Copyright needs to be shorter for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones would be that if copyright was a reasonable length (15 to 30 years), this would all be a moot point and everyone could use books from within a recent timeframe for any kind of use, including AI training.
Further, this would make it feel a lot less hypocritical like piracy is okay for giant corporations and their products as long as they make oodles of money but piracy for regular people is still bad. I mean for fucks sake they put the guys from The Pirate Bay in prison for less, under the same argument: that they were profiting off of pirated works, just like AI companies are. Yet somehow it's totes okay for OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Meta, and Twitter, and they're not being sent to prison over it. It really re-enforces the feeling that there's two justice systems, one for the obscenely rich where as long as they make crazy profit they can do whatever the fuck they want, and one for the poor where they get fucked six ways to Sunday for doing on a small, individual level what giant corporatio
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Copyright needs to be shorter for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones would be that if copyright was a reasonable length (15 to 30 years), this would all be a moot point and everyone could use books from within a recent timeframe for any kind of use, including AI training.
Further, this would make it feel a lot less hypocritical like piracy is okay for giant corporations and their products as long as they make oodles of money but piracy for regular people is still bad. I mean for fucks sake they put the guys from The Pirate Bay in prison for less, under the same argument: that they were profiting off of pirated works, just like AI companies are. Yet somehow it's totes okay for OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Meta, and Twitter, and they're not being sent to prison over it. It really re-enforces the feeling that there's two justice systems, one for the obscenely rich where as long as they make crazy profit they can do whatever the fuck they want, and one for the poor where they get fucked six ways to Sunday for doing on a small, individual level what giant corporations do at industrial scale.
The solution is to fix copyright and make more works public domain and then nobody is going to prison and nobody is getting a free pass over what's considered illegal for others.
The more I think about how to fix copyright, the more I wonder whether we really need copyright.
I mean, think about it, the original idea behind copyright is to protect the small guy who creates media and wants to sell it from companies that might want to sell it themselves. Well, it's not working whatsoever. The small guy gets pennies on the dollar, while the big companies rake in the profits.
So honestly, let's just abolish copyright altogether and work on more of a donation base (that actually gets to the artists, since they control it) which is already being used with video a lot, and to ensure that artists can afford the necessities, add universal basic inco... OK shit I'm at it again.
I think it's simple, just make copyright non-transferable. Someone can sign a contract to distribute your works but can never own the rights to them. You can't pass them to anyone when you die, they go to the public domain.
Exactly. This is why you can't tie property ownership to life and death, because then you're simply creating a business incentive to seeing that people with valuable property die.
So to solve that, instead of tying the property to a specific person's lifetime, you tie it to a generic estimation of human lifetime (say 80-110 years, optimistically), and that brings us right back to where we are.
That, and it only solves one of the problems copyright causes. The problems in regards to using content to create more content is still there. The problems with massive companies raking in millions while giving the creator pennis is still there. The problems with access to content. All the spinoff issues with DRM are still there. To give a couple of examples.
The more I think about how to fix copyright, the more I wonder whether we really need copyright.
Are you think about this from the standpoint of a creator? Have you written anything? Have you composed or recorded a song? Have you drawn or painted a picture? Taken an artistic photo? Even written some source code?
Or are you simply looking at copyright from the perspective of a consumer, who sees it as little more than an inconvenience to your access to free media? (I understand the populism of this, because consumers always outnumber creators, and we all like having the power to pirate media in an economy where so much is becoming unaffordable to us.)
I mean, think about it, the original idea behind copyright is to protect the small guy who creates media and wants to sell it from companies that might want to sell it themselves. Well, it's not working whatsoever. The small guy gets pennies on the dollar, while the big companies rake in the profits.
The original idea of copyright was that if
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The more I think about how to fix copyright, the more I wonder whether we really need copyright.
Are you think about this from the standpoint of a creator? Have you written anything? Have you composed or recorded a song? Have you drawn or painted a picture? Taken an artistic photo? Even written some source code?
Or are you simply looking at copyright from the perspective of a consumer, who sees it as little more than an inconvenience to your access to free media? (I understand the populism of this, because consumers always outnumber creators, and we all like having the power to pirate media in an economy where so much is becoming unaffordable to us.)
I mean, think about it, the original idea behind copyright is to protect the small guy who creates media and wants to sell it from companies that might want to sell it themselves. Well, it's not working whatsoever. The small guy gets pennies on the dollar, while the big companies rake in the profits.
The original idea of copyright was that if you write a story (for example), you exclusively own it, and thus do not have to compete for the ability to print and sell it. This was meant to be a real solution to a real problem at the dawn of industrialization; how can the person who writes a story compete with a person who owns a printing press?
