Copyright is not a moral right, it's a monetization strategy

Today's copyright is much different, due to massive lobbying efforts by those who would benefit most. Authors life + what, 100 years or so, is way too long (and that's completely discounting those who would want copyright to be perpetual). So you have a situation where a person creates a work, a large rights owner buys it up, and then they get to milk all the benefits while preventing the public from having their rightful free access.

Restore copyright to 14+14 years (with a single exception, the original artist and only the original artist gets 28+14, if they sell their rights to the work then the recipient only gets 14+14). Destroy the DMCA. Those are the two most important things to restore copyright to a proper moral standing. Otherwise, copyright as it stands right now is immoral and unjust, and thus (some of) those who pirate are doing so for fully ethical reasons, and are on the better side of history in the long run.

Of course, some people just want free shit. However, those people will always exist no matter how reasonable copyright is. Hell, I don't mind getting free shit when I pirate something, even if I'm doing it for moral reasons.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.en....

> When the US Constitution was drafted, the idea that authors were entitled to a copyright monopoly was proposed—and rejected. The founders of our country adopted a different premise, that copyright is not a natural right of authors, but an artificial concession made to them for the sake of progress.

Specifically,

> The copyright system works by providing privileges and thus benefits to publishers and authors; but it does not do this for their sake. Rather, it does this to modify their behavior: to provide an incentive for authors to write more and publish more. In effect, the government spends the public's natural rights, on the public's behalf, as part of a deal to bring the public more published works. Legal scholars call this concept the “copyright bargain.” It is like a government purchase of a highway or an airplane using taxpayers' money, except that the government spends our freedom instead of our money.

But what "natural rights"?

> the freedom to lend a book to your friend, to sell it to a used book store, to borrow it from a library, to buy it without giving your name to a corporate data bank, even the freedom to read it twice.

...as well as

> fair use

I find his perspective compelling. Yet, he only cites the Constitution and one court case. Copyright has a long and complex history. I wonder what the essay "leaves out" and what other "categories of interpretation" exist.

The reality is actually more interesting than this post.

The US Copyright Act of 1790 was meant to provide an incentive to authors, artists, and scientists to create original works by providing creators with a monopoly. The monopoly was limited in order to stimulate creativity and the advancement of “science and the useful arts” through wide public access to works in the “public domain.” Major revisions happened in 1831, 1870, 1909, and 1976. Source: https://www.arl.org/copyright-timeline/

As to moral right, from Wikipedia: "Modern copyright law has been influenced by an array of older legal rights that have been recognized throughout history, including the moral rights of the author who created a work, the economic rights of a benefactor who paid to have a copy made, the property rights of the individual owner of a copy, and a sovereign's right to censor and to regulate the printing industry. The origins of some of these rights can be traced back to ancient Greek culture, ancient Jewish law, and ancient Roman law.[2] In Greek society, during the sixth century B.C.E., there emerged the notion of the individual self, including personal ideals, ambition, and creativity.[3] The individual self is important in copyright because it distinguishes the creativity produced by an individual from the rest of society.[citation needed] In ancient Jewish Talmudic law there can be found recognition of the moral rights of the author and the economic or property rights of an author.[4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#Early_dev...

I absolutely do not want any AI model to use my stuff as training data, to be used on a website or for advertizing. You want to make money off my stuff, you pay.

If you have an idea first and I copy the idea into my own mind, you still have your brain cell connections. You still have your idea. Now I do too, and you have no right to tell me how I can connect my brain cells just because you connected your own similarly before me.

Same thing with computer data. You don't get to tell me I can't arrange bits on a hard drive I own in the same order as the bits on a computer you own just because you arranged them first. That's nonsensical.

If a piece of creative work would not have existed without the prospect of financial gain, it's unlikely to be very good. Society would not have missed out on much if some famous author published only their first 3 truly inspired works, which they wrote to satisfy their creative urge, but not the 20 potboilers that followed.

We need to distinguish discoveries, inventions, and creations. Discoveries cannot be protected by patent/copyright. Inventions can and should (within reason). Creations might also deserve protection, but the incentives argument here is much weaker IMO than in the case of inventions.

