AI is way better at mass oppression, however, and copyright is a threat to it, so it (copyright) will be dismantled.
[0]: Not just or fake videos or comments. Do you have someone on the internet you consider a friend but have never met in person? In the future, rich people or governments will be able to plant ideas in people and influence their thinking by generating fake friends.
Not having sensible people steering copyright in a direction toward winding down its scope is being paired with a court that's likely to make it far more draconian, and create some massive problems that will be a problem for software development.
The reality of course is more complicated. Without copyright there's no GPL. Which I guess is fine if you're in the OSS camp more than the FSF camp. MIT and BSD licenses basically (functionally) give up copyright.
Copyright is also what allows for hybrids like the BSL which protect "little guys" from large cloud providers like AWS etc.
Copyright allows VC startups to at least start out life as Open Source (before pivoting later.)
Of course thus is all in the context of software copyright. Other copyrights (music, books etc) are equally nuanced.
And there are other forms of IP protections as well (patents, trademarks) which are distinct from the copyright concept.
So no, I don't think most people here are against copyright (patents are a different story.)
2. I generally don't like the BSL.
3. No comment. I think OSS projects that exist incidentally versus being the company's main product have always been more reliable (and less susceptible to the company pivoting to closed-only offerings).
4. Copyright has perhaps been the most evil in the music industry; books, less so. I'd rather not even talk about movies or TV right now. Nonetheless, I'd tolerate an extremely limited duration copyright, if no copyright at all isn't an option.
5. Trademarks are mostly fine, because they're primarily supposed to serve customers, not the companies. I'd like to get rid of patents now, however.
It would be nice of FOSS was the baseline, but I don't see that ever happening, especially in a world without an enforcement mechanism.
Sure having source code would be nice, but then again half the software nowadays is using electron and written in javascript anyway. Also plenty of examples of hardware manufacturers using software/firmware copyright as excuse and making legal threats to people who have made their own software to control hardware they bought even though they didn't have access to original source code.
There are probably more examples of people reverse engineering an reimplementing or decompiling large nontrivial software than there examples of companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library (as opposed to avoiding the GPL licensed code or violating the GPL by not releasing the source code).
Does not mean that GPL is ineffective. IT forces them to reimplement the functionality, thus giving copyleft more time to compete with them. Imagine if they were to free to take all public code and just use it. They would always be ahead and open source products wouldn't stand a chance competing.
Not to mention I feel like GPL being so strong is why big companies pretend to love open source but permissive licenses so much - to drown out the GPL competition they hate so much and to attract more developers to permissive rather than copyleft open source projects.
This is extend-and-extinguish on rails. Raise capital, hire a team to fork a public project, develop is closed and only release inscrutable blobs. Add a marketing budget and you get to piggyback on the open-source project while keeping the monetisation.
If I was to guess, I would imagine most on here believe in some copyright, and not total anarchy.
Copyright in its current form is ridiculous, but I support some (much-pared-back) version of copyright that limits rights further, expands fair use, repeals the DMCA, and reduces the copyright term to something on the order of 15-20 years (perhaps with a renewal option as with patents).
I've released a lot of software under the GPL, and the GPL in its current form couldn't exist without copyright.
What copyright should do is protect individual creators, not corporations. And it should protect them even if their work is mixed through complex statistical algorithms such as LLMs.
LLMs wouldn't be possible without _trillions_ of hours of work by people writing books, code, music, etc. they are trained on. The _millions_ of hours of work spent on the training algorithm itself, the chat interface, the scraping scripts, etc. is barely a drop in the bucket.
There is 0 reason the people who spent mere millions of hours of work should get all the reward without giving anything to the rest of the world who put in trillions of hours.
Your point remains, but the problem of the division of responsibility and financial credit doesn't go away with that alone. Do you know if the openAI lawsuits have laid this out?
With code, some licenses are compatible, for example you could take a model trained on GPL and MIT code, and use it to produce GPL code. (The resulting model would _of course_ also be a derivative work licensed under the GPL.) That satisfies the biggest elephant in the room - giving users their rights to inspect and modify the code. Giving credit to individual authors is more difficult though.
I haven't been following the lawsuits much, I am powerless to influence them and having written my fair share of GPL and AGPL code, this whole LLM thing feels like being spat in the face.
It's not only about regurgitation verbatim. Doing that just means it gets caught more easily.
LLMs are just another way the uber rich try to exploit everyone, hoping that if they exploit every single person's work just a little, they will get away with it.
Nobody is 1000x more productive than the average programmer at writing code. There is no reason somebody should make 1000x more money from it either.
We don't like gatekeeping ideas because many people have the same ideas.
I'm still waiting for an update on the final removal timeline.
If you hide behind corporations and have millions of dollars, sure, but not for us normies it isn't.
And it's not like copyright outside the US is a wild west; most national and international copyright regimes in the developed world are based on the US's system (often because the US has strong-armed other countries to comply).
May the best implementation win.
Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can artificially collect rent through a government-enforced monopoly.
Accelerate.
a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion, advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)
or
b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?
How is advertising a book you've written and are selling different than advertising your writing or skills to potential patrons and clients with regard to being negative-sum?
b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?
Who said anything about the relative wealth or patrons and authors? People seem totally willing to subscribe to people whose creative output they value. Sometimes such patronage is barely enough to live, sometimes it's an impressive total sum.
If someone's unable to find anyone willing to pay them in advance for their work or purchase a subscription, is their work really creating much value to society?
A lot of the people bashing on copyright seem to have no concept of the second order effects abolishing copyright would have and no intention to game it out.
Copyright has issues. For example it protects corporations instead of individual creators and workers. But not having it means rich people who own brands and have access to massive advertising can just take someone's work and make money from it while contributing nothing of value by themselves.
Any copy-left code is basically free to be used in closed source software, as long as it's not a verbatim copy? Count me out.
LLMs are used to subvert the spirit of GPL, if not the letter.
That's it, they're in maintenance mode and I'm not releasing anything again in the future.
My model used to be to build products and spin off components into generic open source libraries others could use, and some caught on. Now I'm just keeping them for myself or attempting to monetize them somehow.
Now they can just copyright-wash it through AI models.
I am not a lawyer but I thought it was pretty well established that (a) the library of congress is part of the legislature, not an executive branch office and (b) that the president can remove some people but can't install people in the other branches without confirmation (e.g. when a SCOTUS justice dies or retires, the president can't name a temporary justice).
https://www.govtrack.us/posts/503/2025-05-13_president-trump...
wfleming•4h ago