This is solid guidance. "Given this range of experimentation, courts should be reluctant to decide in advance what tools do and do not foster “human creativity.”"
There might need to be some calibration. The reason for copyright is (ostensibly) to compensate for the enormous cost of production. If the cost goes down, the protection should also logically go down.
The purpose of copyright under the US Constitution, a text relevant to the courts the EFF is addressing here, is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving creators temporary exclusive rights to their works"
It is not to "compensate for the cost of production", nor is it to ensure that business plans of major music publishers happen to be successful.
The EFF is correct to say here that copyright shouldn't be perverted to limiting market competition generally, but limited to protecting a specific works.
Why are you being argumentative? "Promote" and "exclusive rights" was always about compensation for the time and effort invested. You just rephrased what the OP said while claiming to disagree.
It's substantively different. The level of compensation you could expect from copyright needs to be high enough that creators/inventors in general feel that it may be worthwhile to create/invent stuff. That level of compensation may be exactly enough to pay for a musician to make a track. We know this is not the case, it's more like a lottery ticket; some musicians make millions (much more than would be needed to entice them to choose this line of work) and many make almost nothing, but still persist. If you relax copyright provisions so that average compensation is halved, this would presumably have a non-linear impact. Maybe a 50% decrease in expected compensation only results in -10% new works. Maybe in -80%. For example, it is completely implausible that retroactively extending copyright (as has been done) results in any additional works being created at all - just higher profits for existing owners. This also applies to the costs; a higher cost of production (e.g. cost of living) doesn't necessarily need to lead to more stringent copyright restraints, nor lower costs to more lax restrictions.
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
In what ways does an exclusive right promote the progress of science and the useful arts other than by incentivizing that creative work?
In what way can that incentive work other than by compensating for the cost of production?
Copyright has nothing to do with cost of production. What does it cost for me to doodle something on a napkin? Nothing, yet I still enjoy the full protections copyright law offers for that doodle (with the exception today being AI companies. Apparently, they can do whatever the fuck they want with it)
Independend of AI I am fully supporting the idea to abolish copyright in general, full stop. Allowing cheap duplication and tweaking is what leads to fast innovation and culture changes. Explicit (costly) patents can remain in place to secure industrial-grade research processes, but the general everyday stuff, incluing music and literature and code and so on is something to strip default rights away to allow faster progress. and oh the poor artists: next to none percentage wise gets much royalties anymore, streaming income is close to zero usually even if popular, the only real world industry to defend are the parasites that do not create art to begin with but siphon production/distribution channels. you might disagree with me, just wanna make clear that some people like me are against this copyright theater before AI blew up in popularity.
> Explicit (costly) patents can remain in place to secure industrial-grade research processes
I keep reading about big companies i) developing very similar drugs that are different enough to avoid patents, ii) using their size to prevent litigation.
That is a thing (though arguably there is still value in the reformulations). A good current example would be orally administered wegovy, which received an additional patent on top of semaglutide for combining the drug with an absorption enhancer. This is a genuine advancement, and did require clinical trials (not all patentable improvements do) but it is ultimately just a variation on an existing drug.
That being said, the patent on semaglutide still expires at the same time and biosimilars (or generics in other cases) can be produced at that time using the injectable formulation (or a new alternative). This seems reasonable to me
if copyrigth is abolished. amazon would publish every single boon without giving a cent to writers.
it would be reqlly hard for writers to make a living. Im not a fan of copyrigth and how is being used at the moment but I don't really see an alternative where writers still get paid.
Maybe the strategy is to try to build up some steam behind the abolish copyright movement to move the Overton window a bit.
If IP owners see actual support behind abolishing copyright, maybe rolling back to min(30, life of author) years of protection would seem like a more reasonable compromise.
If it were to happen I don't think Amazon would sell any books to begin with. And even under the current system, I only buy books to pay writers, and even then they only get very little of the amount I pay. I'd much rather pay them directly through whatever system evolves through the hypothetical change.
They're not paid because access to books is limited by copyright, but because whatever eyeballs they manage to reach are willing to buy their books. I may not be a representative sample, but I think that part wouldn't change much, and discoverability would still be the deciding factor.
If it were to happen I don't think Amazon would sell any books to begin with. And even under the current system, I only buy books to pay writers, and even then they only get very little of the amount I pay. I'd much rather pay them directly through whatever system evolves through the hypothetical change.
They're not paid because access to books is limited by copyright, but because whatever eyeballs they manage to reach are willing to buy their books. I may not be a representative sample, but I think that part wouldn't change much, and discoverability would still be the deciding factor.
I hate the attention economy as much as the next person, but I don't think there's any putting that back in the bottle, the amount of media won't shrink.
> amazon would publish every single boon without giving a cent to writers. it would be reqlly hard for writers to make a living.
Not quite, Amazon would just become the publisher that buys new books/articles/whatever directly from the writers, one upfront fee. Not saying it's a sustainable living for writers, just saying that's probably what would happen.