Ironically, the NYT, which prides itself on being a neutral and objective purveyor of facts, isn’t challenging OpenAI for using the factual elements of its reporting in training data. Facts, being discoveries, aren’t copyrightable. Instead, they are focused on the part where journalists exercise "creative freedom" – the specific wording, narrative, and "spin" journalists put on reported facts. Let's apply the incentives argument to this context: is it clear the world would be a worse place if NYT journalists lose the incentive to exercise creative freedom in their news reports?

What is should not be, is a way to remove the sharing of knowledge, which is detrimental to society as a whole.

Fictional works, editorials, opinion pieces - these may be based upon facts but do not explicity provide knowledge that needs to be shared.

Science should always be open, for the sake of humanity. Those who make the discoveries may gain status and reputation, but those discoveries should not be kept for personal/commercial gain.

Art and music, much like celebrity status, are more difficult to judge. Wanting to make everyone aware of who you are or what you have created, whilst simultaneously demanding that they pay for the privilege, seems at odds. You can create for commission, the payment being from the person that made the request, but then they should be free to keep it private or make it public.

We are obsessed in modern times, that we must be paid for everything we do - largely because governments and businesses have made this so.

We barter our skills for things we cannot ourselves produce, but knowledge should never be kept private for an inclusive society - that is the way towards elitism and power, which is clearly where copyright has travelled.

Should you be given food for free ? No. Should the knowledge of how to grow food be free ? Yes.

Barter the tangible, not the intangible. The 'knowledge' economony is a parasite on humanity.

Specifically:

> For many years, we’ve explained why the debate about copyright is not a moral issue at all. Yet, whenever we get into discussions on it, sooner or later, someone makes an argument about how this or that creator “deserves to make a living” from their art. (...)

https://www.techdirt.com/2011/04/08/if-youre-arguing-that-so...

Edit to add: copyright as a moral right has no current bearing on AI training, the current question (ie in lawsuits) is whether or under what circumstances such training violates copyright, not about the morality.

[1] https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1740605059367367068 and https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1740606348935491648

this is quite interesting. the creator creates something. then, through a contract you give someone either for some time, or forever, the patrimonial rights so they can make copies and distribute those (akin to the copy-right) but the other part of the right, the moral one, stays with the creator. if someone wants to use your creation for something you don't like (for example, using a piece of your music for a politicial person meeting) the moral right lets you say : no. you can distribute it and sell it according to our contract, but THIS I do not want.

we should replace copyright with that more evolved view.

The latter is embodied in the Berne convention, which the United States unfortunately acceded to, leaving the concepts of American copyright and a strong public domain essentially dead. Regulatory capture by entities which extract rents past all possible sense has also helped kill it.

Say you post a blog post on medium, or you write something on a subreddit. Who owns that content? The corporations? Reddit can sell this content if they wanted to and they do.

If someone grabs this content without the platform's explicit permission it is copyright infringement. But to what end? The user? Do you think the corporation is thinking about the user when it argues for copyright infringement? It's about money.

Now, we can go further with this and argue that copyright infringement can also hurt smaller businesses.

Let's say the platforms start making deals with certain corporations so they can get ahold of this content. Maybe as training datasets. Maybe they already do. Now only bigger corporations with money and contacts will get access to this content and less smaller open-source projects will have the same resources to build models of the same caliber. Now it's hurting the competitive economy.

Yes, an individual should be allowed to own their own content but if they freely post something on a blog or a forum, that is owned by someone else, they have already given their content away. And whether they like it or not it is being sold for monetary gain.

That these corporations use the idea of copyright infringement as a way to bar everyone from this data without paying them is not about what is right, it is about money. It's a strategy.

That will do away with the corporations that amass copyright. Corporations can still promote artists, and use copyright as a basis, but not in a way whereby those artists sign over copyright to the corporation.

Of course if you phrase it in general abstractions, copyright sounds like arbitrary regulatory capture. But if you say "Copyright is a monetization strategy that enables business models which produce novel ideas at the expense of business models which repackage existing ideas" then as a matter of public policy this makes a lot of sense! Novel ideas are far more rare than repackaged existing ideas, and generally much more valuable. Governments should build a regulatory structure that incentivizes the former over the latter.

