Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose. We need to treat that monopoly power with more respect. We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly. Copyright is allowed in the constitution for "limited times" and Congress has ignored that.

And I agree. Copyright in its current form does more harm than good.

Copyright was introduced to counter genuine harms: there are stories of people publishing in the UK, and having what today we'd consider pirate copies of their books selling massive quantities in the US, for example, with the author seeing no revenue. I believe anyone who puts work into creating something, physical or non-physical, should be able to derive revenue from their work. But I also believe in the public good; that 'information want to be free' in that thoughts, ideas and stories are meant to be shared; and that in a fast-moving world long-term prevention of movement is harmful. I also believe that over time, protections meant for individuals become weapons for the powerful, and I believe we're there now.

Further, I worry that over the past decades to today, 'rights' are being socially redefined as property rights. We consider privacy, an inalienable human right, as something for us to be paid for by Meta. This is implicitly and silently treating an inalienable essence of being human as something to be bartered away, and I think a social retreat from the concept of property rights as being anything other than localised to, well, property, would help. Reduction or abolition of copyright would be a radical positive change in a general social attitude here.

Realistically, radically adjusted copyright (3 years for software, 10 years for a book or music?) gives both an opportunity for profit and allows reasonable expiration while still relevant. In the absence of that, yes, complete abolishment would be an upheaval but a net benefit to the world.

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'

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.

This rules out negotiations. They imply a possible negative result, hence the thing is not really available. A public offer, however, is fine.

This thing alone may change the situation quite a bit. Imagine a true market for textbooks or streaming media where every provider has the same selection of titles and has to actually compete.

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.

Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.

I agree that it is broken and probably needs to be reformed, but abolished outright would lead to a ton of issues right?

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.

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.

So, which one is it?

All of this is a problem because someone exerted influence over the US government.

Google _knew_ that openai was scraping youtube to train whisper et al. They didn't stop it because they realised that they if they sued them, they would have to pay to train.

So they silently also did the same thing.

With that, copyright in training went to shit.

Copyright, should, allow you or me to make a living from "intellectual works" or anything else tangible/not tangible

Very well aligned with my beliefs not to mention it's one of if not the most private OS.

In Angels in America Roy Cohn is given this line where he is so politically embedded he can simply guess stuff and be right "You don't know what all I know. I don't know what all I know. Half this shit I make up and I'm still right". I feel this way about tech now.

I don't need to worry how it works. I take a guess of how it should work and I'm usually right. Not on Windows or some other subpar platform. But can my Android play white noise on the speaker and a podcast on the headphones? While yes, of course it can. I learned that fiddling with Pulse audio years ago and now it's just expected.

If you create something you should have some protection of other people just blatantly ripping you off.

Copyright terms are in dire need of a reset to a sane length, though. Disney (among others) has spent way to much money extending the term each time their cartoons threatened to expire.

Patents on the other hand should never have been used for software. Patents have their function in preventing inventors from keeping their designs secret, but the whole system is set up to give people to invest in building large brick halls filled with steam engines and it does not match software's pace of development at all.

Abolishing copyright also means abolishing copyright-based licensing. GPL, Creative Commons, all that loses what makes it work. Want to give corporations a lot more power, really fast? Nuke GPL.

Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense some of the worst people on earth will come up with. Before we abolish copyright, we should wait until Larry Ellison dies just to be safe.

> Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda,

If LLM overlords were to stomp on copyright just to train their model, i would be happy, even if it's their doing.

From the mention of LLMs I guess he means software copyright. But then refers to takedowns, which I don't see much of in the copyright space.

And possibly he's confusing copyright with patents?

For software, copyright I the only thing that protects Free Software. Without it GPL would not exist, and all GPL software could be used wherever without releasing sources.

Copyright most certainly protects small business against big business. It is the model on which most small software businesses are built.

Patents are bad, and if you replace the term "cooyright" with patent in the original article it makes more sense. But to be fair it's hard to put much credibility into a post that doesn't even understand that difference.