I'd say shorter but with renewals. Say, 15 years with two or three renewals of equal length, but require that the original protected work is still for sale to get the renewal. This would clear up things like retro games being stuck in limbo or small press books being impossible to buy. It would still allow rights holders to make their exclusive money if they are actually making money on the original. It wouldn't allow a Disney, where they extend the copyright on a century-old work without selling it just so they can make money on sequels or moving back and forth among animation, stage, TV series, and live action movies.
I am against renewals. It is just additional layer of complication. Having to look up and track possibly poorly informed state of work is unnecessary extra step.
Straight up x years from identified release year of edition you have on hand is most reasonable.
This would also mean copyleft would not work anymore. Companies would not be forced to release the source code of their modifications of (A)GPL software.
I’m just not convinced that most artists would change their behavior under no copyright, so somewhat agree. But the main issue is length of time.
The fact that copyright is longer than patents makes no sense. Patents prove that a shorter period is sufficient to stimulate large investment. And you have to pay for patents!
If you assume reasonable discount rates, the economic value plummets over time for an asset producing the same income (a bad assumption for copyright work in general).
At an 8% discount rate, extending copyright from 32 years to infinity adds less than 10% to its total present-day value. There are many good reform proposals, but mine would be something like 15ish years of free copyright, followed by 1 paid renewal for 15 years that is modest in price (eg $1000) and one extra 10 year renewal that is something like $1M. Meaning you have most economically neutral work free up at year 15, small business types having it affordable through 30 years, and the big Hollywood productions can go from 30-40 years for a modest (to them) fee to incentivize investments in expensive works. Movies come to mind. Give existing work a 20 year buffer on top of that to transition and there is a very small economic effect on everyone.
Removing copyright will benefit parasites and big players more than small artists and businesses. Big businesses won’t have to eg obtain any licensing to publish someone else’s novel or technical book.
How do you make a feature film - budget ranging from low millions to hundreds of millions of dollars - if anyone can copy it and view it without paying for it?
Im OK with limited forms of copyright. But the problem is that copyright business interests will ALWAYS pervert the original agreed-upon rules to their benefit.
Now something we saw that does work with audio, is statutory licensing. That rule alone allows spotify to be made. And thats also why a spotify-for-video cant be.
Thats why a local Jellyfin with 30TB of videos is better than all US based streaming services combined. Nobody is *legally* able to put a complete video library and pay access fees to relevent rightsholders.
I'm skeptical patents play a significant role at encouraging research. No correlation between stronger patent laws and more innovation has ever been found.
I'm also in favor of very light copyright laws, e.g. I don't think anyone should claim they are Coca Cola.
What % of new authors today make full-time salary on writing?
And what % of those do by selling, vs giving away their work for free (to get non-negligible attention) then getting their real money through donations, merch, etc.?
I don't think anyone has the right to take work I create, for free.
In the same way I have no right to walk into your house and use it for free.
In the same way you cannot expect me to turn up and work at your business for free.
I don't care what half delusional rubbish you come up with to justify your theft.
It's theft, you want to steal something you put zero effort into creating and use it as you see fit. No fuck you. If I want to give it away for free, that's my prerogative not your expectation, if I can monetise via merch or other means, that's my prerogative not your right.
It matters because copyright is widely abused and hurts neutral sites which must constantly check for copyrighted content, and it would’ve hampered AI if it was enforced.
Your analogy doesn’t fit because a house is physical, but “intellectual property” is digital. If we lived in the metaverse and I could just copy your house and live in it without affecting you, why should you care? Theft is bad because the victim no longer has the original.
Today, practically zero new indies make a living from selling digital copies of a thing they created. That income is eclipsed by giving away their main work, then asking for donations, maybe selling merchandise, early access, tailored commissions, or some other token (and sponsorships but those unfortunately hurt quality).
So abolish copyright, and indies still make money from creating digital works - at least almost as much as they do now, but probably more, because it will further normalize the alternate incomes. Copyright maybe used to help indies, but every copyright case I’ve seen recently, the plaintiff is a publisher with more than enough revenue; and in many cases the defendant hasn’t actually infringed, but regardless suffers from DMCA or the law under the guise of “copyright”.
Please go tell those people they should be happy for someone else to steal their work and charge for it even after they've given it away for free.
It doesn't matter whether "few" people make a living from it. Copyright does not guarantee you an audience. Copyright going away would not guarantee you more of an audience.
The only thing it guarantees is that if you manage to write something that resonates with an audience you have the potential to earn a living from it. That is what you want to take away.
These only further my point. Everything published on RoyalRoad is already free; the issue the authors face is trademark, not copyright, violation, because their works are republished under a different name. Also, while OP found resolution, most of the other commenters did not, showing that copyright laws don’t protect the small guy.
I am not a fan of complete removal of copyright, but I also consider its current duration absurd and extreme - saying this as someone who wrote 10 books so far, so I have actual skin in the game. Some person in 2130 should not be able to profit from something I am writing now, that is just feudalism in a new cloak.
Any creative person whose ego is not overinflated accepts the fact that no art emerges from a vacuum, that they themselves were inspired by others and their work, and that they should pay this forward to the coming generations.
For me, the worst aspect of long copyright is the de-facto ban on derived works. Work derivation is how civilization and culture came to be.
The more successful "self published" authors writing web novels make significant money from patreon (>$20k/month); this relies on copyright protection (but interestingly, just a few months would be sufficient for that business model).