Sure, we can argue that the publisher still often wins today, because artists are so BROKE and desperate for cash that they will too often agree to a contract with bad terms. (See Spotify, for just one of many examples.) But without copyright, the writer loses and the printing company wins 100% of the time. The author would have zero ability to capitalize of their work, and the entity with the largest printing press would be unbeatable in the free market.
If AI is going to be treated like a printing press, artists should be protected from it like they were protected from the printing press. That demands stronger copyright laws, not weaker ones.
So honestly, let's just abolish copyright altogether and work on more of a donation base (that actually gets to the artists, since they control it) which is already being used with video a lot, and to ensure that artists can afford the necessities, add universal basic inco... OK shit I'm at it again.
As an artist myself, I'm tired of hearing non-artists propose solutions in which artists can only "afford the necessities" while billionaire tech bros hoard 99.9% of the wealth for themselves. Whether it's some kind of social safety net or UBI, what you're proposing amounts to little more than an allowance or table scraps from society, for the people who do what I think is the important work of creating large parts of human culture. Promising creative people a meager future in which they scrape by on only the bare minimum needed to survive is not the glamorous sales pitch that some people seem to think it is...
Why is the prescription a society where creative people are the only ones who can't capitalize on their creations?
If we are to abolish intellectual property, we might as well abolish all property (including land, patents and money as well) because then at least everybody is in the same boat. But if we do so, we'd better be careful to make sure that we aren't simply giving the federal government (and the shitheads who run it) even more power and control over everything. A society like that would need a MUCH stronger Bill of Rights, and one that is actually enforced.
Have you written anything? Have you composed or recorded a song? Have you drawn or painted a picture? Taken an artistic photo? Even written some source code?
Yes I have, yes I have, yes I have, yes I have, and yes I have.
And yes, I'm thinking about this from the point of view of a creator. It's fucking difficult to make ends meet. Talk to any artist that hasn't managed to get a salaried job as an artist (you have to be really, I mean really good at what you do) or gotten lucky enough to make it big. They're saving money anywhere they can. They're working second and third jobs. Honestly, on average, artists are the poorest people I know. Despite copyright protection being strong (put the AI thing aside for a minute, since it's a fairly new problem). The lab results are in. It doesn't work.
You know what they would like? To focus on their art, and not their financial issues. Oh, and many would like to not worry about the legal grey area/hellhole when it comes to remixing or rearranging others' work. I've made an arrangement
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Have you written anything? Have you composed or recorded a song? Have you drawn or painted a picture? Taken an artistic photo? Even written some source code?
Yes I have, yes I have, yes I have, yes I have, and yes I have.
And yes, I'm thinking about this from the point of view of a creator. It's fucking difficult to make ends meet. Talk to any artist that hasn't managed to get a salaried job as an artist (you have to be really, I mean really good at what you do) or gotten lucky enough to make it big. They're saving money anywhere they can. They're working second and third jobs. Honestly, on average, artists are the poorest people I know. Despite copyright protection being strong (put the AI thing aside for a minute, since it's a fairly new problem). The lab results are in. It doesn't work.
You know what they would like? To focus on their art, and not their financial issues. Oh, and many would like to not worry about the legal grey area/hellhole when it comes to remixing or rearranging others' work. I've made an arrangement for a song I was fascinated with, but I haven't released it, partly because I don't want to deal with all the legal BS.
This was meant to be a real solution to a real problem at the dawn of industrialization; how can the person who writes a story compete with a person who owns a printing press?
You're mixing up your history here. Copyright is much, much newer than the printing press. And even if you take that assumption, that calculation has changed, since again there's next to no cost to making copies anymore. So now, the companies have used copyright to become gatekeepers while also keeping as much of the profit as humanly possible.
Why is the prescription a society where creative people are the only ones who can't capitalize on their creations?
...except they can. There are plenty of media creators that get their audience to sponsor them, to varying degrees of success.
But honestly, if there's no worry about food insecurity or housing insecurity, do you want to create art or just profit from it?
I'm not going to go into the slippery slope tirade at the end except to say this: look at how filthy rich companies like Disney, Sony, etc. are. They are that ridiculously rich because of copyright. Is that really what you want?
Sometimes I wonder why copyright isn't the same length as a patent? I don't think it particularly matters whether you use utility patent or design patent length. Patent law has it's faults, but as someone who both has patents and has had to deal with someone else beating me to an idea, it seems to be a better system than whatever the fuck Disney has managed to turn copyright into.
we’d better be careful to make sure that we aren’t simply giving the federal government (and the shitheads who run it) even more power and control over everything
You do realize that copyright is solely a function of the federal government, right? There is no state or municipal copyright, it's already the federal government who decides whether your copyright as a creator is valid or enforceable, or whether to just hand it over to another company/ billionaire.
If we are to abolish intellectual property, we might as well abolish all property (including land, patents and money as well
That's a bit messy.
