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 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.

The 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.

Hear 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.

The major problem with copyright is it's too long. The vast majority of revenue from copyrighted content is made in the first year or two of release, and yet we extend protection 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.

Every 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.

Funny 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?

Copyright 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.

Copyright 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.

Did 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

I 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.

From 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.

Funny 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?

Copyright 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.