Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”
I’ve been on board with this for fucking years. Our IP system in the USA is so fucked. It’s like “death of the creator plus 40 years” or something and then Disney lobbies to increase it further to protect the mouse.
Let me make Mickey Mouse shirts and let me make money off of them!
Let me stream Nintendo games without a cease and desist!
Not to mention the fact that the stronger IP law is, the more it’s often used to exploit people.
Oh, did you as an artist get given stronger rights for your work? That platform you’re posting on demands that you give them a license for any possible use, in exchange for posting your art there to get eyeballs on your work.
Did your patents just get stronger enforcement? Too bad it’s conveniently very difficult to fund and develop any product at scale under that patent without needing outside investor funding into a new corporate entity that will own the patent, instead of you!
To loosely paraphrase from Cory Doctorow: If someone wants a stronger lock, but won’t give you the key, then it’s not for your benefit.
If corporations get to put locks on everything with keys they own, but also make it hard for you to get or enforce access to the keys to the locks on your stuff, then the simplest way to level the playing field is to simply eliminate the locks.
As much as I also would like IP law to die, I do not think that these two saying such means much.
Jack Dorsey is not in government and worth a 100th of what Musk is worth. And Elon Musk is evil and retarded.
So delete all pharmaceutical IP to make drugs accessible to everyone and save taxpayers trillions?
“Noooo, not like that!”
This is why it’s a mixed bag for me. IP law is kinda important in a capitalist system, which, for better or worse, that’s what we have. If someone comes up with a wonder drug that outright cures addiction or something, you’d want that person to be able to recoup their costs before a bigger organization with more capital swoops in and undercuts them on production costs until they’re the sole supplier of the drug. The hepatitis C cure drug selling for $70,000 is a great example of this quandary; there’s millions of dollars worth of research and clinical trials that went into developing the drug, you’d want the company to be able to recuperate the costs of developing it or else there’s less incentive to do something similar for other diseases down the line. Also, though, $70,000 or go fucking die is an outrageous statement.
Of course, what we have for IP law in practice is a bastardized monster, where corporations exploit the fuck out of it to have monopoly control over important products like insulins and life-saving medications that cost cents to produce and allow them to sell for hundreds a dose. That’s not the intent of IP law, IMO, and that doesn’t really serve anyone.
I see the point you’re aiming at, but it’s not little companies discovering new drugs it’s giant corporations (often on the back of government research money) who then ‘swoop in’ to protect their own profits while people in underdeveloped nations die of tuberculosis or whatever because they would rather make money than save lives.
You might be surprised how small medical research labs can be. The lady responsible for nanolipid particles used in transporting rNA vaccines, in similar fashion to how an organelle gets packaged in membrane and cast out, spent decades cruising on bare minimum public funding.
What costs money is testing phases, including a lab to hold and propogate immortal cell lines and later production lines to create enough doses for thousands of human trials.
Although tbh I don’t expect the USA to be upholding strict drug safety standards in the near future.
What costs money is testing phases, including a lab to hold and propogate immortal cell lines and later production lines to create enough doses for thousands of human trials.
Thank you. These arguments are always hard to read. Sure, small labs are where it usually starts, but without enormous and risky investments, we would never have the drugs we have today. Most of these investments fail miserably, so one successful drug must cover the costs of ten unsuccessful ones. Nobody would do that if their IP weren’t protected. It’s more about reputation than facts when it comes to this topic.
Unless it were completely government funded, but that’s clearly not was Illegal Immigrant Billionaire Elon Musk and the Orange Felon are proposing so yeah, IP Laws applying to Pharmaceuticals all the way.
I was speaking generally and obviously there are exceptions and contributions from all over the place. But it’s not tiny labs like that that hold a death-grip on the patents to drugs that are being sold for absurd amounts of money that are far out of reach of the people who need them. Also while I recognize that this kind of research is expensive it must also be recognized that much of that research is funded, directly or indirectly, by the US government through the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, etc, so the fact that these big corporations are effectively getting a hand-out and then charging an arm and a leg for it sticks in my craw. But then maybe I’m just weird for thinking that human life is more important than quarterly profits.
idk i think our incentive should be to cure diseases with public funding and make people healthy instead of for profit but what do i know
I agree, though I will note that I have often found that there is a non-trivial gap between what is and what ought to be.