My understanding is that most of these web novels are free, and patreon grants early access at best, which is enforced by trust anyways (the creator doesn’t have the time or resources to track and sue someone posting the early access on a pirate site, when it will be public a week or month later, but the people who pay to get something a week or month early mostly aren’t the type who would pirate even if it was easy).
In what way does that business model rely on copyright protection? "Get the next chapter early" requires a source of chapters, so all you need is for paying clients to not be motivated to redistribute the chapters in an organised way, or would-be paying clients to not be motivated to use such organised "slightly more chapters of that webnovel you follow" services instead. Humans aren't amoral ideal rational economic actors.
The authors I'm aware of making >$20k don't do any significant gating. That practice is only really common with people republishing through Amazon (which probably demands it).
> so all you need is for paying clients to not be motivated to redistribute the chapters in an organised way
This is exactly what copyright is.
I agree that you could work around this in a world without copyright (e.g. by watermarking content and blacklisting), but it would be difficult and make the whole profession less viable.
Mass distribution and payment becoming accessible/low overhead was an extremely helpful development for authors in my view, and removing copyright would have the opposite effect (but cutting it down even to several years would change surprisingly little).
many people commenting have never tried to earn a living from independently created works of authorship. The NAPSTER-fans say "more for me, what is your problem". Other economies (China) do not have commerce law that protects original works of authorship, but the Western tradition has enabled this.
Blinded by corporate abuse, calls for removal of copyright law are often naive or ill-willed IMHO
Just treat copyright as an engineering issue, rather than a religion. Is copyright doing more good than harm when it comes to encouraging creativity? I think everything tilted in favor of abolishing copyright around the turn of the century, and AI isn't improving things.
Your point about making a living off of creative endeavors underscores this point: if copyright were doing it's job the way it's supposed to, your first sentence wouldn't be a note alluding to how damn hard it is to make a living on writing. Somehow you're twisting that to be a feature, which I get, because there's no alternative story, but at the same time, let's be honest: copyright doesn't work well, and incurs huge costs for society.
The part this analysis misses is that the author's "dream" of doing that full time is almost never realized -- 25% percent of authors identify as "full-time", but only 10% of those authors can actually make ends meet. Only 30% of books ever pay back the advance. The best shot is to be a "romance" author, which earns more than other genres, pretty much because sex sells. Copyright isn't doing a great job at its stated purpose, and yet we endure endless fights over it. The juice isn't worth the squeeze, and writers are mostly supporting themselves with other jobs anyway.
Copyright does not guarantee you an audience. Nothing guarantees you an audience, authors know this, everyone who creates anything ought to know this?
Copyright just says that if you DO manage to create a work that truly connects with an audience, you're in a position to make money off it because it cannot be stolen from you.
> writers are mostly supporting themselves with other jobs anyway.
Skill issue. This is common for low-barrier careers that look like anyone can do them, but only a minority break-even. Others include porn/Onlyfans, social media "influencers",and hordes of aspiring actors who flock to Los Angeles.
A variant where the copyright would be automatic but very limited (say, 10 years), with a necessity to pay some growing fee for extended protection, would solve most situations.
The vast majority of stories do not make any money ever. Some do, but only briefly so. The true money makers should have no problem paying the fees.
Only very rare cases of authors who get discovered decades later would not be covered by this, and this is less likely to happen with the Internet. There are no publishing gatekeepers anymore.
People arguing against parent are Property Thieves.
see 5th amendment which requires "private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation".
It's your property. Do what you want with it. In a free society, the public isn't compelled to buy your books.
Authors and artists are not (and souldn't be) making Art for money. It is not a 'job' where effort goes in and product comes out. It's more like a religious calling, they often have no other option. That's true, but it's also the reason people are paid less than their technical peers.
It is difficult in the current climate to prevent industrial actors from cultivating genetic lines instantiated by Artists in Art. In a different future, the seperation between small and large-scale genetic agriculture would be recognised, and the abolition of copyright may proceed.
In a world where money is devalued, genetic lines and mental constituency will become even more powerful.
See: the mental constituency of sci-fi books in E. Musk's brain
Not sure if you really mean it, but you're kind of making the argument that a person that mindlessly shovels dirt from one hole to another in a circle should be paid. People are paid for the result, not for their labor.
Not at all. You're presuming that nobody can be taken off this hypothetical salary once they're on it, and that they would be placed on it indiscriminately.
Simple safeguards are already in practice in today's economy to prevent such circumstances.
Yes they do. As a kid our (admittedly not particularly lavish) family summer holiday was paid for each year by the modest royalties my father, an academic, received from a couple of academic textbooks he had authored.
Right, that was worded too universally, but this is what I mean: royalties here are supplementary to a salary, not a wage in themselves. The research was funded before publication.
I'm using "research" broadly. People can privately research and publish under whatever arrangement they wish. Academics too. For those that sell their copyright, that would be valued based on projections of what the copyright buyer expects to sell. For those whose research was funded by the copyright buyer prior to writing because they didn't want to bear the risk or lacked the funds, that's going to be less, but everything stems from how the books are expected to sell.
