically have lobbied for stronger IP protection laws, you would agree.
- AlienRobot 28d agoI don't think I have ever seen someone outside of tech saying this. It's always people working with the data-copying machines, never the people creating the data protected by the law, that want said laws gone.
- conorcleary 28d ago"The ceiling blocks my view of the sky, and the roof doesn't let me see my TV from outside; we don't need framework or anything to keep the weather out, it's sunny!"
- draw_down 28d ago[dead]
- nmstoker 28d agoIt has issues but I would rather see reform of patents first. Given the greater pace of developments now, effectively they now represent a proportionately longer period now than in the past. And they are too broad, along with various abuses (especially around novelty)
- mrkeen 28d agoWhat's the most generous, charitable definition of an alternative?
- jongjong 28d agoWe can't abolish it. That would be theft. A lot of people worked very hard based on the assumption that their work would be theirs and that they could monetize it. It would be the greatest theft of human labor since slavery. If we switch to a communist system with UBI, then that might be acceptable. Otherwise not. You can't arbitrarily abolish laws as soon as they become inconvenient to capital.
- grapheneos 28d agoThe post didn't say that it should happen in a single moment. It would likely take the form of heavily reducing the maximum duration across the board and then gradually decreasing it for anything new. For example, capping it entirely at 30 years and then reducing it by 1 year for all new works every year. It would then be abolished in 30 years.
- jongjong 23d agoSure why not. Maybe we can also abolish private property in 30 years. The work and entrepreneurial achievements which produced it were made in the past so we can just phase out ownership. No incentive problem there, the suckers already built all the stuff so there's no problem and they'll have 30 years to adjust. How generous are we!
- kepeko 28d agoAfter a short/zero copyright it would be a "free for all". But that sounds lovely! It would be a different business model, not ripping someone off. I don't recognize copyright as some kind of "natural law". Taking someone's physical property, that's theft. Singing a song that you have heard, that shouldn't be theft.
- hliyan 28d ago(1) As I understand, the first modern copyright law was in 1700's Britain, which broke a printer monopoly and shifted control of works from publisher to author. It also meant that an author and their family would not starve while their work was still generating revenue for the publisher (who would have outright purchased and owned the work). (2) This probably led to an proliferation of authors and new works, motivated by the prospect of royalties. In some cases, it enabled talented authors who would otherwise languish in obscurity. In other cases, it produced works of little value beyond revenue generation, by catering to whatever immediate demands for consumption that existed in the market. (3) Obviously, intellectual pursuits, invention, creative writing, art all existed before the 1700. But as per (2), it probably greatly accelerated them, while also diluting quality. (4) Mass production and distribution led to economies of scale, which meant a larger portion of the population now had access to such works. If these four propositions are true, then it follows that abolishing (or severely curtailing) copyright will not outright eliminate any creative human output, but will probably mean that as a whole, humanity will take longer to produce the same output. Since the cost of production and distribution of digital media is now a negligible fraction of the cost of the creation process, this is unlikely to negatively impact availability. Given that the world could probably afford to slow down a bit, perhaps some sort of curtailment of exclusive ownership of intellectual output might be a good thing.
- beej71 28d agoNot quite. If you abolish copyright, then some place like Google or Amazon will be the only one who will make money. Authors will get zero, relatively. The second you publish your book, Amazon will instantly republish it and collect 100% of sales. Instead, shorten the length to 25 years or so. We simply need copyright to not be extreme. And zero years is still extreme.
- braiamp 28d agoYou don't need to abolish copyright, you just have to limit the scope to the economic mechanism that actually matter for authors: reproduction and distribution of the reproduced works. Removing all of copyright except that combined right will still give authors the ability to license under the terms they find reasonable and viable, without harming any of the consumer abilities that we've come to expect.
- Planktonne 28d agoI know this is a popular take on HN, but it's very much one that collapses the moment you think about it. Abolishing copyright would only enable the large corporations further.
- glimshe 28d agoFor decades we've suffered the crushing hand of Big Copyright. As the little guys, we could do nothing. I'd never expected to see commercial entities with a lot of money and political/military connections depending on the weakening of copyright for survival. For now, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
- Frieren 28d ago> Large corporations getting special exceptions from it didn't start with LLMs. The root problem is inequality. Copyright makes sense to allow authors to profit from their work. But it was warped to give more power to big corporations that own now works for more than a century. Everybody that was alive when some works were produced will be dead by the time that they are free. LLMs shows what happens when you remove copyright. Websites are starving for visitors as LLMs copy/paste their contents and charge for it without giving anything back. Split monopolies, improve working class conditions, and get politicians that work for - the now powerful - working class. Copyright can be fixed, but not until power is removed from the few and given back to the many.
