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.
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.
I'm not an artist and might be entirely wrong, but my understanding is that for 99% of artists, over 99% of their revenue is from concerts tickets, merch and other physical products, rather than digital/broadcast plays, so changing this to zero wouldn't really affect them, but would act to reduce the power of the labels and other intermediaries over them.
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.
It seems like you really only know about how the affects people who make music and TV.
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.
artists sell live experiences and original merchandise to actually make money these days. only a rare subset of megastars are living off royalties to begin with, and I am totally fine if some tailor swift has less millions to begin with.
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.
It’s not Taylor Swift who is hurt by this, it’s the solo creatives who cannot afford other mechanisms (e.g. trademark enforcement) to protect their work.
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 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.
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.
We could do that with all kinds of IP! Use a feature in software or in a Meta app, just donate to the minimum amount wage (for legal reasons) workers who developed it. And Meta and Google themselves could be forbidden to show ads, just rely on donations as well.
> 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
The "me too" drug still need to go through an R&D, clinical trail and approval process, so combined with patents the exclusivity period is at least several years. Abolishing patents would completely remove the exclusivity period
The government could always pay for results too, like $10B for something that does this. I don’t love it either and am not positive it is better than patents.
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.
From my perspective from reading and watching fan fiction, these unofficial derived works are typically significantly more distinct and interesting than the official sequels, and I'd be cool with these getting bigger budgets.
> From my perspective from reading and watching fan fiction, these unofficial derived works are typically significantly more distinct and interesting than the official sequels, and I'd be cool with these getting bigger budgets.
This suggests that copyright isn't holding back these works...
There would be no movies as we know them today. Studios couldn’t support making multi-hundred million dollar movies that are immediately free to everyone. Basically movies would become YouTube.
It could potentially help theater owners, who provide a somewhat unique experience. That doesn’t seem very valued these days, though.
An exclusive theatrical window is one of the big reasons to go to a movie theater: you want to see a movie before it's available on streaming. Removing copyright seems like it would harm theaters pretty significantly.
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 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.
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.
My biggest contention is the acquiring price for such use. I hold that for such use the cost such be significantly higher than just if you were buying book for reading.
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.
I don't think the reason for copyright law is compensation, per se. It's ownership: being in a position where the creator is able to decide what to do with it. Compensation being one option, but also restricting use our controlling access.
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!
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.
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.
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.
And what if that actually leads to less open-ness? If I license code under a copyleft license, users are forced to give back their changes to the public. Without copyright they would not be forced to do this, which means less work will be published.
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.
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.
> and oh the poor artists: next to none percentage wise gets much royalties anymore, streaming income is close to zero usually even if popular
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'm not an artist and might be entirely wrong, but my understanding is that for 99% of artists, over 99% of their revenue is from concerts tickets, merch and other physical products, rather than digital/broadcast plays, so changing this to zero wouldn't really affect them, but would act to reduce the power of the labels and other intermediaries over them.
Copyright covers a lot more than the long tail of indie music bands who stream a few thousand plays on Spotify.
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.
Big studios will love this
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.
It seems like you really only know about how the affects people who make music and TV.
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.
> Knitters and crocheters who create patterns?
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.
There are more kinds of art than just music.
artists sell live experiences and original merchandise to actually make money these days. only a rare subset of megastars are living off royalties to begin with, and I am totally fine if some tailor swift has less millions to begin with.
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.
So you'll reduce that to just live experiences: abolish copyright, and watch 1 million bootleg Taylor Swift T-shirts suddenly blink into existance
That's a trademark issue, not a copyright issue.
It’s not Taylor Swift who is hurt by this, it’s the solo creatives who cannot afford other mechanisms (e.g. trademark enforcement) to protect their work.
It's already an epsilon away from zero.
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.
I thought that was always the point. A world without any copyright at all obviously doesn't function.
Is it not hard for writers to make a living? If so maybe I should do that.
I'd then pirate those books for free.
> 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.
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.
We could do that with all kinds of IP! Use a feature in software or in a Meta app, just donate to the minimum amount wage (for legal reasons) workers who developed it. And Meta and Google themselves could be forbidden to show ads, just rely on donations as well.
I sense sarcasm, but anybody serious about fixing corporate social media should read this:
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.
> 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.
So would keeping patents help?
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
The "me too" drug still need to go through an R&D, clinical trail and approval process, so combined with patents the exclusivity period is at least several years. Abolishing patents would completely remove the exclusivity period
The government could always pay for results too, like $10B for something that does this. I don’t love it either and am not positive it is better than patents.
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.
> fast innovation and culture changes
Does this mean you think innovation and change in our culture is too slow? What’s you’re yardstick?
Hmm. Looking at the cinemas, almost all the top movies are prequels or sequels, milking the same topic for the tenth time.
I'd say that at least the movie industry is somehow stuck in a rut.
Wouldn’t removing copyright just lead to more “milking the same topic”?
I don’t see how it would lead to a higher volume of original ideas.
I can assure you that people had original ideas before the invention of copyright 300 years ago.
> people had original ideas before the invention of copyright 300 years ago
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.
If you get rid of copyright, half of movies will be sequels to other people's work from the previous year.
From my perspective from reading and watching fan fiction, these unofficial derived works are typically significantly more distinct and interesting than the official sequels, and I'd be cool with these getting bigger budgets.
> From my perspective from reading and watching fan fiction, these unofficial derived works are typically significantly more distinct and interesting than the official sequels, and I'd be cool with these getting bigger budgets.
This suggests that copyright isn't holding back these works...
There would be no movies as we know them today. Studios couldn’t support making multi-hundred million dollar movies that are immediately free to everyone. Basically movies would become YouTube.
It could potentially help theater owners, who provide a somewhat unique experience. That doesn’t seem very valued these days, though.
An exclusive theatrical window is one of the big reasons to go to a movie theater: you want to see a movie before it's available on streaming. Removing copyright seems like it would harm theaters pretty significantly.
Getting rid of copyright is going to make that problem worse not better...
I'm wondering if you are reasoning correctly about this.
Go back to the old 28 year system. Dump the renewal.
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.
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 think that would be a great loss
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.
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.
My biggest contention is the acquiring price for such use. I hold that for such use the cost such be significantly higher than just if you were buying book for reading.
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.
I don't think the reason for copyright law is compensation, per se. It's ownership: being in a position where the creator is able to decide what to do with it. Compensation being one option, but also restricting use our controlling access.
The cost of producing decent things hasn't gone down. Also the cost of slop is not that low, just subsidised.
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!
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.
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.
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.
And what if that actually leads to less open-ness? If I license code under a copyleft license, users are forced to give back their changes to the public. Without copyright they would not be forced to do this, which means less work will be published.