Patents are IP, with the caveat that they usually protect corporation over inventors.
Money is a medium for measuring transactions. Hoarding it is very much like having people owing you a service.
Land is more complex and needs for a society to clarify "property" first : property because of use or property in a more abstract way allowing others to use it for your benefit. This also implies a split between single-person usage (t'is my plot for I toil it for my family) and a more common use (10 persons toil the field which provides enough for 20).
See, I think copyright has value, I think it has just lost sight of its original goals and intentions because corporations (which never die) have vested interest in copyright being as long as possible.
According to the research of Rufus Pollock, optimal copyright term is between 15 and 38 years. This provides a range that the majority of copyright holders will make the majority of their income from copyright on, while also promoting the originals goals of copyright which was to allow artists to support themselves while also promoting creation of new media. The majority of copyrighted works only have a real shelf-life of 15 to 38 years before people aren't really looking to pay for them, so why should we have copyright that exists beyond that when most will have already made all the profit they will ever make from their works within that timeframe.
I personally think UBI is a pretty weak replacement for copyright. UBI shouldn't wholesale replace markets but rather be a safety net for people who are struggling and need a basic amount of support to reasonably survive.
I actually don't understand your reasoning here... What have you made in your life that leads you to think that copyright should be limited at all? Have you never written a story? Composed or recorded a song? Drawn a picture or taken a photograph? Written some computer code?
I've done all of these things, and I don't see any logic in the idea that I shouldn't have exclusive legal rights over a work that I've created throughout my lifetime, at the very least. I write a song and I only get 15 years to perform and sell it? I paint an illustration and I only get 15 years to prevent other people from drop-shipping t-shirts and posters of it on Amazon?
Copyright exists, in theory, to protect the original creators of works. Whether it does a good job of that or not is a secondary point. It seems that you're essentially arguing that artists should have less rights, power and value simply to justify piracy. No offense, but this strikes me as the argument of a consumer trying to justify piracy, with zero consideration of protecting writers, artists, musicians, and other creators
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I actually don't understand your reasoning here... What have you made in your life that leads you to think that copyright should be limited at all? Have you never written a story? Composed or recorded a song? Drawn a picture or taken a photograph? Written some computer code?
I've done all of these things, and I don't see any logic in the idea that I shouldn't have exclusive legal rights over a work that I've created throughout my lifetime, at the very least. I write a song and I only get 15 years to perform and sell it? I paint an illustration and I only get 15 years to prevent other people from drop-shipping t-shirts and posters of it on Amazon?
Copyright exists, in theory, to protect the original creators of works. Whether it does a good job of that or not is a secondary point. It seems that you're essentially arguing that artists should have less rights, power and value simply to justify piracy. No offense, but this strikes me as the argument of a consumer trying to justify piracy, with zero consideration of protecting writers, artists, musicians, and other creators of "intellectual property".
Indeed, one solution to corporations getting away with breaking the law is to make the law more lax for everyone. But another (much more preferable) solution is to simply enforce the laws equally and take action to protect creators.
The basic trade-off inherent in copyright is a simple one. On the one hand, increasing copyright yields benefits by stimulating the creation of new works but, on the other hand, it reduces access to existing works (the welfare ‘deadweight’ loss). Choosing the optimal term, that is the length of protection, presents these two countervailing forces particularly starkly.
Unfortunately this "research" is merely the subjective opinion of a "open data activist" who, to my knowledge, has not created anything, and is based on a flawed and entitled premise that the world is owed "access" to the creations of artists. I invite you to use your own brain, and reach your own conclusions:
If I write a song from my own mind, what entitles you or anyone else to access of that song?
If you paint a painting and hang it up on the wall of your bedroom, does that entitle me to have access to it in any way?
The answers to these questions are obvious.
There is no need to optimize copyright laws to balance the the
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The basic trade-off inherent in copyright is a simple one. On the one hand, increasing copyright yields benefits by stimulating the creation of new works but, on the other hand, it reduces access to existing works (the welfare ‘deadweight’ loss). Choosing the optimal term, that is the length of protection, presents these two countervailing forces particularly starkly.
Unfortunately this "research" is merely the subjective opinion of a "open data activist" who, to my knowledge, has not created anything, and is based on a flawed and entitled premise that the world is owed "access" to the creations of artists. I invite you to use your own brain, and reach your own conclusions:
If I write a song from my own mind, what entitles you or anyone else to access of that song?
If you paint a painting and hang it up on the wall of your bedroom, does that entitle me to have access to it in any way?
The answers to these questions are obvious.
There is no need to optimize copyright laws to balance the the rights of creators with the accessibility of media, because copyright exists simply to protect creators to own and control their own creations, which other people are in no way entitled to. "Access" isn't a factor, or at least it shouldn't be within the lifetime of the original creator.
