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.
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.?
Your argument is that artists aren’t paid enough, so we should go ahead and take it all the way to zero by law?
This thread has a lot of arguments based entirely on beliefs about small bands and streaming services. Music is only a small part of copyright law.
There’s so much competition nowadays, almost no indie can achieve nearly enough sales for a living wage. And ironically, the best way to get more attention is to make your product free, hence more and more artists doing free + paid merch.
They’ll come across some talented little band playing some nice new tune in a tiny club, record it on their phone and give it to one of the existing boy-bands to play.
No need to sign up aspiring artists any more - just take their songs.
Of course it’s the boy band that will sell the merch and the concert tickets.
In fact if all of copyright operated with mechanical licenses it would be a much better system.
What about illustrators who license their work? Knitters and crocheters who create patterns? There are countless people who sell creative output on a license-basis which would no longer exist in a world without copyright.
Already people who make visual art are demotivated by AI, follow literally any visual artist on Instagram and you’ll see this. Taking away copyright would make that look tiny in comparison.
Wow, is that a thing? If you're willing to share, I'd love to hear more about these vocations and how they make money.
Do you only care about professional artists or something? Amateur artists deserve legal protection for their artwork too :/
If you're at the point where you're making money from merch and concert tickets you're probably ahead of 99% of artists
I suppose we usually just call them "aspiring artists" then, but still
people support/pay real artists if they want more of it, else there is no way I see a right to get paid a wage for just being an artist in itself. if youre not original enough so you get copycats in a day well thats also a signal of artistic value. you cannot separate art from the artist, even if some people are okay with knockoffs after all. there is a difference between art and just content production, the latter is already worthless today with AI speedrunning the decline for mass producing mediocre slop people think is good enough.
1. John Locke, for example, opposed the monopoly.
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.
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.
How about a unified social platform that allows people to donate to the authors/artists/creators/projects of their choosing? It could allow feedback similar to goodreads, and also be more longterm focused than the traditional kickstarter, etc. The social aspect would give people a pat on the back for sending money somewhere.
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
I guess my idea would easily fit into what that article proposes for a solution.
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
This would lead to explosive innovation and the pie would be growing rapidly. #growth-mindset #disruption
I'm also in favor of very light copyright laws, e.g. I don't think anyone should claim they are Coca Cola.
But I guess we can count on the big companies to do the innovation?
Does this mean you think innovation and change in our culture is too slow? What’s you’re yardstick?
I'd say that at least the movie industry is somehow stuck in a rut.
I don’t see how it would lead to a higher volume of original ideas.
Not in dispute but that's also not the point being argued.
The argument is:
a) whether copyright kills original ideas. I don't think it does but would love to understand what the mechanism is if you think otherwise.
b) whether removing copyright would lead to more "milking of same old topics" in movies. I think the answer is self-evidently yes.
This suggests that copyright isn't holding back these works...
It could potentially help theater owners, who provide a somewhat unique experience. That doesn’t seem very valued these days, though.
I'm wondering if you are reasoning correctly about this.
Patents on the other hand have become a total joke and I'd be happy to see them gone.
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.
I think that would be a great loss
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.
Something feels broken.
Patents are the only protection that should exist for this type of thing. (though finding an algorithm worth patenting is hard - most are either a small variation easy to work around, or so old that prior art exists from 50 years ago).
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 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.
If you believe the anti-AI people you will become misinformed, just as much as if you listen to the most pro-AI people.
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!
"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.
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.
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.