Companies will not — ever — dump hundreds of millions/billions into developing a drug only to have it be sold at cost or even worse, completely losing out on it when a competitor sells a copy of it at a price you can’t match.
And even if they did suddenly turn to altruism like that, they’d very quickly go bankrupt.
Why would anybody spend billions making new drugs if they knew with 100% certainty that they’d never make the money back?
We may not like it, but that’s the system that we have. Some form of IP law should exist to encourage these companies to continue putting out medicines that better our lives, it’s just that our current ones go way too far.
We already fund the research of new drugs almost entirely through publicly funded projects which then HAND OVER the patent rights to whichever company has the most former board members in the executive branch at the time.
I watched it happen in real time during covid while working for the DPH. Those companies produce NOTHING. They are the literal obstacle to creating new medicines and making them widely available.
I’m against the context of the main post but putting on a cape for medical patents is wild. The entirety of healthcare in america is inexcusable. Let’s stay focused on the AI tech oligarchs robbing us of our futures and attempting to frame it as a concern with intellectual property.
If it’s state funded then that’s obviously a different matter.
But usually it’s a company making drugs, and they’d go bust if they spent billions developing a drug and got zero money back. Then there would be far fewer drugs made.
Be practical. Letting people die for ideological reasons is not a good thing.
I wrote a long winded reply but honestly I’ll just say that your second paragraph is entirely based on fiction and your final paragraph is precisely what for profit medicine is designed to do. Profit is a purely ideological drive, medicine and healthcare do not need profits to exist. The post office does not need to make money. It exists because we HAVE to have it.
You can go see for yourself. Moderna did not single handedly make the covid vaccine. They do not and should not have the right to deny anyone the right to produce it as cheaply as necessary to provide it to their populations. I can go deeper if you want but if this doesn’t show you that we are saying the same thing I’m going to have doubts about this being in good faith.
It’s not fiction, that’s the reality.
Profit is a purely ideological drive, medicine and healthcare do not need profits to exist.
No shit. Everyone knows that. But it does exist. That’s the world we live in. Income tax doesn’t need to exist, but it does, and things would go wrong if you suddenly stopped paying it.
Moderna did not single handedly make the covid vaccine
Who said they did? Many companies did, and some had government or university help.
I can go deeper if you want
Go as deep as you like. I’ve already explained the situation, though.
I am speaking in good faith. How do you go about avoiding companies simply refusing to create new medications when they know for a fact making new ones would cost billions and they’d never get the money back?
I don’t like that that’s the situation. I want companies to make medications and sell them at a loss, but that’s a fantasy world. I’m being pragmatic. We can improve IP laws without completely killing off future medicine development.
“Just, like, don’t make profit, broooo” would be nice, but that’s not how the world works.
How, when more companies would be able to develop the same drug? And they don’t develop drugs, they develop ways to extend their patents.
More companies will develop that drug.
But think of it this way. You’re the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that makes drugs, vaccines, etc that saves lives. You do this for a profit.
You’re presented with a plan to make a drug that, idk, lessens the symptoms of Crohn’s Disease. It’ll cost $2 billion to create and bring to market.
After it’s done being created, and the drug spends 10+ years in clinical testing, it’s on shelves. You have to price each box at $10 in order to break even after 5 years, so you do so.
But the law has changed, now anybody can manufacture the drug. A competitor who didn’t foot any of the development costs or do any of the hard work is selling each box at $0.80. you can’t compete with that, you make an enormous loss and your company edges closer to bankruptcy.
One of your workers comes to you with plans for a $2bn project that will hopefully reduce migraines. Given lessons learned from the previous example, do you go ahead with the plan? Will the board even let you?
I agree that IP laws in the sector need to be pared down, but scrapping them entirely would prevent any company from creating new drugs, as they’d be absolutely certain they wouldn’t be able to recoup development and regulatory hurdle costs.
In an ideal world, all drugs would be made by governments, for a loss, and open sourced, so the market could compete on price. But that’s not the world we live in.
If you only funded drugs through public funding, that means the government has a say in what drugs get funded and which don’t, meaning any and all drugs that don’t affect the broadest number of people simply won’t get funded.
Drugs will no longer be for all people, it’ll be strictly the people that vote for the government in charge. So… No hormone treatments, no birth control, no vaccines, no aids research, nothing that doesn’t explicitly align with the government.