“The AI + open data combo is incredibly powerful—but it must be democratic, ethical, and human-centered.” - Rufus Pollock, CKAN Monthly Live #33, July 6th 2025
It "must be" democratic? ethical? human-centered?
Guess what? It's none of those things... And the only way to even begin to force it to be any of those things is creating robust copyright laws that protect creators from exploitation of the technology-controlling elite oligarchs who have monopolized money, power, and the means of production (if you can even call generously generative AI "production", instead of mere theft.)
So again, I'll ask you, "what have you made in your life that leads you to think copyright should be limited to 15 years?"
The answer for someone like Rufus Pollock seems to be "I've created nothing, I just want access to other people's things", probably only so that he and other highly privileged tech bros can further engineer a society where they can use people's data for their own benefit.
We don't need some 20 year old joke of a research paper from Cambridge to judge what we are seeing with our own eyes right here and now. If you need a concrete example of where forced "open data" (as in, "we've pirated every song ever and hosted them on Anna's Archive so big tech can use them to train a model to rip off musicians who are already working 2-3 jobs to make ends meet") has failed, it has been the abuse and exploitation of copyrighted works on the part of generative AI companies in a system that has only served to make the rich richer and the poor, including the creative class, poorer.
Pollock isn't entitled to "access" to the things I create, nor is Altman entitled to train his over-valued company's for-profit product off of them. Fuck that.
The increasingly broke creative proletariat are being ripped the fuck off by the disgustingly wealthy techno-oligarch bourgeoisie, all because generative AI training seems to barely be a gray area in existing copyright laws--showing once and for all that giving these people even a single inch of "access" to our work will end in nothing but rampant exploitation.
He's a doctor of economics, he has a PhD. He's not exactly a tech bro by any stretch.
The paper I linked is literally an example of him making something. Unless you somehow erroneously think that research papers aren't entitled to copyright protection, which, surprise, you're wrong.
The Silicon Valley Nonprofit Also Rolls Out New Model for Community Participation Palo Alto, California, USA – May 29, 2003 – Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a layer of reasonable copyright, announced today that it would begin dev…
These are all nothing more than arguments from authority. There are too many more creative people on the other side of the issue to even bother trying to list them.
The number of artists who release their creations into CC0 or public domain is not even a drop in the bucket. Good for them, that's a valid and maybe noble choice to relinquish their copyright--but it is a personal choice, not a law, nor should it be.
I've also written GPL code for years. That's my choice. I don't even regret it, despite knowing that it's being exploited. I'm not going to pretend that entitles me to the code that other people write. I'm not going to try to mandate that laws force everything to be GPL. It also doesn't mean that my code can be freely scraped and abused by AI companies.
"If you really want to keep control of your art, keep it in your house, don't share it with anyone, don't share it with the world."
Because that's really c
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These are all nothing more than arguments from authority. There are too many more creative people on the other side of the issue to even bother trying to list them.
The number of artists who release their creations into CC0 or public domain is not even a drop in the bucket. Good for them, that's a valid and maybe noble choice to relinquish their copyright--but it is a personal choice, not a law, nor should it be.
I've also written GPL code for years. That's my choice. I don't even regret it, despite knowing that it's being exploited. I'm not going to pretend that entitles me to the code that other people write. I'm not going to try to mandate that laws force everything to be GPL. It also doesn't mean that my code can be freely scraped and abused by AI companies.
"If you really want to keep control of your art, keep it in your house, don't share it with anyone, don't share it with the world."
Because that's really conducive to living in a capitalist society where the only way to make art is to have money, and the only way to have money is to sell your time, isn't it?
Sounds like a pretty shitty deal to me for artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, designers, etc.
Copyright exists, at least in theory, to prevent us from living in such a world.
I reject all of that. It's a false dichotomy to tell artists that they have to either "keep their art in their house" or share it openly with an entire world of rich assholes like Altman, Musk, Zuck, Huang, and others who seek to exploit it for their own gain.
Personally I think you're the one who needs to get his head out of his ass and stop worshiping the words of other people as if they were gospel. I don't dwell on the every word of my favorite musicians. You're so busy looking up to people that you're not looking at the world around you as it is, right now, in 2026.
Look at the rampant, flagrant and shameless exploitation of the creative class by the pompous, rich, powerful, tech-bro elites who feel endless entitlement to everything that they can see. Are we just gonna pretend like this comment isn't attached to an article about how the richest company in the world purchased a massive trove of copyrighted works to train their AI? Are we gonna pretend like Anthropic, Google, X, and OpenAI haven't all done the exact same thing?
Sorry. I can't subscribe to that.
I care much more about art and artists than I care about tech or "open culture" on the internet.
At any rate, today's my birthday and I'm trying not to waste my time getting all worked up... Your opinion is valid and we probably aren't going to change each other's minds on this, so it's hardly worth continuing this conversation. I don't dislike you, I just disagree. Have a good one.
