this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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You don’t hate copyright.
You hate that entertainment megacorps have set up a massive toll booth between creators and audiences, thwarting their ability to connect and collaborate, and crippling the average person’s ability to meaningfully participate in culture unless it happens to be profitable for those in charge.
And soon you will hate that AI megacorps have set up a massive toll booth between creators and audiences, thwarting their ability to connect and collaborate, and crippling the average person’s ability to meaningfully participate in culture unless it happens to be profitable for those in charge.
What they did to us by forcing us to obey copyright, they will now do by disregarding copyright.
You can be pro-piracy because it distributes power, and be anti-AI because it consolidates it, without legitimizing copyright as a fundamental principle of ethics.
You are mistaken. I do hate copyrights like the plague they are, because they are chains for knowledge and culture. And I do not hate AI, but I hate corporations for taking technology, progress and their benefit to themselves and to oppress society, and this thanks to the secret they keep and copyrights.
Sharing of knowledge and culture is the solution, not the problem.
Clearly we see the word "copyright" very differently, so I'm wondering if it's maybe a useless term for us here. I'll get more specific about what I see as being valuable, and maybe we'll see that we agree on some of it.
I like that the law, by default, obliges people to attribute works accurately. It helps me find the stuff I like, or to fact-check sources.
I like that the law, by default, obliges copies to remain faithful to the original. This is the other half of attribution. Attribution isn't worth much if it's not exactly what the original creator meant. That was a big problem in the period immediately following the printing press, and we already see it cropping up again with reactions/stitches/duets, and it'll probably escalate with AI.
I like that I can eagerly share all of the shitty code that I write, slap a non-commercial share-alike clause on there, and know that it's illegal (not that it doesn't happen anyway) for a megacorp to shunt it off into a for-profit, closed-source venture. If I couldn't do that, I might just not share it at all.
I like that I can -- or at least, I used to be able to -- find the person who made a thing I like, because the search results didn't used to be an endless flood of copies/reposts of it.
I don't like that the primary employment model for artists and inventors is to have them instantly assign all rights to their creations over to some holding company that doesn't have a creative bone in its corporate body.
I don't like that they often can't even produce derivative work on their own dime in order to engage with the fanbase that they themselves built.
I don't like the trend of "reaction videos" where a media group with clout and deep pockets can scoop the work of a no-name creator, say "lol" a few times or just leave a livecam of an empty chair, and rake in mad dollars while the person who did the hard work gets a mere trickle of support from the 0.0001% of viewers who bother finding the original.
I don't like that a holding company can just sit on an IP and do nothing with it. I also don't like that they can sell it to another company that will disrespect the creation as they milk it for every last dollar.
I don't like that fans are often shot down or prosecuted when they try to make remixes or tributes to the stuff they love.
I don't like that people who can't afford to pay -- or are just geographically in the "wrong" location -- are cut off from accessing knowledge and participating in culture.
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I don't like tech bros treating culture like a raw material to be mined and refined, with no respect for the fertility of the soil in which it grew.
The stuff that I like... I don't just like it because of what it is, but also because of who made it, and where they were in their life when they made it.
The fact that their viewpoint, at that moment, is inseparable from the artifact that's a mere shadow of that moment... is part of what makes life worth living, to me.
What is "Fate of the Animals" without the wild story of Franz Marc's fever dream, his subsequent death, the inscription on the back, the warehouse fire, and his friend's restoration? Just pixels? The pixels are just the reference point. They're the SHA256 of that story. Disconnecting the story, seeing just the hash... It does some kind of damage to humanity as an enterprise.
Copyrights don't do shit for controlling sources and trust on Internet. You are mistakening things. Copyright is a framework of laws to enforce rarity and property on immaterial things. Patent is another way to it much more reasonably. Trademark is a third way. None of those is worth anything.
Imposing rarity and property on things that can be copied and transfered freely is a cancer for mankind.
Now there is what in France is called paternity of a work. Unfortunately it's tied to copyrights in the law, but it's still its own thing. I don't care much for it. It didn't existed for ages and it didn't prevented mankind from creating all kind of stuff.