First of all, governments already do fund all the research.
Even in your hypothetical, thats just one government. It doesn’t stop medical advancement entirely just because one dictatorship stops funding research. It moves elsewhere. When nazi germany declared that nobody would receive funding for anything outside of Aryan research ^tm the scientists just left to a country that wasn’t barbarically stupid.
Also, everything in your final paragraph is stuff that is happening now, in america, under the capitalist organization of the economy which gives all the rights to a private company after publicly funding the research and development of their drugs. It makes no difference, save the fact that now the authoritarian government in power has consolidated billions of dollars for rich capitalists who will gladly accept the orders to no longer produce those medicines while remaining disgustingly wealthy.
Even if you believe in the delusional idea that private companies are funding the development of novel treatments entirely on their own the fact remains that drugs are currently, as we speak, not for all people. I am pointing out the solution to that problem, and the response was to point out how, if we did what I said, then what’s already happening now would be the consequence.
Except no, they don’t.
The development of new medications should be 100% funded by governments and the IP that comes out of it should be 100% if the government, aka the people.
Governments are the ones that do the investments of projects that don’t directly make money but are good for humanity.
You don’t like that and the hepac drug can suddenly cost 70 dollars
You’re right.
In the US the tax payer subsidizes almost all drug research. Between 2010 and 2019 the NIH spent $184 Billion on all but 2 drugs approved by the FDA.
It worked out to about $1.5 Billion for each R&D product with a novel target and about $600 mill for each R&D product with multiple targets.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10148199/
Or
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2804378
The cost to develop each drug is between about $1 and $2.5 Billion
I’m not sure how much is subsidized outside of NIH but I’d imagine other countries are doing the same.
Why should companies own the whole IP or perhaps why should they have any ownership if most of the funding is from the public?
This is a great point. I know that some pharmas actually do internally funded research, it’s a thing, it happens, but it’s completely dwarfed by shareholder giveaways and government subsidies ofc.
The problem I mostly have is even when those costs are recouped most companies fight tooth and nail to keep the prices high and unaffordable in order to line the pockets of investors.
Yes, 100%.
Lol we all know trump would put pharmaceuticals on the exemption list.
They don’t want to delete all IP law, they just want to delete the IP law which is preventing them from postponing the collapse of the AI hype a little bit more.
If they wanted to delete ALL IP Law, I’d move to have my Sonic fanfiction officially published.
Sally Acorn’s back in the canon if I say she is bro!
… Delete… all… IP law?
So… just literally make all piracy legal, switch all gaming and tv show and movie production/consumption… to an optional donation model?
Fuck it, why not.
I am both an avid pirate and have a degree in econ, wrote papers as an undergrad on how to potentially reform the DMCA… and uh yeah, at this point yeah no one has any fucking idea how any thing works, everyone is an idiot, sure fuck it, blow it all up, why not.
Yeah except you know it isn’t going to be that
They’re going to go “yeah but not like that”
They’ll just remove consumer protections and make it so you own even less and if you try to fight it, you’ll have the full weight of the court system to make you poor
Is musk supports it, that’s exactly what he’s hoping will happen. The rich will be able to take advantage of it and the poor will either stay the same or get worse
also jam in there protections for AI training so they don’t have to deal with those pesky rent-seeking “authors”
This, he means abolish IP Law in terms of consumer protections.
Abolish IP for billionaires… not for the poor.
Free for people that already can afford anything.
I mean, I’d like to get rid of IP Law too…
But I actually mean get rid of, not an “Under New Management” sense like Elon The Musky Husky wants
Honestly, I’m a fan of abolishing IP law too, but for some reason I suspect the implementation of that they support is very different than the one I support
Do it., but also ensure that all work enters the public domain and is free for anyone to use, modify, commercialize, or basically whatever the GPL says.
Nonono, see, they will have punitive contracts with employees that will nail them to the wall if they leak source code.
They like rules as long as they’re the one writing them.
“I don’t think so. Whatever is yours is ours, whatever is ours stays ours. Thank you for understanding.”
—Microsoft et al.
That’s what would happen if copyright doesn’t exist. If a company releases something, it’s immediately public domain, because no law protects it.
GPL
The GPL is very much not the public domain.