When you post from standard Lemmy interface and add a picture, it adds it as a link that may overwrite the URL you have entered. Annoying, but it is what it is.
Add a picture first, and then replace the URL with what you link to.
Snot Flickerman
in reply to mrmaplebar • • •Copyright needs to be shorter for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones would be that if copyright was a reasonable length (15 to 30 years), this would all be a moot point and everyone could use books from within a recent timeframe for any kind of use, including AI training.
Further, this would make it feel a lot less hypocritical like piracy is okay for giant corporations and their products as long as they make oodles of money but piracy for regular people is still bad. I mean for fucks sake they put the guys from The Pirate Bay in prison for less, under the same argument: that they were profiting off of pirated works, just like AI companies are. Yet somehow it's totes okay for OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Meta, and Twitter, and they're not being sent to prison over it. It really re-enforces the feeling that there's two justice systems, one for the obscenely rich where as long as they make crazy profit they can do whatever the fuck they want, and one for the poor where they get fucked six ways to Sunday for doing on a small, individual level what giant corporatio
... Show more...Copyright needs to be shorter for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones would be that if copyright was a reasonable length (15 to 30 years), this would all be a moot point and everyone could use books from within a recent timeframe for any kind of use, including AI training.
Further, this would make it feel a lot less hypocritical like piracy is okay for giant corporations and their products as long as they make oodles of money but piracy for regular people is still bad. I mean for fucks sake they put the guys from The Pirate Bay in prison for less, under the same argument: that they were profiting off of pirated works, just like AI companies are. Yet somehow it's totes okay for OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Meta, and Twitter, and they're not being sent to prison over it. It really re-enforces the feeling that there's two justice systems, one for the obscenely rich where as long as they make crazy profit they can do whatever the fuck they want, and one for the poor where they get fucked six ways to Sunday for doing on a small, individual level what giant corporations do at industrial scale.
The solution is to fix copyright and make more works public domain and then nobody is going to prison and nobody is getting a free pass over what's considered illegal for others.
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unknownuserunknownlocation
in reply to Snot Flickerman • • •The more I think about how to fix copyright, the more I wonder whether we really need copyright.
I mean, think about it, the original idea behind copyright is to protect the small guy who creates media and wants to sell it from companies that might want to sell it themselves. Well, it's not working whatsoever. The small guy gets pennies on the dollar, while the big companies rake in the profits.
So honestly, let's just abolish copyright altogether and work on more of a donation base (that actually gets to the artists, since they control it) which is already being used with video a lot, and to ensure that artists can afford the necessities, add universal basic inco... OK shit I'm at it again.
Jayjader
in reply to unknownuserunknownlocation • • •It's "funny" how it always seems to come down to ~~this~~ people shouldn't need to make someone else richer just to survive...
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realitista
in reply to unknownuserunknownlocation • • •like this
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Em Adespoton
in reply to realitista • • •The problem with that is the rash of deaths of people with copyright over desirable content.
And this isn’t just speculative.
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mrmaplebar
in reply to Em Adespoton • • •Exactly. This is why you can't tie property ownership to life and death, because then you're simply creating a business incentive to seeing that people with valuable property die.
So to solve that, instead of tying the property to a specific person's lifetime, you tie it to a generic estimation of human lifetime (say 80-110 years, optimistically), and that brings us right back to where we are.
realitista
in reply to Em Adespoton • • •unknownuserunknownlocation
in reply to Em Adespoton • • •Valmond
in reply to Em Adespoton • • •Okay transferrable but 5 years tops.
That's wildly enough IMO.
artyom
in reply to unknownuserunknownlocation • • •Or we could not do that and actually solve the problem that causes those kind of splits...
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mrmaplebar
in reply to unknownuserunknownlocation • • •Are you think about this from the standpoint of a creator? Have you written anything? Have you composed or recorded a song? Have you drawn or painted a picture? Taken an artistic photo? Even written some source code?
Or are you simply looking at copyright from the perspective of a consumer, who sees it as little more than an inconvenience to your access to free media? (I understand the populism of this, because consumers always outnumber creators, and we all like having the power to pirate media in an economy where so much is becoming unaffordable to us.)
... Show more...The original idea of copyright was that if
Are you think about this from the standpoint of a creator? Have you written anything? Have you composed or recorded a song? Have you drawn or painted a picture? Taken an artistic photo? Even written some source code?
Or are you simply looking at copyright from the perspective of a consumer, who sees it as little more than an inconvenience to your access to free media? (I understand the populism of this, because consumers always outnumber creators, and we all like having the power to pirate media in an economy where so much is becoming unaffordable to us.)
