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- Hacker News
- > Large corporations getting special exceptions from it didn't start with LLMs.
The root problem is inequality. Copyright makes sense to allow authors to profit from their work. But it was warped to give more power to big corporations that own now works for more than a century. Everybody that was alive when some works were produced will be dead by the time that they are free.
LLMs shows what happens when you remove copyright. Websites are starving for visitors as LLMs copy/paste their contents and charge for it without giving anything back.
Split monopolies, improve working class conditions, and get politicians that work for - the now powerful - working class. Copyright can be fixed, but not until power is removed from the few and given back to the many.
by Frieren - Copyright shouldn't be abolished, it should be reformed however.
It should be 20 years, with right to renew, your first 10 year renewal is free, then the cost skyrockets, with proof required that you are still using the work in commerce, and after that first term, you get a flat rate 5 year extension, then it must be renewed annually with escalating fees.
It allows the big IP places to hold on to their family jewels, but also would return a significant amount of orphaned work to public domain.
by Aloha - How many years of monopoly is enough? And why not ought works be explicitly registered for such protections?by Den_VR
- I don't see any reason it should be longer than patents (20 years).
Why should authors be granted vastly larger IP protections than inventors?
- You'll throw Hollywood and most of the publishing industry out of business overnight if you "abolish" copyright. Not a good idea to throw so many people out of work.
Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.
by solatic - It's not only Hollywood, these ML tankies that want to abolish private ownership will destroy pharmaceutical innovation. (This is where people's brains will turn off)
Why would a firm invest in research improving Super-Rare-Disease therapies if I don't get exclusive rights to the monetary benefit?
And to the inevitable room temperature IQ DSA crowd, why would the ML government with state research firms ever direct public resources to improving Super-Rare-Disease? Something that affects 1-in-10000 people doesn't deserve public resources like common diseases.
s/ancap/marxist leninist/
by reddozen - Hollywood was created by ignoring copyrights.by happymellon
- > You'll throw Hollywood and most of the publishing industry out of business overnight
Any downsides?
by grishka - > You'll throw Hollywood and most of ...
Compared to the economic and human disruptions of shipping most of America's manufacturing jobs overseas since WWII, that sounds very minor.
Yes, I understand that Hollywood & publishing carry much higher social status than mere manufacturing, for the "right" people to object at them being tossed.
No, I'm not disagreeing with your "reform not abolish" ideal.
by bell-cot - From the perspective of "The general purpose computing device I own should be able to run any instructions written by anyone without legal issues" then copyright sucks. Massively abused by corporations to unproductively charge rent by squatting on obvious implementations.
From the perspective of "I'm an artist and I want to make a living off the things I create" copyright has some utility. (Although also gets in the way at times, as in bad faith music plagiarism cases)
I feel both perspectives. On a moral level not sure how to unite them in a way that doesn't enable some kind of abuse.
I'm sure we can improve the current systems though.
by jackpepsi - Don't fall for this trap! GrapheneOS leadership is very against Copyleft, probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors, and copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all. Proprietary software can be kept secret, and only shared as a binary, but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.
It's not perfect, and the terms are far too long, but we do want to keep it. Reduce it to 20 years and we'd be golden.
by purpleidea - That's not true. Look at their FAQ [1]:
> GrapheneOS is permissively licensed and is usable for building devices with an immutable root of trust. GPLv3 is deliberately incompatible with these kinds of locked down devices, unlike GPLv2 code such as the Linux kernel. This means GrapheneOS can't include GPLv3 code without forbidding use cases we want to support. GPLv3 is no problem for our own usage, but we don't want to forbid using GrapheneOS as a replacement for the Android Open Source Project in locked down devices.
They're not against GPLv3 and, but they explain why it's not suited for a project like GrapheneOS.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#:~:text=In%20some%20cases,locked%...
by Andromxda - > Proprietary software can be kept secret, and only shared as a binary
That doesn't stop piracy at all so I think copyright is what prevents proliferation of piracy not secrecy.
by Cider9986 - I don't agree. Free software would still be free even if copyright were to be abolished, if anything it would flourish further. That is because even proprietary software could be better integrated.by fedeb95
- > but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.
Can you elaborate on that? I have done a lot of open source (professionally and in my free time), and I don't see it.
I have exactly one example where I see that copyleft is useful, and that's Linux: it is nice to be able to get the downstream kernel. I genuinely don't have another example.
For smaller projects (even not that small actually), my feeling is that a Copyleft licence is just an opportunity for a competing project to come with a permissive licence. It happened to me in a library I built: people complained about my choice of MPLv2, eventually someone started a competing library with a permissive licence and everybody jumped on it.
An example of a not-so-small project I have is Ardupilot: as a user I love that GPLv3 should make it possible for me to access (and reflash!) it, but it seems to me that the GPLv3 was clearly an opportunity for PX4 to gain traction (Ardupilot even got evicted from Dronecode).
So yeah, I totally understand the appeal of copyleft in theory, but in practice I'm a bit more skeptical. And I say that as someone who actually licences my projects as copyleft.
by palata - > GrapheneOS leadership is very against Copyleft
We use GPLv2 licensing for substantial portions of our code beyond our Linux kernel changes. Vanadium is licensed as GPLv2. As long as copyright exists then there's a place for copyleft to counter it.
> probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors
That's a strange thing to claim about Proton and Cape. Those are the only companies we're aware of sending us any substantial monetary donations in the past couple years. It has several $10k donations from Proton and maybe around 10x that for Cape which sells phones with GrapheneOS for a $50 fee.
We have a list of formal sponsors at https://grapheneos.org/sponsors which are 4 server companies sponsoring dedicated servers, a GeoIP database company giving us sponsored access to the downloadable database and a VPN company sponsoring 2 DataPacket servers. We could list Cape too but they started donating to us on their own.
> copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all
What does it protect it from? GPL is widely violated with minimal consequences. The main impact is that a lot of Android OEMs and similar companies release Linux kernel drivers as open source while the firmware and userspace drivers are closed source.
> Proprietary software can be kept secret
The source code can be kept secret but not the code running on the device. That can be reverse engineered and forked. If copyright was abolished, it would be legal to fork closed source software. That's becoming far easier to do from a technical perspective.
by grapheneos - In a world where copyright doesn't exist - let's say I spend two years writing a novel/or a book on the history of computers.
What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published?
How am I ever going to justify that two year investment?
by DrScientist - Don’t worry, either way, in two years everyone will just ask chatgpt to write the book they want to read.by Machado117
- It already happens. Instead of a book look at TikTok for example. Come up with a cool product, if it sells at all, it will be immediately counterfeited.
The issue is that copyright is only protecting massive corporations.
Did copyright helped against AI? Nope.
If copyright was eliminated, say you are a great up-and-coming filmmaker, you could go make your own marvel movie. You might break into the industry because of that. You make some one off superhero movie is far less likely to hit with an audience.
Copyright doesn’t help small individuals, it only helps corporations protect themselves against us.
by jml78 - > What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published?
What's stopping people from doing that now? The moment you sell something of any interest, you can be sure to find a copy of it free on the internet somewhere.
by jeroenhd - No one, but history tells us this isn't a problem. Publishers will still want to pay you in order to have the opportunity to be the first to the market with the copies, and this is what makes a lot of money under the assumption your work will make a lot of money. If the assumption is false, then no copyright will give you money, if anything will prevent you from the remote opportunity of freely made copies to circulate and become famous of their own; at which point, publishers would want to make a contract with you for your next work.
We are too much used to copyright that fail to see how we would be better without.
by fedeb95 - I think the thinking is that in current system as solo creator you are somewhat protected by copyright but your work still gets mainly bought by your audience even if it can be pirated.
On the other hand copyright has been absolutely abused by big corporations to give them immense powers. Many creators were forced to sign away their rights and don't even make money on their work. You jailbreak your phone or your TV because of it. Generally it blocks so much of the competition. And with LLMs seems to have decided that copyright doesn't matter anyway.
by omnimus - As others have pointed out, piracy is already easy for anything remotely popular, yet people still buy books. We could assume that it's not because they fear breaking the law, but because they want to support the author and have an "authentic" copy.
There are also other models than creating a work without any income, then recouping that cost by a state-granted monopoly. You can release preview chapters and then solicit donations from interested readers. You can build on your reputation and then promise to finish the book later for some up-front payment. These might not work for everyone, but they are in wide use today. One could argue that removing options for those authors that depend on copyright today is still a reasonable price to pay for removing all the abuses of copyright.
by dvdkon - Hear me out. What if copyright could only be claimed by the creator/artist OR public domain. Make it non-transferable. Force big media corps license music from artists instead of owning it outright. Push negotiating power to the artist away from the organization. Avoid "Taylor Swift re-recorded all her music to own it" and similar stuff in the future.by laserbeam
- The industry can just push and promote people it picked itself and then bind them some other way. How would this work with open software, which is not public domain and often sees the original creator step away down the line?by OroPla
- While initially a perpetual right to copying for some publishers, copyright was made into what it is today to "promote creation". Funnily enough it's used in the exactly opposite way. Culture is basically frozen, same movie and same music released every week.
The fields where creativity flows the most seem to me the ones furthest away from copyright. FOSS and memes come to mind.
What matters is who made something, regardless of who copied it. I think that in a ocean of AI generated content, this will become more and more important. Platforms like patreon and kofi show that people care about creators and are willing to support without 'buying a copy'
by monneyboi - Games are another big area where distance to copyright seems to be where the innovation is occurring. So many of the big genres of games and ultimately the "game" that started the genre begun as a mod of another game. Counterstrike from half life, the myriad of factory games from modded minecraft, Arma and DayZ spawned the survival genre and further Arma mods formed the idea of PubG as well. In sim racing mods to Assetto Corsa have influenced the successor title of Competizone which chose GT3 cars since they were the most popular online. Then the modders on AC made long journey driving modifications and this has now influenced the upcoming Evo. There are probably many more examples from Skyrim or other FPS games of ideas born first by modders.
A lot of these mods break copyright of original material but with it they create an entire genre of games far outweighing the value of the initial piece of copyright.
by PaulKeeble - >It's abused to take down content that's not in violation of copyright
That's a problem with DMCA in that it's applicable in an immediate and unilateral manner and any decision to resist comes after the takedown. DMCA is the problem in this context, not "copyright" itself.
by Daedren - The real problem is that misuse is not followed by ruinously high penalty. False claims should result in statutory damages of tens thousands per claim. That is the way to prevent misuse.by Ekaros
- Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda, trying to convince you that copyright is bad so they can avoid copyright lawsuits and use everyone's data without paying licensing fees. Without copyright, they can use your data for free.by tristanj