The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.
The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.
If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny's Child, because you couldn't afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you're an evil pirate! You wouldn't steal a car! Creators must be paid!
If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and featured a video or audio clip, then even if it's fair use, and even if it's used to make a legitimate point, you're getting demonetised. That's assuming your videos don't disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn't shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube's convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others!
And if you're a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.5 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US$2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone's intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don't deserve to be paid a cent.
Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business.
> If I go to a bookshop, take a book off the shelf and start reading it, I am not infringing any copyright.
An LLM is not a person, and gobbling up the entire shop is not the same as reading a few pages from a single book. If you start reading more than half the books in the shop without ever paying, you bet the owner will ask you to buy something or kick you out.
@kkarhan@ajsadauskas@technology@music@fedibb.ml@music@lemmy.ml@senficon My late congresscritter, Howard Coble, was responsible for that. A product of north-central North Carolina, he was nicknamed "The Congressman from Disney" in the district (and in Washington) because of all the water he carried for that corporation on IP matters.
Which makes it even worse as they basically now squat that and prevent everyone from making good new works unless the few cases were their IP has also lapsed...
Anything else is a gross violation of social contract given the fact that noone can make content past their death, so 70 years postmortal IP protection can only serve corporations and license administrations and noone else.
i would add two additional stipulations to that: copyright restriction should not be automatic, and should be renewed every year. one would have to pay a fee for copyright restriction (without the fee, restrictions would default to a much more permissive CC BY-SA–like system) and the fee must be paid every year the restrictions are renewed
that way, eventually the cost of keeping the material restricted will outweigh the profits, and the license holders will stop paying. it automatically enters the more permissive set of restrictions, and it gains a new life among sharers and remixers
There's a lot of software out there in the world that's still in use, still under copyright, but no longer sold or supported by a vendor. In some cases, it might not even be clear who actually owns the copyright.
Sometimes it's for specialist equipment that's built using obsolete software. (Hello, OS/2 ATM machines.)
Sometimes it's for large enterprises that still use legacy VAX machines, token ring ethernet equipment, CP/M applications and Windows XP desktops.
Sometimes it's run by retro computing hobbyists who really loved the Atari ST or Speccy.
There's a good argument to be made that all abandonware should be released to the public domain. It would certainly make life a lot easier for many people.
It doesn't remain broadly relevant for all that long in popular culture anyway. Before the internet that cycle was at the very most decade-long, now it has shrunk dramatically as information travels faster and more broadly.
Copyright also inherently assumes you have a right to control the minds of others, which I deem unconscionable.
That said, if you would, please explain why you mean by "copyright also inherently assumes you have a right to control the minds of others." I'm not following.
Given that human culture generally involves the sharing of stories and ideas, it turns all culture covered by copyright into cognitohazards that poison any attached material.
@kkarhan@ajsadauskas@technology@music@fedibb.ml@music@lemmy.ml@senficon But when the bot is just spitting out huge chunks of your intellectual work (or whatever you might want to call answering questions on SO), I dunno it doesn't feel like there is much of "derivative work or even machine generated stuff", it just feels like copied and pasted code from stackoverflow, cause, well, it is.