The original idea of copyright was that if you write a story (for example), you exclusively own it, and thus do not have to compete for the ability to print and sell it. This was meant to be a real solution to a real problem at the dawn of industrialization; how can the person who writes a story compete with a person who owns a printing press?
Sure, we can argue that the publisher still often wins today, because artists are so BROKE and desperate for cash that they will too often agree to a contract with bad terms. (See Spotify, for just one of many examples.) But without copyright, the writer loses and the printing company wins 100% of the time. The author would have zero ability to capitalize of their work, and the entity with the largest printing press would be unbeatable in the free market.
If AI is going to be treated like a printing press, artists should be protected from it like they were protected from the printing press. That demands stronger copyright laws, not weaker ones.
As an artist myself, I'm tired of hearing non-artists propose solutions in which artists can only "afford the necessities" while billionaire tech bros hoard 99.9% of the wealth for themselves. Whether it's some kind of social safety net or UBI, what you're proposing amounts to little more than an allowance or table scraps from society, for the people who do what I think is the important work of creating large parts of human culture. Promising creative people a meager future in which they scrape by on only the bare minimum needed to survive is not the glamorous sales pitch that some people seem to think it is...
Why is the prescription a society where creative people are the only ones who can't capitalize on their creations?
If we are to abolish intellectual property, we might as well abolish all property (including land, patents and money as well) because then at least everybody is in the same boat. But if we do so, we'd better be careful to make sure that we aren't simply giving the federal government (and the shitheads who run it) even more power and control over everything. A society like that would need a MUCH stronger Bill of Rights, and one that is actually enforced.
unknownuserunknownlocation
in reply to mrmaplebar • • •Yes I have, yes I have, yes I have, yes I have, and yes I have.
And yes, I'm thinking about this from the point of view of a creator. It's fucking difficult to make ends meet. Talk to any artist that hasn't managed to get a salaried job as an artist (you have to be really, I mean really good at what you do) or gotten lucky enough to make it big. They're saving money anywhere they can. They're working second and third jobs. Honestly, on average, artists are the poorest people I know. Despite copyright protection being strong (put the AI thing aside for a minute, since it's a fairly new problem). The lab results are in. It doesn't work.
You know what they would like? To focus on their art, and not their financial issues. Oh, and many would like to not worry about the legal grey area/hellhole when it comes to remixing or rearranging others' work. I've made an arrangement
... Show more...Yes I have, yes I have, yes I have, yes I have, and yes I have.
And yes, I'm thinking about this from the point of view of a creator. It's fucking difficult to make ends meet. Talk to any artist that hasn't managed to get a salaried job as an artist (you have to be really, I mean really good at what you do) or gotten lucky enough to make it big. They're saving money anywhere they can. They're working second and third jobs. Honestly, on average, artists are the poorest people I know. Despite copyright protection being strong (put the AI thing aside for a minute, since it's a fairly new problem). The lab results are in. It doesn't work.
You know what they would like? To focus on their art, and not their financial issues. Oh, and many would like to not worry about the legal grey area/hellhole when it comes to remixing or rearranging others' work. I've made an arrangement for a song I was fascinated with, but I haven't released it, partly because I don't want to deal with all the legal BS.
You're mixing up your history here. Copyright is much, much newer than the printing press. And even if you take that assumption, that calculation has changed, since again there's next to no cost to making copies anymore. So now, the companies have used copyright to become gatekeepers while also keeping as much of the profit as humanly possible.
...except they can. There are plenty of media creators that get their audience to sponsor them, to varying degrees of success.
But honestly, if there's no worry about food insecurity or housing insecurity, do you want to create art or just profit from it?
I'm not going to go into the slippery slope tirade at the end except to say this: look at how filthy rich companies like Disney, Sony, etc. are. They are that ridiculously rich because of copyright. Is that really what you want?
SteevyT
in reply to unknownuserunknownlocation • • •t3rmit3
in reply to mrmaplebar • • •You do realize that copyright is solely a function of the federal government, right? There is no state or municipal copyright, it's already the federal government who decides whether your copyright as a creator is valid or enforceable, or whether to just hand it over to another company/ billionaire.
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leftascenter
in reply to mrmaplebar • • •That's a bit messy.
Patents are IP, with the caveat that they usually protect corporation over inventors.
Money is a medium for measuring transactions. Hoarding it is very much like having people owing you a service.
Land is more complex and needs for a society to clarify "property" first : property because of use or property in a more abstract way allowing others to use it for your benefit. This also implies a split between single-person usage (t'is my plot for I toil it for my family) and a more common use (10 persons toil the field which provides enough for 20).
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Snot Flickerman
in reply to unknownuserunknownlocation • • •See, I think copyright has value, I think it has just lost sight of its original goals and intentions because corporations (which never die) have vested interest in copyright being as long as possible.