Copyright is described by its proponents as a "Monopoly held by the creator". Considering how much we take from the Public Domain, I'd argue that Copyright should only last as long as Patents do, up to a maximum of 20 years.
Anything beyond that is not personal property, but a literal monopoly which impedes creativity, seeing the many, many, many sequels which are terrible often made to keep a studio's grasp on an IP. It happens so often those are often called "ashcan copy" or "rights-retention" films, which wouldn't happen if Copyright law expired as naturally as Patents do.
As an example, the entirety of the Disney Catalogue makes multiple references, or retellings of old Folk Tales from Europe, while also defending their "Intellectual Property" so fiercely, that they artificially extended copyright from 56 years to 96 years for corporately owned products, or the author's life and 70 years for a single author.
It used to be roughly on par with Patent expiration, but it's now almost either 100 years to almost 200.
I believe copyright timeframes have gotten WAY out of hand and need to be reigned in to something more sensible, but I still think it's a valuable concept and don't want to see it abolished.
Patents on the other hand have become a total joke and I'd be happy to see them gone.
As it is now, it’s a joke. Essentially new laws are continuously introduced to make disney’s junk forever inaccessible. No author, no animator, no one except disney share holders wants these shit laws.
I am fully supporting the idea of abolishing property rights for web services. Any web service must publish its entire stack, data, collected information and so on.
This would lead to explosive innovation and the pie would be growing rapidly. #growth-mindset #disruption
Incidentally, the Statute of Anne was pushed by a printing guild after they lost their monopoly on printing. It was so unpopular[1] for them to get the monopoly back that they had to pivot and come up with some other way. So they figured they could do it in the name of writers. That worked!
FLOSS only exists because of copyright. Without it you don’t get a utopia where everything can be read and copied, you get the opposite, companies not sharing their work, artists not releasing their work. Sacrificing the whole culture built on top of copyright for a maybe faster technical progress is incredibly myopic
I'm struggling to see how the issues regarding low compensation from streaming services is going to be positively affected by abolishing copyright wholesale.
Before the advent of LLMs, as now, my position on copyright is that what we had prior to Disneys lobyying efforts (which also then lead to adopting outside the US showcasing the type of soft power and legislative inspirations the States previously had) of roughly 25 years plus one extension is a fair compromise.
Lest we forget, while enforcement is far to limited, any success in defending FOSS projects and their licenses are only possible because we have copyright.
You yourself say that allowing cheap duplication and tweaking is what leads to fast innovation. Why should I be restricted from cheap use of a patent I could use to further innovation?
> next to none percentage wise gets much royalties anymore
While artists get paid less then many would like, royalties make up roughly 2/3rds of revenue of all the streaming giants, which is a huge amount of money. This recurring monthly, mostly passive income is still helpful for smaller professional bands in between touring.
When the indie band Xiu Xiu pulled out of Spotify many were quick to say it didn't matter that much except for exposure, but in interviews they pointed out that they lost a significant portion of they're yearly income from doing it just from the streaming royalties.
Many will say touring is where the real money is, but costs are rising and what I've heard its not as lucrative for smaller bands as it was in the past.
Some links:
Spotify's own report on payouts, obviously a biased editorial, but good data nonetheless (for example 13K artists made 100k/year from spotify royalties alone) https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/payouts/
A transparent report on tour costs from a fairly popular indie band (notably they could make more if they were less principled or were a smaller band, but I think this report is still eye opening in terms of general costs) https://stereogum.com/2497822/los-campesinos-break-down-what...
What progress do you expect in music that would justify throwing poor musicians under the bus (the fact that they get a small portion of IP revenue doesn't explain why that portion should become even smaller)?
Wait...your theory is that if we make it so I can copy and tweak any work of authorship I can find at no cost other than the actual effort it takes to make a copy and tweak it this is going to make me more likely to put in the effort to create new works?
I'm a musician who has been releasing my work under CC0 / Public Domain for the last few years for these very reasons.
While I do agree in principal, it is important this is a consensual choice made by the artists themselves. That is the only way to have healthy cultural change.
At the moment, we have e.g. Suno's CEO, who has publicly stated "people never really liked making music in the first place" - this is the kind of detached and exploitative person that we are seeing trying to force copyright changes on the rest of us.
To be fair AI as we have it today wouldn't exist if everything was copyrighted and copyright was enforced very strictly across the web. Not sure if it's fair use and I get that it's not great if these companies try to monopolize knowledge (if they even can do that) but overall being more lax on copyright for fair use is good. Especially scientific knowledge should be openly accessibly to anyone, imagine what we could achieve if we could train LLMs on everything and make it accessible to everyone.
I think we need to adjust copyright to balance market needs and preservation needs. AI works best when we can strike a balance between the needs of the creator to get compensated and the need of the general public to use content in ways the creator didn't anticipate.