- remus 28d agopersonally I do not take such a hard line, I think a more limited form of copyright does have a place in allowing authors to profit from their work. I think what doesn't work is a massive, blanket term applied across all works. The situation we have currently is a handful of extremely valuable works which get milked for decades and decades, and huge bulk of material which is left to rot into obscurity because it is untouchable under current copyright law. I have experience of this with a project I run collating historic material on climbing and mountaineering: pre-internet a lot of the discourse happened in magazines, and this discourse is generally pretty hard to get your hands on. You need to track down physical copies of obscures mags that have been mouldering away in someone's attic for the last 40 years. If you talk to the authors of the content in these magazines, none of them are bothered about trying to make money of 500 words of copy they wrote 40 years ago, but because of the current massive copyright terms this stuff will not become public domain for 80-90 years in many cases, by which time I am sure finding physical copies of this material will be very difficult. I would like to see a much more limited term by default (20 years from publication perhaps?) which still gives an author plenty of time to capitalise on their work. I think it should then be possible to renew your copyright claim (every 10 years say?) but at an increasingly high cost. £250 the first time, £500 second time, £1000 third time etc. This would mean the bulk of material would fall out of copyright on a much shorter timescale, while if you happen to have made something popular and you want to keep benefiting then you can up to a point.
- mixxit 28d agoIt's interesting that we stunt ourselves while we sit in the dust as other nations steal ip
- zzo38computer 28d ago(If the message is not displayed, try appending ".json"; in my experience, this works on some Mastodon servers (and some others too) but not others, and works on this one. However, I will repeat it here because it is short enough.) > Copyright does far more harm than good and should be abolished. It doesn't protect the livelihood of individuals and small businesses in practice. Instead, it's a weapon wielded by large corporations to protect their monopolies. It's abused to take down content that's not in violation of copyright and to restrict people being able to use/repair/modify/backup their property. Large corporations getting special exceptions from it didn't start with LLMs. I agree that copyright should be abolished, and have said such thing in the past, and other people have said such things too. These are some of the significant problems with it, but not necessarily the only problems. Even if there are some cases where it is beneficial, I think that they would generally work better if copyright were abolished and then such cases would become unnecessary. Patents should also be abolished.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 28d agoIn 1976, Bill Gates tried to persuade programmers that there should be copyrights for software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobbyists_ocr.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobb... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists The "Abolish copyright!" and "Abolish intellectual property!" memes are quite old themselves. But those repeating them never explain how the world would work without copyrights. The meme has been repeated endlessly for the last thirty years but I haven't seen anyone present a vision for how things would work without copyrights; maybe I missed it As it happens, we know how things would work without software copyright. We only have to look at hobbyist programming in the 1970's For example, in a world without copyright law it's possible that There would be no more Microsoft Windows or MacOS. Anyone could copy that software without risk of being sued There would be no more enforceable "copyleft" licenses, e.g., GNU licenses. Online debates about open source software licenses and public domain software, e.g., SQLite, djb, would be pointless. "Your" software is now everyone's software and vice versa There would be no more enforceable "website terms of service" because "your" website is now everyone's website and vice versa. Anyone can copy anything Beyond software copyright, consider "your" submissions to www sites "Your content" would now be everyone's content and vice versa. Anyone could copy anyone else's work without permission, including "big corporations" For example, in the Mastodon terms of service, users grant the Mastodon GmbH company a license to use their content. Without copyright law, this license would not be necessary https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/terms_of_service https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/terms_of_service But it would not be necessary for "big corporations" to obtain a license from users either NB. The meme I'm referring to is not "modify copyright". It is "_abolish_ copyright". Quite a difference
- 4d4m 28d agoAre there any other worker or creator protections you'd like to dismantle because they're also too inconvenient for you and your narrow worldview? Does the author have any semblance of sense or do they yell at the sky for hours on end every day about things they barely understand? List the benefits of copyright first and then we'll trust you can form a balanced take and are not just spewing a half-baked opinion.