According to the research of Rufus Pollock, optimal copyright term is between 15 and 38 years. This provides a range that the majority of copyright holders will make the majority of their income from copyright on, while also promoting the originals goals of copyright which was to allow artists to support themselves while also promoting creation of new media. The majority of copyrighted works only have a real shelf-life of 15 to 38 years before people aren't really looking to pay for them, so why should we have copyright that exists beyond that when most will have already made all the profit they will ever make from their works within that timeframe.
I personally think UBI is a pretty weak replacement for copyright. UBI shouldn't wholesale replace markets but rather be a safety net for people who are struggling and need a basic amount of support to reasonably survive.
mrmaplebar
in reply to Snot Flickerman • • •I actually don't understand your reasoning here... What have you made in your life that leads you to think that copyright should be limited at all? Have you never written a story? Composed or recorded a song? Drawn a picture or taken a photograph? Written some computer code?
I've done all of these things, and I don't see any logic in the idea that I shouldn't have exclusive legal rights over a work that I've created throughout my lifetime, at the very least. I write a song and I only get 15 years to perform and sell it? I paint an illustration and I only get 15 years to prevent other people from drop-shipping t-shirts and posters of it on Amazon?
Copyright exists, in theory, to protect the original creators of works. Whether it does a good job of that or not is a secondary point. It seems that you're essentially arguing that artists should have less rights, power and value simply to justify piracy. No offense, but this strikes me as the argument of a consumer trying to justify piracy, with zero consideration of protecting writers, artists, musicians, and other creators
... Show more...I actually don't understand your reasoning here... What have you made in your life that leads you to think that copyright should be limited at all? Have you never written a story? Composed or recorded a song? Drawn a picture or taken a photograph? Written some computer code?
I've done all of these things, and I don't see any logic in the idea that I shouldn't have exclusive legal rights over a work that I've created throughout my lifetime, at the very least. I write a song and I only get 15 years to perform and sell it? I paint an illustration and I only get 15 years to prevent other people from drop-shipping t-shirts and posters of it on Amazon?
Copyright exists, in theory, to protect the original creators of works. Whether it does a good job of that or not is a secondary point. It seems that you're essentially arguing that artists should have less rights, power and value simply to justify piracy. No offense, but this strikes me as the argument of a consumer trying to justify piracy, with zero consideration of protecting writers, artists, musicians, and other creators of "intellectual property".
Indeed, one solution to corporations getting away with breaking the law is to make the law more lax for everyone. But another (much more preferable) solution is to simply enforce the laws equally and take action to protect creators.
Snot Flickerman
in reply to mrmaplebar • • •rufuspollock.com/papers/optima…
The research has been done, and speaks for itself.
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mrmaplebar
in reply to Snot Flickerman • • •Unfortunately this "research" is merely the subjective opinion of a "open data activist" who, to my knowledge, has not created anything, and is based on a flawed and entitled premise that the world is owed "access" to the creations of artists. I invite you to use your own brain, and reach your own conclusions:
The answers to these questions are obvious.
There is no need to optimize copyright laws to balance the the
... Show more...Unfortunately this "research" is merely the subjective opinion of a "open data activist" who, to my knowledge, has not created anything, and is based on a flawed and entitled premise that the world is owed "access" to the creations of artists. I invite you to use your own brain, and reach your own conclusions:
The answers to these questions are obvious.
There is no need to optimize copyright laws to balance the the rights of creators with the accessibility of media, because copyright exists simply to protect creators to own and control their own creations, which other people are in no way entitled to. "Access" isn't a factor, or at least it shouldn't be within the lifetime of the original creator.
It "must be" democratic? ethical? human-centered?
Guess what? It's none of those things... And the only way to even begin to force it to be any of those things is creating robust copyright laws that protect creators from exploitation of the technology-controlling elite oligarchs who have monopolized money, power, and the means of production (if you can even call generously generative AI "production", instead of mere theft.)
So again, I'll ask you, "what have you made in your life that leads you to think copyright should be limited to 15 years?"
The answer for someone like Rufus Pollock seems to be "I've created nothing, I just want access to other people's things", probably only so that he and other highly privileged tech bros can further engineer a society where they can use people's data for their own benefit.
We don't need some 20 year old joke of a research paper from Cambridge to judge what we are seeing with our own eyes right here and now. If you need a concrete example of where forced "open data" (as in, "we've pirated every song ever and hosted them on Anna's Archive so big tech can use them to train a model to rip off musicians who are already working 2-3 jobs to make ends meet") has failed, it has been the abuse and exploitation of copyrighted works on the part of generative AI companies in a system that has only served to make the rich richer and the poor, including the creative class, poorer.
Pollock isn't entitled to "access" to the things I create, nor is Altman entitled to train his over-valued company's for-profit product off of them. Fuck that.