You might be right, but I think we need at least 10 years before we can really start this discussion, and the discussion itself needs to take many more years.
in the few books I've read about actual technological breakthroughs that revolutionized the world, the vast majority come from academia. I'm thinking about Eckert's adoption of IBM's ticker tape for commands rather than just rote data [0], all the inventions that came out of the NDRC [1] (for better or worse), the ENIAC, FORTRAN, how reliant solid state devices were on understanding quantum theory [2], and so many other examples
most of the things that private enterprise contributes is cost reduction and manufacturing capacity (important in their own right for ubiquity) but having extremely well-funded R&D and universities still seem like the primary driver for truly evolutionary and revolutionary breakthroughs rather than useful but not necessary optimizations
IP law very much aims to protect the latter so that breakthroughs can be capitalized on but aren't a necessary motivator for researchers to continue frontier work
Copyright in general, is too long, too broad, and - thanks largely to DMCA - enforced too strictly. One reason for China's success in tech is their willingness to ignore all the IP nonsense (or at least look the other way) allowing folks to rapidly iterate on ideas without running into IP rent-seekers at every turn.
I recently heard a local EU politician on the radio trying to convince the listeners "things made with AI should be inherently non copyrightable, because they lack human creative labour".
I wish I could tell him there is this thing called photography where all a human does is presses a button and copyrightable artefacts are created by capturing how the world looks. For example a landscape that human had no influence over creating!
Surely this "non copyrightability" should apply to photography too.
/sarcasm
AI is just a tool. You can make slop or you can make beautiful art. Is it fair to Picasso's copyright holder that all his paintings were used for training and you can prompt "this in style of Picasso"?
No, especially if the company that trained the LLM makes money on it.
But there is a technical solution. Simply during training record who owns what training data and record how much influence on each weight this training run had.
Then during inference it could be recorded if the weights that trained on Picasso's stuff activated or not. And if someone pays for inference the original owner of tgat data should get a cut.
Maybe even blockchain tech could be used for this... Imagine the hype! AI and crypto together!
I consider current length of copyright to be extremely too long.
On other hand I also think that creators should be compensated when their creations are used to train AI models and this compensation should be substantial per company. And to any fallacious person telling about humans also "learning". Well humans brains are not replicated en masse just yet. And single learned person is not made to millions of copies and made to answer inane queries day and night...
I disagree with restrictions on digestive use of a work. If I legally acquire a book, I should be able to run that data through an algorithm, and I should be allowed to share the result freely as long as it's not replicating the original.
The EFF is in the pocket of Big-AI, and this isn't the first time.
"It is not the place of courts to say these people are not artists or that AI cannot augment human creativity in a positive way."
Yes it is. If you had ever created anything, which you have not, you would know! You are a couple of tech bureaucrats who want foundation salaries and change with the political winds.
We need to limit copyright to commercial use. Piracy only hurts corporate profits (CDPR proved it will never bankrupt a studio) but a media company getting an artist to work for them and not paying is seriously unfair.
This kind of breaks down with independent artists but any economic loss for them would be way less important than the benefits of a system where all culture is shared and open for modification. We can't put the interests of a small group over everyone else if the members of that group choose to be in it.
Guess it's time to stop donating to the EFF. They're completely off the mark this time.
The random loser generating slop in his bedroom isn't necessarily the one infringing, it's the AI company that took all of our work and is reselling it that is infringing. This is an obvious blind spot in copyright law and no reasonable person would consider that to be fair use. The challenge I think is communicating to a layman how AI training works.
For the people currently in the grips of AI psychosis: new regulation here is good for AI too. AI models will not get more creative without new human training data, but the current exploitative situation means people are not incentivized to keep creating. Human artists who create new things should be rewarded by the market, as copyright law intended. Even if their work only ever ends up feeding some gen AI model, they should still be entitled to compensation in some way (eg royalties). They worked hard so that you don't have to.™
Instead, AI companies are the ones being rewarded for it. That's not sustainable for anyone.
Yep. I've seen it happen and there's basically no recourse against it currently. And EFF is saying that it's fine… honestly not what I was expecting to read.
Copyright is too long (thank you Disney and Pelosi) and I'm all for shortening it. Also I do agree that market dilution is not really defensible. The main reason why models should have been shut down is the sketchy way in which the models were trained.
ITT: Tell me you don’t have anything worth copyrighting without telling me you don’t have anything worth copyrighting.
I worry about some of y’all.
After reading the article, I don’t disagree with the EFF. We shouldn’t rewrite copyright law to ban creative generation of {art}. AI generated images only increases competition, which is good for consumers of {art}. I do agree that copyright should still exist to prevent duplicate {art} being sold by a new individual claiming it as their own.
I think the tricky thing with AI is that as the end user, it’s still your responsibility to identify when you might be infringing on someone else’s copyright. I imagine that will be very difficult to do. Perhaps we need an AI copyright agent that can ingest your {art} and compare against all existing {art} for percent copyright infringement score.
In my opinion, the biggest thing I worry about is small creators having their work stolen, repackaged, and sold by big corporations. Which copyright protects. In fact with AI assisted lawyering, it might actually be even easier for small timers to protect their stuff, just like the big wigs do.
Abolishing copyright altogether is just such a wild, knee jerk take.
The EFF has managed to keep to the letter of its principles while discarding the spirit of them; it's now defending enormous commercial concerns that hoover up and hoard data, at the expense of people creating and sharing information.