It’s an interesting point that without any IP law, GPL would be invalid and corporations could use and modify things like Lemmy without complying with the license.
Exactly. They wouldn’t be obligated to contribute back at all, so someone like Meta could just rebrand Lemmy into something else and throw ads everywhere.
But then corporations could not stop anyone from modifying their modifications to things like Lemmy.
Well, they wouldn’t need to release those changes publicly.
But then anyone could take them anyway.
The GPL is basically trying to make a world without copyright. The GPL basically only has teeth in a world where copyright exists. If copyright didn’t exist then everything would be in the public domain and the GPL would be toothless, but that’s fine because it would no longer be unnecessary.
No, the GPL very much requires copyright to work. The whole point is copyleft, which obligates changes to the code remain under the same license and be available to everyone.
Without copyright, companies just wouldn’t share their changes at all. The whole TIVO-ization clause in the GPL v3 would be irrelevant since TIVO can very much take without giving back. Copyright is very much essential to the whole concept of the GPL working.
Just think, why would anyone want to use Linux if Microsoft or Apple could just bake Linux into their offering?
No, the GPL very much requires copyright to work
That’s what I said.
If copyright didn’t exist then everything would be in the public domain and the GPL would be toothless, but that’s fine because it would no longer be unnecessary.
I’m saying it is necessary to achieve the aims of the GPL.
If it was just about ensuring the source is free, the MIT license would be sufficient. The GPL goes further and forces modifications to also be free, which relies on copyright.
I’m saying it is necessary to achieve the aims of the GPL.
Which would make GPL toothless, but that’s fine because it would no longer be necessary.
I’m saying it is necessary to achieve the aims of the GPL.
Until copyright no longer exists and everything is in the public domain, as I said.
How are you going to enforce the GPL in a world where copyright doesn’t exist?
How are you going to enforce the GPL in a world where copyright doesn’t exist?
And that’s what I’m saying, you can’t, therefore the aims of the GPL cannot be achieved. The GPL was created specifically to force modifications to be shared. The MIT license was created to be as close to public domain as possible, but within a copyright context (the only obligation is to retain the license text on source distributions).
If everything is public domain, then there would be no functional changes to MIT-licensed code, whereas GPL-licensed code would become a free-for-all with companies no longer being obligated to share their changes.
So basically the bluesky source code is now public domain?
They want to do this so they can feed their ai models.
You can tell China is making strides when suddenly IP laws are a nuisance rather than a fundamental value of the American system lol
Our models
I hate agreeing with these assholes, but I do in this case. IP/patent law is explicitly designed to stifle competition. At most, it should last a few years (if you agree with the “recoup the cost of innovation” argument). Innovation will be done for the sake of innovation if there’s competition though. If your opposition innovates and you don’t, you’re going to be destroyed. The exception is when they agree to not compete, which is already illegal though not enforced as strongly as it should be.
IIRC the original US copyright law as written by the founders was 25 years or so. The extensions on that have all been in the last 70 years or so due to mega corps like Disney.
The problem with Musk and Dorsey is that they want the copyright laws to apply to them but no one else. “Rules for thee but not for me” mentality of the wealthy.
Yeah, the problem was not the original copyright law which gave incentive for coming up with new ideas by giving you rights to that idea for long enough that you can be profitable, the problem is that it’s been extended to the point that the people who came up with the idea are long dead and it’s still under copyright for massive corporations.
I hate agreeing with these assholes, but I do in this case.
I guarantee you that neither of these assholes champion any kind of open access to their end works. Elon famously shut down the Twitter API and vexatiously litigated any number of Tesla copycats. Dorsey is only plugging an anti-IP stance because he’s got a new AI engine out and wants to get on board the “Stealing everyone’s DeviantArt library” gravy train. None of it is remotely sincere.
If your opposition innovates and you don’t, you’re going to be destroyed.
That’s simply not true. There are a myriad of historical examples as to it not being true, from the Japanese abolition of the gun during the Meiji Restoration to German telecoms clinging to copper wire data infrastructure despite fiber optics being obviously superior. If you don’t innovate because you have an economic incentive to drag your heels, and your economic clout gives you the ability to close out competitors, then you can do perfectly fine “innovating” in the field of anti-competitive trade behavior rather than real tech innovation.