The increasingly broke creative proletariat are being ripped the fuck off by the disgustingly wealthy techno-oligarch bourgeoisie, all because generative AI training seems to barely be a gray area in existing copyright laws--showing once and for all that giving these people even a single inch of "access" to our work will end in nothing but rampant exploitation.
Snot Flickerman
in reply to mrmaplebar • • •He's a doctor of economics, he has a PhD. He's not exactly a tech bro by any stretch.
The paper I linked is literally an example of him making something. Unless you somehow erroneously think that research papers aren't entitled to copyright protection, which, surprise, you're wrong.
This isn't even worth replying to. Get your head out of your ass, man. Plenty of people who make things that are copyrightable promote shortening and amending copyright, including author Cory Doctorow, the man who coined the term "enshittification."
I'll quote Mark Hosler of the band Negativland, who made a shitload of art. Negativland was also instrumental in designing early Creative Commons licenses.
"If you really want to keep control of your art, keep it in your house, don't share it with anyone, don't share it with the world."
Creative Commons and Negativland Begin Work on Free Sampling and Collage - Creative Commons
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mrmaplebar
in reply to Snot Flickerman • • •These are all nothing more than arguments from authority. There are too many more creative people on the other side of the issue to even bother trying to list them.
The number of artists who release their creations into CC0 or public domain is not even a drop in the bucket. Good for them, that's a valid and maybe noble choice to relinquish their copyright--but it is a personal choice, not a law, nor should it be.
I've also written GPL code for years. That's my choice. I don't even regret it, despite knowing that it's being exploited. I'm not going to pretend that entitles me to the code that other people write. I'm not going to try to mandate that laws force everything to be GPL. It also doesn't mean that my code can be freely scraped and abused by AI companies.
... Show more...Because that's really c
These are all nothing more than arguments from authority. There are too many more creative people on the other side of the issue to even bother trying to list them.
The number of artists who release their creations into CC0 or public domain is not even a drop in the bucket. Good for them, that's a valid and maybe noble choice to relinquish their copyright--but it is a personal choice, not a law, nor should it be.
I've also written GPL code for years. That's my choice. I don't even regret it, despite knowing that it's being exploited. I'm not going to pretend that entitles me to the code that other people write. I'm not going to try to mandate that laws force everything to be GPL. It also doesn't mean that my code can be freely scraped and abused by AI companies.
Because that's really conducive to living in a capitalist society where the only way to make art is to have money, and the only way to have money is to sell your time, isn't it?
Sounds like a pretty shitty deal to me for artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, designers, etc.
Copyright exists, at least in theory, to prevent us from living in such a world.
I reject all of that. It's a false dichotomy to tell artists that they have to either "keep their art in their house" or share it openly with an entire world of rich assholes like Altman, Musk, Zuck, Huang, and others who seek to exploit it for their own gain.
Personally I think you're the one who needs to get his head out of his ass and stop worshiping the words of other people as if they were gospel. I don't dwell on the every word of my favorite musicians. You're so busy looking up to people that you're not looking at the world around you as it is, right now, in 2026.
Look at the rampant, flagrant and shameless exploitation of the creative class by the pompous, rich, powerful, tech-bro elites who feel endless entitlement to everything that they can see. Are we just gonna pretend like this comment isn't attached to an article about how the richest company in the world purchased a massive trove of copyrighted works to train their AI? Are we gonna pretend like Anthropic, Google, X, and OpenAI haven't all done the exact same thing?
Sorry. I can't subscribe to that.
I care much more about art and artists than I care about tech or "open culture" on the internet.
At any rate, today's my birthday and I'm trying not to waste my time getting all worked up... Your opinion is valid and we probably aren't going to change each other's minds on this, so it's hardly worth continuing this conversation. I don't dislike you, I just disagree. Have a good one.
a form of defeasible argument in which a claimed authority's support is used as evidence for an argument's conclusion
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Snot Flickerman
in reply to mrmaplebar • • •Too late, you've done nothing but rant in this thread. Get over yourself.
Kissaki
in reply to mrmaplebar • • •Could you link a or the source?
The post links an image, and the description links a page with a login screen.
schnurrito
in reply to Kissaki • • •This is probably supposed to be a link to this: torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contac…
There are a few communities where that link was posted correctly: discuss.tchncs.de/post/5313335…
NVIDIA Contacted Anna’s Archive to Secure Access to Millions of Pirated Books * TorrentFreak
Ernesto Van der Sar (TF Publishing)mrmaplebar
in reply to schnurrito • • •Allero
in reply to mrmaplebar • • •When you post from standard Lemmy interface and add a picture, it adds it as a link that may overwrite the URL you have entered. Annoying, but it is what it is.
Add a picture first, and then replace the URL with what you link to.
Novi Sad
in reply to mrmaplebar • • •American computer programmer and internet-political activist (1986-2013)
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