Copyright is broken and needs major reform, but copyright must exist in some form as long as we are operating under the current economic system. If we want a society where some people have the job of creating art, then they must be compensated for their art. The leverage that artists have to demand compensation is controlling who access to their art. Said another way, the artist owns the right to make copies of their art. That is protected by law.
I think copyright as it exists is abused by large companies and stifles culture. Broadly speaking, I think copyright should be a much shorter term, lasting more like 20 years rather than the 100+ years that is typical (life of the author + 70 years). The exact term is debateable, but the purpose should be to allow the artist sufficient time to monetize their creation for themselves, and then allowing the art to belong to the broader culture. There should be a worthwhile financial incentive to create art.
My utopian dream would be a radically restructured society where we do not expect people to have "artist" as a career. Instead, people would work 15 hours a week doing the work that must be done to contributue to society. The compensation from that 15 hours of work guarantees all their needs to live in modest comfort. People then have more leisure time to pursue whatever they find self-actualizing, which for many will mean creating art and sharing it with the world.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 12.9 ms ] threadIt is not to "compensate for the cost of production", nor is it to ensure that business plans of major music publishers happen to be successful.
The EFF is correct to say here that copyright shouldn't be perverted to limiting market competition generally, but limited to protecting a specific works.
In what ways does an exclusive right promote the progress of science and the useful arts other than by incentivizing that creative work?
In what way can that incentive work other than by compensating for the cost of production?
Does this mean you think innovation and change in our culture is too slow? What’s you’re yardstick?
I keep reading about big companies i) developing very similar drugs that are different enough to avoid patents, ii) using their size to prevent litigation.
So would keeping patents help?
That being said, the patent on semaglutide still expires at the same time and biosimilars (or generics in other cases) can be produced at that time using the injectable formulation (or a new alternative). This seems reasonable to me
If IP owners see actual support behind abolishing copyright, maybe rolling back to min(30, life of author) years of protection would seem like a more reasonable compromise.
They're not paid because access to books is limited by copyright, but because whatever eyeballs they manage to reach are willing to buy their books. I may not be a representative sample, but I think that part wouldn't change much, and discoverability would still be the deciding factor.
They're not paid because access to books is limited by copyright, but because whatever eyeballs they manage to reach are willing to buy their books. I may not be a representative sample, but I think that part wouldn't change much, and discoverability would still be the deciding factor.
I hate the attention economy as much as the next person, but I don't think there's any putting that back in the bottle, the amount of media won't shrink.
(Not books, but Amazon has ripped off indie products before: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-produ..., and books are being ripped off by other companies’ LLMs.)
Not quite, Amazon would just become the publisher that buys new books/articles/whatever directly from the writers, one upfront fee. Not saying it's a sustainable living for writers, just saying that's probably what would happen.
This would align it with the patent system.
> what leads to fast innovation
Content becomes cultural artifacts - the whole birthday song copyright issue should have told Americans how broken the system was.
Straight up x years from identified release year of edition you have on hand is most reasonable.
Your argument is that artists aren’t paid enough, so we should go ahead and take it all the way to zero by law?
I think that would be a great loss
The fact that copyright is longer than patents makes no sense. Patents prove that a shorter period is sufficient to stimulate large investment. And you have to pay for patents!
If you assume reasonable discount rates, the economic value plummets over time for an asset producing the same income (a bad assumption for copyright work in general).
At an 8% discount rate, extending copyright from 32 years to infinity adds less than 10% to its total present-day value. There are many good reform proposals, but mine would be something like 15ish years of free copyright, followed by 1 paid renewal for 15 years that is modest in price (eg $1000) and one extra 10 year renewal that is something like $1M. Meaning you have most economically neutral work free up at year 15, small business types having it affordable through 30 years, and the big Hollywood productions can go from 30-40 years for a modest (to them) fee to incentivize investments in expensive works. Movies come to mind. Give existing work a 20 year buffer on top of that to transition and there is a very small economic effect on everyone.
Now something we saw that does work with audio, is statutory licensing. That rule alone allows spotify to be made. And thats also why a spotify-for-video cant be.
Thats why a local Jellyfin with 30TB of videos is better than all US based streaming services combined. Nobody is *legally* able to put a complete video library and pay access fees to relevent rightsholders.
I'm also in favor of very light copyright laws, e.g. I don't think anyone should claim they are Coca Cola.
You: I will steal this, consume it, reprint it as I see fit and you will earn nothing.
Yeah... I don't think your opinions are worth much.
And what % of those do by selling, vs giving away their work for free (to get non-negligible attention) then getting their real money through donations, merch, etc.?
I don't think anyone has the right to take work I create, for free.
In the same way I have no right to walk into your house and use it for free.
In the same way you cannot expect me to turn up and work at your business for free.
I don't care what half delusional rubbish you come up with to justify your theft.
It's theft, you want to steal something you put zero effort into creating and use it as you see fit. No fuck you. If I want to give it away for free, that's my prerogative not your expectation, if I can monetise via merch or other means, that's my prerogative not your right.
Your analogy doesn’t fit because a house is physical, but “intellectual property” is digital. If we lived in the metaverse and I could just copy your house and live in it without affecting you, why should you care? Theft is bad because the victim no longer has the original.