What we have in Musk and Dorsey are two men who have benefited enormously from Silicon Valley insider investing and cheap borrowing. They don’t give a shit about other people’s IP in the same way Microsoft was more than happy to pillage code and reverse engineer software of its rivals. But if you think they’re going to apply that to their own codebase and personal economic interests… well…
vexatiously
Cool word
This is going to be used corporations to take away everything from individuals who are innovating (more than they already are). Nobody will be able to build wealth off a good idea again. Which if we were in a society where wealth wasn’t required to live a good life I would be okay with, but we aren’t, so I’m not.
Maybe. That’s certainly their intent. I could also see it working the other way though. No more patent trolls or companies hoarding good ideas.
The corporations wouldn’t just hold good ideas under this proposal, they would hold every idea.
Someone innovates and makes a good product? Looks like WalMart is going to produce 100,000 units and sell them at 75% of the innovator’s price, pushing him out.
No matter what, under capitalism, money ALWAYS wins.
Yea, it is a complicated issue, but at least the current way offers the little guys some protection. I’ve posted everything I’ve ever made (not that any of it was all that impressive) freely so it doesn’t really matter to me but for some people it may.
Right? There’s no reason Superman and Winnie The Pooh should fall under ANY copyright, everyone involved with the creation of both ins long dead… The only thing being protected is DC and Disney’s bottom line.
And the fact that Tarzan isn’t public domain is most absurd
Hell it took forever for Sherlock Holmes to be public domain, and the world he was created in doesn’t even remotely exist anymore.
“Delete all IP law” say people who have never created anything of any value to humanity.
IP law does 3 things that are incredibly important… but have been basically irrelevant between roughly 1995-2023.
- Accurate attribution. Knowing who actually made a thing is super important for the continued development of ideas, as well as just granting some dignity to the inventor/author/creator.
- Faithful reproduction. Historically, bootleg copies of things would often be abridged to save costs or modified to suit the politics of the bootlegger, but would still be sold under the original title. It’s important to know what the canonical original content is, if you’re going to judge it fairly and respond to it.
- Preventing bootleggers from outcompeting original creators through scale.
Digital technology made these irrelevant for a while, because search engines could easily answer #1, digital copies are usually exact copies so #2 was not an issue, and digital distribution made #3 (scale) much more balanced.
But then came AI. And suddenly all 3 of these concerns are valid again. And we’ve got a population who just spent the past 30 years living in a world where IP law had zero upsides and massive downsides.
There’s no question that IP law is due for an overhaul. The question is: will we remember that it ever did anything useful, or will we exchange one regime of fatcats fucking over culture for another one?
I’m yet to see how AI makes #2 relevant.
How does genai make those concerns valid again?
Make yourself the question: how does genai respect these 3 boundaries set by IP law? All providers of Generative AI services should be forced by law to explicitly estate this.
I’m still not getting it. What does generative AI have to do with attribution? Like, at all.
I can train a model on a billion pictures from open, free sources that were specifically donated for that purpose and it’ll be able to generate realistic pictures of those things with infinite variation. Every time it generates an image it’s just using logic and RNG to come up with options.
Do we attribute the images to the RNG god or something? It doesn’t make sense that attribution come into play here.
I would like to take a crack at this. There is this recent trend going around with ghiblifying one’s picture. Its basically converting a picture into ghibli image. If you had trained it on free sources, this is not possible.
Internally an LLM works by having networks which activate based on certain signals. When you ask it a certain question. It creates a network of similar looking words and then gives it back to you. When u convert an image, you are doing something similar. You cannot form these networks and the threshold at which they activate without seeing copyrighted images from studio ghibli. There is no way in hell or heaven for that to happen.
OpenAI trained their models on pirated things just like meta did. So when an AI produces an image in style of something, it should attribute the person from which it actually took it. Thats not whats happening. Instead it just makes more money for the thief.
If you hired someone to copy Ghibli’s style, then fed that into an AI as training data, it would completely negate your entire argument.
It is not illegal for an artist to copy someone else’s style. They can’t copy another artist’s work—that’s a derivative—but copying their style is perfectly legal. You can’t copyright a style.
All of that is irrelevant, however. The argument is that—somehow—training an AI with anything is somehow a violation of copyright. It is not. It is absolutely 100% not a violation of copyright to do that!