People rely on pointless abstractions like "monetization strategy" when the actual facts of the case are unflattering to their ideological/financial priors. "GPT-4 blatantly plagiarizes from the New York Times" is extremely unflattering to AI evangelists and entrepreneurs, so it's easier to go with "OpenAI has a different information business model than the New York Times."

The media which you grow up consuming forms near-permanent structures in your brain. If by the time you're an adult the creator of your favorite childhood media decides to become a bigot you should be allowed to reclaim it and take it in whatever direction you want.

I also don't think it makes sense that we allow a small number of companies to buy the rights to most of our music, this grants them too much control over an important part of human culture.

Finally, the software world is forced by copyright to constantly waste engineering effort in rebuilding perfectly good tools that are no longer on sale. Imagine a world where source code were released as soon as some codebase is no longer under copyright! Isn't that essential for allowing us to build upon the work of those who have come before us? Otherwise we're forced to keep rebuilding the wheel, despite the fact that a group of top-tier engineers already built a near-perfect wheel 30 years ago.

Honestly, I think the devil is in the details. I'm not particularly dogmatic about any specific duration, and could probably be convinced that the rules should vary slightly based on different factors such as corporate vs individual ownership. There's probably a lot of edge cases that I haven't fully considered carefully, and I'm really open to exploring the topic.

Copyright is a topic which I contemplate often, and I'm thankful that the emergence of new AI tooling is forcing us to take a closer look. I think in general we should look to empower individuals, because they're the ones who will ultimately grow the game.

GNU/Linux distributions released on or before 1995 include Slackware 3.0 and Debian 0.93R6.

"Only thieves and vandals have made money on Calvin and Hobbes merchandise."

There should be different rules for "originators", legal owners, and legal entities. When the controlling legal rights of a work are separated from an originator, the speed to public domain should be accelerated.

In this system:

- An originator is the person who creates the work, and owns the work by default.

- A legal owner is a person who buys the rights to a work.

- A legal entity is any legal construct meant to represent a person or multiple people.

Time to public domain would be faster if a company outright buys the controlling legal rights to a work.

vs.

Time to public domain would be slower if a company licenses the work from an originator.

Works with no originator enter the public domain on the fastest track.

Previous discussion of this idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899357

We all have ideas how to fix it - very simply could be to go with Authors life and when the art is sold it goes down to 10-25 years. Thats it. Simple.

What seems to be unsolved is HOW we actually get to this point. It seems to be impossible to get enough money to outspend the evil cooperations in buying politicians, so what do you suggest?

> [the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

...

> Some terms in the clause are used in archaic meanings, potentially confusing modern readers. For example, "useful Arts" does not refer to artistic endeavors, but rather to the work of artisans, people skilled in a manufacturing craft; "Sciences" refers not only to fields of modern scientific inquiry but rather to all knowledge.[4]

Copyright is statutory law, meaning it must obey the constitution but otherwise can do anything. (Being an amendment to the preceding body of the Constitution, the First Amendment overrides the Copyright Clause where and only where the two parts conflict.) The Copyright Clause allows Congress to produce short-term restrictions as the means to fulfill a long-term purpose. Congress can add and remove from copyright, but both actions must be for the purpose of promoting the spread, development, and eventual unrestricted public access to creative works. Emphasis on both "eventual" and "unrestricted". In simpler terms, copyright is a means to ensure that the public eventually gets access to every creative work.

Copyright covers creative expression. Copyright does not apply to facts and ideas, nor does it reward "sweat of the brow" [2]. Patents cover implemented inventions, which are novel implementations of practical ideas. Patents do not apply to creative expression, nor unimplemented ideas. (Well, I think that's how patents are supposed to work. But software patents would beg to differ.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_State...

The rise of web apps was hugely driven, perhaps primarily driven, by the fact you can’t just copy them.

iPhone apps? Same thing.

All enterprise contract work? The concept is irrelevant.

Actually any contract work, any production of custom physical items … irrelevant.

Copyright is the one where society has to “buy in” for the creator to get paid. This is an artifact of technology, and nothing to do with inherent moral or commercialization claims.

Whoever tweeted this seems to have heard the term 'moral right' and decided that it means the same thing as 'natural right' or something? I don't get it.

It's not just plain capitalism. Art, journalism, sport, all reward people who invest time, money and effort, knowing that they can personally benefit if they succeed. That gives us centuries of beautiful art, quality newspapers and worthwhile spectator sports.