On the basis it's digital.
I don't care if it's digital, I care if it took time and effort to create. If it did, it does not matter if it's digital or physical, it's theft.
So abolish copyright, and indies still make money from creating digital works - at least almost as much as they do now, but probably more, because it will further normalize the alternate incomes. Copyright maybe used to help indies, but every copyright case I’ve seen recently, the plaintiff is a publisher with more than enough revenue; and in many cases the defendant hasn’t actually infringed, but regardless suffers from DMCA or the law under the guise of “copyright”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1uwyuf1/psa_stol...
Here is an example of the theft you endorse.
Please go tell those people they should be happy for someone else to steal their work and charge for it even after they've given it away for free.
It doesn't matter whether "few" people make a living from it. Copyright does not guarantee you an audience. Copyright going away would not guarantee you more of an audience.
The only thing it guarantees is that if you manage to write something that resonates with an audience you have the potential to earn a living from it. That is what you want to take away.
So layoffs should be illegal?
Any creative person whose ego is not overinflated accepts the fact that no art emerges from a vacuum, that they themselves were inspired by others and their work, and that they should pay this forward to the coming generations.
For me, the worst aspect of long copyright is the de-facto ban on derived works. Work derivation is how civilization and culture came to be.
The authors I'm aware of making >$20k don't do any significant gating. That practice is only really common with people republishing through Amazon (which probably demands it).
This is exactly what copyright is.
I agree that you could work around this in a world without copyright (e.g. by watermarking content and blacklisting), but it would be difficult and make the whole profession less viable.
Mass distribution and payment becoming accessible/low overhead was an extremely helpful development for authors in my view, and removing copyright would have the opposite effect (but cutting it down even to several years would change surprisingly little).
Blinded by corporate abuse, calls for removal of copyright law are often naive or ill-willed IMHO
Your point about making a living off of creative endeavors underscores this point: if copyright were doing it's job the way it's supposed to, your first sentence wouldn't be a note alluding to how damn hard it is to make a living on writing. Somehow you're twisting that to be a feature, which I get, because there's no alternative story, but at the same time, let's be honest: copyright doesn't work well, and incurs huge costs for society.
Copyright does not guarantee you an audience. Nothing guarantees you an audience, authors know this, everyone who creates anything ought to know this?
Copyright just says that if you DO manage to create a work that truly connects with an audience, you're in a position to make money off it because it cannot be stolen from you.
What is so wrong with that?
Skill issue. This is common for low-barrier careers that look like anyone can do them, but only a minority break-even. Others include porn/Onlyfans, social media "influencers",and hordes of aspiring actors who flock to Los Angeles.
The vast majority of stories do not make any money ever. Some do, but only briefly so. The true money makers should have no problem paying the fees.
Only very rare cases of authors who get discovered decades later would not be covered by this, and this is less likely to happen with the Internet. There are no publishing gatekeepers anymore.
It's your property. Do what you want with it. In a free society, the public isn't compelled to buy your books.
It is difficult in the current climate to prevent industrial actors from cultivating genetic lines instantiated by Artists in Art. In a different future, the seperation between small and large-scale genetic agriculture would be recognised, and the abolition of copyright may proceed.
In a world where money is devalued, genetic lines and mental constituency will become even more powerful.
See: the mental constituency of sci-fi books in E. Musk's brain
> Authors and artists are not (and souldn't be) making Art for money.
Hmm...
> Author: I spent some years researching a topic to write a book about it.
Authors don't just make art.
What excuse do artists have?
Simple safeguards are already in practice in today's economy to prevent such circumstances.
Anything beyond that is not personal property, but a literal monopoly which impedes creativity, seeing the many, many, many sequels which are terrible often made to keep a studio's grasp on an IP. It happens so often those are often called "ashcan copy" or "rights-retention" films, which wouldn't happen if Copyright law expired as naturally as Patents do.
It used to be roughly on par with Patent expiration, but it's now almost either 100 years to almost 200.
Patents on the other hand have become a total joke and I'd be happy to see them gone.
This would lead to explosive innovation and the pie would be growing rapidly. #growth-mindset #disruption
Partly because reverse engineering source code is now trivial.
1. John Locke, for example, opposed the monopoly.
Before the advent of LLMs, as now, my position on copyright is that what we had prior to Disneys lobyying efforts (which also then lead to adopting outside the US showcasing the type of soft power and legislative inspirations the States previously had) of roughly 25 years plus one extension is a fair compromise.
Lest we forget, while enforcement is far to limited, any success in defending FOSS projects and their licenses are only possible because we have copyright.
You yourself say that allowing cheap duplication and tweaking is what leads to fast innovation. Why should I be restricted from cheap use of a patent I could use to further innovation?
While artists get paid less then many would like, royalties make up roughly 2/3rds of revenue of all the streaming giants, which is a huge amount of money. This recurring monthly, mostly passive income is still helpful for smaller professional bands in between touring.
When the indie band Xiu Xiu pulled out of Spotify many were quick to say it didn't matter that much except for exposure, but in interviews they pointed out that they lost a significant portion of they're yearly income from doing it just from the streaming royalties.