Copyright is all about distribution rights. Anyone can download whatever TF they want and they’re not violating anyone’s copyright. It’s the entity that sent the person the copyright that violated the law. Therefore, Meta, OpenAI, et al can host enormous libraries of copyrighted data in their data centers and use that to train their AI. It’s not illegal at all.
When some AI model produces a work that’s so similar to an original work that anyone would recognize it, “yeah, that’s from Spirited Away” then yes: They violated Ghibli’s copyright.
If the model produces an image of some random person in the style of Studio Ghibli that is not violating anyone’s copyright. It is not illegal nor is it immoral. No one is deprived of anything in such a transaction.
I think your understanding of generative AI is incorrect. It’s not just “logic and RNG” It is using training data (read as both copyrighted and uncopyrighted material) to come up with a model of “correctness” or “expectedness”. If you then give it a pattern, (read as question or prompt) it checks its “expectedness” model for whatever should come next. If you ask it “how many cups in a pint” it will check the most common thing it has seen after that exact string of words it in its training data: 2. If you ask for a picture of something “in the style of van gogh”, it will spit out something with thick paint and swirls, as those are the characteristics of the pictures in its training data that have been tagged with “Van Gogh”. These responses are not brand new, they are merely a representation of the training data that would most work as a response to your request. In this case, if any of the training data is copyrighted, then attribution must be given, or at the very least permission to use this data must be given by the current copyright holder.
I think your understanding of generative AI is incorrect. It’s not just “logic and RNG”…
If it runs on a computer, it’s literally “just logic and RNG”. It’s all transistors, memory, and an RNG.
The data used to train an AI model is copyrighted. It’s impossible for something to exist without copyright (in the past 100 years). Even public domain works had copyright at some point.
if any of the training data is copyrighted, then attribution must be given, or at the very least permission to use this data must be given by the current copyright holder.
This is not correct. Every artist ever has been trained with copyrighted works, yet they don’t have to recite every single picture they’ve seen or book they’ve ever read whenever they produce something.
If it runs on a computer, it’s literally “just logic and RNG”. It’s all transistors, memory, and an RNG.
Sure, but this is a bad faith argument. You can say this about anything. Everything is made up of other stuff, it’s what someone has done to combine or use those elements that matters. You could extend this to anything proprietary. Manufacturing equipment is just a handful of metals, rubbers, and plastics. However, the context in which someone uses those materials is what matters when determining if copyright laws have been broken.
The data used to train an AI model is copyrighted. It’s impossible for something to exist without copyright (in the past 100 years). Even public domain works had copyright at some point.
If the data used to train the model was copyrighted data acquired without explicit permission from the data owners, it itself cannot be copyrighted. You can’t take something copyrighted by someone else, put it in a group of stuff that is also copyrighted by others, and claim you have some form of ownership over that collection of works.
This is not correct. Every artist ever has been trained with copyrighted works, yet they don’t have to recite every single picture they’ve seen or book they’ve ever read whenever they produce something.
You speak confidently, but I don’t think you understand the problem area enough to act as an authority on the topic.
Laws can be different for individuals and companies. Hell, laws of use can be different for two different individuals, and the copyright owner actually gets a say in how their thing can be used by different groups of people. For instance, for a 3d art software, students can use it for free. However, their use agreement is that they cannot profit off of anything they make. Non students have to pay, but can sell their work without consequences. Companies have to pay even more, but often times get bulk discounts if they are buying licenses for their whole team.
Artists have something of value: AI training data. We know this is valuable to AI training companies, because artists are getting reached out to by AI companies, asking to sell them the rights to train their model on their data. If AI companies just use an artist’s AI training data without their permission, it’s stealing the potential revenue they could have made selling it to a different AI company. Taking away revenue potential on someone’s work is the basis for having violated copyright/fair use laws.
I’ve decided all of your comments are all mine, I’m feeding them into an AI which approximates you except ends every statement with how stupid and lame it is. It talks a lot about gayness as a side effect of that, in a derogatory manner.
Would you like me to stop?
1&2 solved by digital signature
3 both never happens and when it happens IP laws can’t really stop it
Are we pretending metadata on images and sounds actually work and don’t get scrubbed almost immediately?
Of course they are both lying. As with all capitalists, they will always use the law to seize greater power.
I’m fully in favour of abolishing IP law for everyone, ideally globally.
Public domain everything.
