Don'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.

Copyright isn't, patents in their current form are though.

This 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.

Not disagreeing with the post- wouldn’t this come under the category of “everything is bad for users when the corporations become too big”?

>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.

"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.

You'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.

Copyright 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.

As 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.

It already de facto has been. Have you seen LLMs?

I've published and sold my own software. I'm a writer (unpublished in terms of a novel, but I hope to use CC4 like Cory Doctorow.) 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 stop 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.

Further, I worry that over the most decades, 'rights' are being 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.