Many will say touring is where the real money is, but costs are rising and what I've heard its not as lucrative for smaller bands as it was in the past.
Some links: Spotify's own report on payouts, obviously a biased editorial, but good data nonetheless (for example 13K artists made 100k/year from spotify royalties alone) https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/payouts/
A transparent report on tour costs from a fairly popular indie band (notably they could make more if they were less principled or were a smaller band, but I think this report is still eye opening in terms of general costs) https://stereogum.com/2497822/los-campesinos-break-down-what...
While I do agree in principal, it is important this is a consensual choice made by the artists themselves. That is the only way to have healthy cultural change.
At the moment, we have e.g. Suno's CEO, who has publicly stated "people never really liked making music in the first place" - this is the kind of detached and exploitative person that we are seeing trying to force copyright changes on the rest of us.
most of the things that private enterprise contributes is cost reduction and manufacturing capacity (important in their own right for ubiquity) but having extremely well-funded R&D and universities still seem like the primary driver for truly evolutionary and revolutionary breakthroughs rather than useful but not necessary optimizations
IP law very much aims to protect the latter so that breakthroughs can be capitalized on but aren't a necessary motivator for researchers to continue frontier work
(0)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_SSEC (1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Research_Comm... (2)https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/semiconductors/chp...
I wish I could tell him there is this thing called photography where all a human does is presses a button and copyrightable artefacts are created by capturing how the world looks. For example a landscape that human had no influence over creating!
Surely this "non copyrightability" should apply to photography too.
/sarcasm
AI is just a tool. You can make slop or you can make beautiful art. Is it fair to Picasso's copyright holder that all his paintings were used for training and you can prompt "this in style of Picasso"?
No, especially if the company that trained the LLM makes money on it.
But there is a technical solution. Simply during training record who owns what training data and record how much influence on each weight this training run had.
Then during inference it could be recorded if the weights that trained on Picasso's stuff activated or not. And if someone pays for inference the original owner of tgat data should get a cut.
Maybe even blockchain tech could be used for this... Imagine the hype! AI and crypto together!
On other hand I also think that creators should be compensated when their creations are used to train AI models and this compensation should be substantial per company. And to any fallacious person telling about humans also "learning". Well humans brains are not replicated en masse just yet. And single learned person is not made to millions of copies and made to answer inane queries day and night...
"It is not the place of courts to say these people are not artists or that AI cannot augment human creativity in a positive way."
Yes it is. If you had ever created anything, which you have not, you would know! You are a couple of tech bureaucrats who want foundation salaries and change with the political winds.
This kind of breaks down with independent artists but any economic loss for them would be way less important than the benefits of a system where all culture is shared and open for modification. We can't put the interests of a small group over everyone else if the members of that group choose to be in it.
The random loser generating slop in his bedroom isn't necessarily the one infringing, it's the AI company that took all of our work and is reselling it that is infringing. This is an obvious blind spot in copyright law and no reasonable person would consider that to be fair use. The challenge I think is communicating to a layman how AI training works.
For the people currently in the grips of AI psychosis: new regulation here is good for AI too. AI models will not get more creative without new human training data, but the current exploitative situation means people are not incentivized to keep creating. Human artists who create new things should be rewarded by the market, as copyright law intended. Even if their work only ever ends up feeding some gen AI model, they should still be entitled to compensation in some way (eg royalties). They worked hard so that you don't have to.™
Instead, AI companies are the ones being rewarded for it. That's not sustainable for anyone.
Something feels broken.
I worry about some of y’all.
After reading the article, I don’t disagree with the EFF. We shouldn’t rewrite copyright law to ban creative generation of {art}. AI generated images only increases competition, which is good for consumers of {art}. I do agree that copyright should still exist to prevent duplicate {art} being sold by a new individual claiming it as their own.
I think the tricky thing with AI is that as the end user, it’s still your responsibility to identify when you might be infringing on someone else’s copyright. I imagine that will be very difficult to do. Perhaps we need an AI copyright agent that can ingest your {art} and compare against all existing {art} for percent copyright infringement score.
In my opinion, the biggest thing I worry about is small creators having their work stolen, repackaged, and sold by big corporations. Which copyright protects. In fact with AI assisted lawyering, it might actually be even easier for small timers to protect their stuff, just like the big wigs do.
Abolishing copyright altogether is just such a wild, knee jerk take.
It's easier to not get my stuff stolen if we add superthieves on cocaine?
Seems to me the EFF is entirely fine with it?
I think copyright as it exists is abused by large companies and stifles culture. Broadly speaking, I think copyright should be a much shorter term, lasting more like 20 years rather than the 100+ years that is typical (life of the author + 70 years). The exact term is debateable, but the purpose should be to allow the artist sufficient time to monetize their creation for themselves, and then allowing the art to belong to the broader culture. There should be a worthwhile financial incentive to create art.
My utopian dream would be a radically restructured society where we do not expect people to have "artist" as a career. Instead, people would work 15 hours a week doing the work that must be done to contributue to society. The compensation from that 15 hours of work guarantees all their needs to live in modest comfort. People then have more leisure time to pursue whatever they find self-actualizing, which for many will mean creating art and sharing it with the world.