I suspect that isn’t the picture these two have in mind. It’s going to be the same as Musk’s demand for free speech, which just turns out to mean “let me be an asshole and you’re not allowed to complain.” This one is going to be “I get to profit off your ideas, but you’re not allowed to use mine.”
This is a horrible idea. Why would an author dedicate years of their life to a book only to make no money off of it. Why would I spend time and money prototyping a new invention only to not see a dime from it as a big company steals my idea.
People need to eat and live. If you can’t survive by creating, you do something else instead of creating. How can people not see this very simple concept?
You could literally write the next Lord of the Rings and another company could print and sell the book, sell merch, and make a movie about it and you’d see 0 money. But no one would make movies any more because what’s the point?
All these indie games disrupting the gaming industry, gone. Game dev takes a lot of time and money, guess big companies will be the only ones who can afford to do it. The indie guy trying to sell his game for 5$ will be buried by a company that steals it and dumps a few hundred K into it to make a better version and the original creator is left with nothing.
People think about getting an the stuff from companies for free and forget that big companies would benefit most with no protection to the little guy. There is a reason why the rich want to do this, honestly think about it.
The rich want to do it because of AI. That’s it.
They can already take whatever you create wihout giving you a dime. What are you gonna do, sue a multi-billion dollar company with a fleet of attorneys on standby? With what money?
They would certainly just settle and give you a pittance just about large enough to cover your attorney fees.
Do you know why companies usually don’t do this? Because they have sufficiently many people hired who do nothing but create stories for the company full time. They do not need your ideas.
Copyright didn’t exist for millenia. It didn’t stop authors from writing books.
Small companies have defend themselves from Apple. People make money from their inventions and writings. There are tons of examples. You’re creating this idea of unbeatable huge corpos that isn’t true. They don’t always win, you can easily prove with with a 1 minute Google search.
They also don’t want it just because of AI, this would enable them to steal and mass produce any IP anyone makes. This includes physical inventions.
Also copyright didn’t exist for a long time and neither did the Internet or global trade. Times change. We went millennia without many things, it doesn’t automatically make them wrong or bad. What a silly basis.
The cases where large companies do win won’t make news though. “Large companies settles with individual” isn’t really headline material now, is it?
Also, small companies != people. Neither me nor you are a company and even small companies have significantly more resources available to them than someone who just created the next Lord of the Rings and didn’t see a penny.
There are significantly more companies who would rather start killing politicians than see IP law gone. They rake in billions of shareholder value, much moreso than any AI company out there.
I never argued that copyright law is necessarily wrong or bad just because we went millenia without it. What I am arguing is that these laws do not allow people to create intellectual works as people in the past were no less artistic than we are today - maybe even moreso.
Have you seen the impact of IP law on science? It’s horrible. No researcher sees any money from their works - rather they must pay to lose their “rights” and have papers published. Scientific journals have hampered scientific progress and will continue to do so for as long as IP law remains. I would not be surprised if millions of needless deaths could have been prevented if only every medical researcher had access to research.
IP law serves solely large companies and independent artists see a couple of breadcrumbs. Abolishing IP law - or at the very least limiting it to a couple of years at most - would have hardly any impact on small artists. The vast, vast, VAST majority of artists make hardly any money already. Just check Bandcamp or itch.io and see how many millions of artists there are who will never ever see success. They do not benefit from IP law - so why should we keep it for the top 0.1% of artists who do?
The cases where large companies do win won’t make news though. “Large companies settles with individual” isn’t really headline material now, is it?
Ok, and not every time a person wins there’s a headline either, this is a moot point.
Also, small companies != people. Neither me nor you are a company and even small companies have significantly more resources available to them than someone who just created the next Lord of the Rings and didn’t see a penny.
So, what is your point? People can win against big companies, even over IP. It has been done before, if you want I can list a bunch for you. I just researched to make sure I wasn’t off base. You don’t always have to have the most money to win. You know why? Because of IP law, the very thing you want to destroy.
There are significantly more companies who would rather start killing politicians than see IP law gone. They rake in billions of shareholder value, much moreso than any AI company out there.
Ok, and? Because a company makes money due to X doesn’t automatically make X a bad thing. I’ve not seen one good plan laid out on how destorying IP would help the common man, it doesn’t.
I never argued that copyright law is necessarily wrong or bad just because we went millenia without it.