I don't understand the hostility to the idea that, say, a writer can control their work, other than maybe people would rather not pay and feel good about it.

How would you feel if someone decrees you charging a monthly subscription for your SaaS is evil and they're going to outlaw it. Or, dunno, declare that after 7 years of using it they get it perpetually for free...

The point is that "moral" rights conveyed by certain copyright legislation may pose a threat to "AI" companies. These rights are separate from the "economic" rights that commenters are focused on. They are not for sale.

In some countries, creaters of copyrighted works retain moral rights even when the copyright, i.e., the bundle of economic rights, is owned by someone else. The moral rights are not a means of commercially exploiting works ("monetisation"). They are a means of protecting proper attribution, integrity and maybe even privacy.

https://www.jtl.columbia.edu/bulletin-blog/ai-created-art-an...

Repeating the examples I already posted in some previous discussion here: I don't want my painting being used for harmful product packaging. I don't want my music being used as a background for a political campaign or some hateful video. I don't want my literary characters being incorporated into some other work with a different narrative/vibe/whatever.

Is there a better way to give the authors this kind of control which doesn't result in a dumpster fire of a system we live with?

Now, the root cause must be attacked: copyright itself, not the intransigence of OpenAI to license this content (as they have with, say, Axel Springer).

Can the rules of the game be changed before they come into effect for our heroes? Tune in to the next episode in 2024…

Most of us would probably agree that if someone provides something of value to someone else then the beneficiary providing something of value in return is “fair” on some basic level.

If there’s a physical item involved then it’s obvious how “providing” it works. We can exchange a certain amount of money for a certain item and everyone understands the trade.

If there’s some kind of personal service involved then again it’s obvious what “providing” it means. Again, we can exchange a certain amount of money for a certain service rendered and everyone understands the trade.

There are at least two other things that we value greatly as a society but which can’t be supported in the same direct ways. One is public services, which is essentially work that is done for the common good that would probably not be arranged by any given individual beneficiary. For this we have established governments and we typically fund them through taxation. Naturally this is controversial because it represents (usually) the only lawful way in which someone else can come along and take your money from you, ultimately backed by a threat of force if you don’t hand it over, and there will never be universal agreement about what should or should not be provided and funded in this way.

Another tricky thing to support is creative work. There is no reasonable doubt that this provides enormous value to our society, nor that many people contribute to creative endeavours and if we want them to continue providing their contributions then most of them must be compensated sufficiently by those who benefit from them to make their ongoing work possible. But unlike everything else mentioned above, most of the work that goes into the creative process naturally happens before the end result is ready — before there is anything of substantial value that will benefit others who might provide something of value in return. So how to incentivise this kind of creative work?

The way I see it, that is the problem that copyright tries to solve, or at least tried to solve originally. It’s an attempt to apply the more familiar economics of selling physical products to creative work, to provide a system where it’s worth creators investing their time and resources into making something that others might want, in the knowledge that if they succeed then they will receive compensation accordingly. Like any uncertain investment, it can still result in better or worse returns, in this case depending on how much benefit they do create and for how many people, but that is essentially the kind of market that copyright creates and how it functions as an incentive for creative workers.

Looking at the evidence so far, it appears that the basic principle of copyright has been highly effective in motivating creative work compared to other funding models or volunteer efforts. It also appears that the original link between the creators doing the work and the beneficiaries of that work who pay to support it has been subverted by numerous intermediaries and changes in the legal/regulatory framework. This often results in the creative workers usually receiving only a small fraction of the money paid by the recipients of the work, and the recipients paying a lot more for the benefit of the work than the creators who made it will ever receive. IMHO, this is the fundamental problem with modern copyright and where any attempts to “fix the system” should first be targeted.

Sarcasm aside, this take is very disappointing. People leverage copyright for many purposes - copyleft, recognition, exclusiveness and many more.

I also find it interesting that it seems to be largely the hyped-by-AI crowd clamoring for abolishing Copyright laws. What's that famous saying about people turning a blind eye if they stand to make money off of things? Why is it that we're not seeing "Open"AI releasing all their source code if they're such bastions of morality and progress? Why is it that they want free, unfettered access to everyone else's work, but refuse to put their own work out there for free as well?