No, but you are clearly implying something with “Copyright didn’t exist for millenia. It didn’t stop authors from writing books.” This ignores that those authors couldn’t have their work downloaded and spread across the globe in minutes. You are bringing this up to prove a point, but give how much things have changes over the last few hundred years, the point falls flat. It is irrelevant once you look at all the nuance and reasons why and how they were able to create.
What I am arguing is that these laws do not allow people to create intellectual works as people in the past were no less artistic than we are today - maybe even moreso.
They do allow them. They allow them to make money off of their art. Back in the day you didn’t have an interconnected global economy, you didn’t have to worry about retirement or your 401k, of course it was easier back then, late stage capitalism didn’t set in. But IP laws are what protect creators these days, so they can take a year off of work and write a book and still be able to eat.
Have you seen the impact of IP law on science? It’s horrible. No researcher sees any money from their works - rather they must pay to lose their “rights” and have papers published. Scientific journals have hampered scientific progress and will continue to do so for as long as IP law remains. I would not be surprised if millions of needless deaths could have been prevented if only every medical researcher had access to research.
Yes, absolutely a good point. But because a system is broken is not a reason to get rid of it. The legal system is broken and millionaires just get away with crimes, should we just get rid of all the laws? No. We should work to make them better.
IP law serves solely large companies and independent artists see a couple of breadcrumbs.
Source needed. Because this is a bold claim, that based on what I can find, is not true. People sell IP to companies all the time, so yes they then benefit from it, but the creator of the IP gets paid.
You brought up how lives have probably been lost because of scientific journal IP. How many lives do you think will be lost when big pharma realizes there’s no money in creating a vaccine for a new disease? Who is making that investment? The govt? lol
Abolishing IP law - or at the very least limiting it to a couple of years at most - would have hardly any impact on small artists. It would directly impart them! The small artist who had a good beat or came up with some slick lyrics would have them jacked. Every production company would be scrapping small artists looking for what they could take or steal, with 0 impact. This also goes with authors and writing books. How can they sign a book deal when a publisher can’t guarantee it won’t just get copied and given away? They now have no reason to pay authors.
They do not benefit from IP law - so why should we keep it for the top 0.1% of artists who do?
They ABOLUSTLY do benefit from it, you’re just looking at it as a “less money needs less protection” lens which I highly disagree with. A small artist can have a lot going for them and miss their opportunity because they were stolen. Or they were sampled and never for paid but the person who sampled them got rich. I mean there are dozens of ways to see why this would be a problem. The least of which is, why even make music or movies anymore? If every movie and song ever created can be legally pirated, companies just stop making them.
IP laws help everyone. EVERYONE. Just because companies make money off of them doesn’t make them bad. Just because small creators don’t make a lot of money doesn’t mean they shouldn’t own what they create. Everyone in favor of this just seems to want stuff for free without realizing the impact of that choice, it’s extremely shortsighted.
I never argued that copyright law is necessarily wrong or bad just because we went millenia without it.
You’re right. As we all know people only started to create art after IP laws where established.
Nobody ever made something original just for the joy of it. It’s only fair that a single company has the exclusive rights on a pants-wearing mouse that looks a certain way for 95 years.
This is a bad faith argument.
Forms of IP have existed for a long time. And back in your days you didn’t have one company that could have global reach in second.
You still ignore the fact that if I spend 5 years of my life writing a book, it could be taken away with no money to me. So people can no longer dedicate their lives to creating when they have bills to pay.
Have you considered that the problem of not being able to create art for recreational purposes without thinking about its monetary value is the actual issue here?
Yes, I have.
But how exactly does getting rid of IP laws since that exactly? Because that’s what’s being proposed.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear about that. Abolishing IP laws won’t fix capitalism.
There are other solutions for that. Most of them as unrealistic as abolishing IP laws. But we could try universal basic income as a stopgap.
I think UBI would actually solve a lot of issues, the creative communities’ financial struggle being one of them.
Why not get rid of the patent trolls, the monopolies shelving useful technologies through patent loopholes, the … Oh I see the tech billionaires again wanting to uproot a system because loopholes are just too much effort now.
God if every innovation stuck behind patent trolls was suddenly allowed to see the light of day, we’d basically solve the energy crisis overnight… and we’d see games that used the Nemesis System
