this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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is excellent news! But, to be fair, why shouldn't everything be in the public domain? AI makes objects 'inspired' by everything it has 'ingested', but so do human creators on a smaller scale. Copyright almost always only benefits big profits and corporations. I think people should be able to make a decent living from their work and their ideas, but I'm not convinced that copyright really helps to achieve that.
Small creator: I made a cool thing!
Big corporation: we made a cool thing :)
To give an example, if all books were automatically public domain HBO could have created Game of Thrones without paying George R.R. Martin a single cent for it, then publish and sell "Game of Thrones: The Book", aka the entire Song of Ice and Fire series, again without paying him anything and stealing all of his profit in the process.
So could anyone and everyone all at once. In a copyrightless scenario, the sheer force of the creative effluence would drown out the power of HBO.
It is the artificial monopoly that can be sold via copyright licenses that generates the massive profits for these media tycoons in the first place.
But there would be no-one to do so. In a copyrightless world George R.R Martin would need to have another job to pay the bills and wouldn't be able to dedicate his time for writing, and HBO or anyone else pouring massive amounts of money to create shows also wouldn't be able to exist as they would gain no profit from what they do as their creations would also be in the public domain. Unless you live in an utopia with universal income and replicators that completely eradicate any need for money or ownership of anything, copyright itself as a concept is vital, the issue is just how corrupted the current system has become - which is mostly due to the greed of Disney.
The principle behind copyright is to protect creators for a time so that they can profit off their creations for a time period before the creation becomes public domain. This is intended to inspire people to create new things. Imagine you create an amazing new thing, let's say you've invented a brand new method of compressing/transmitting data. In a world without copyright, you will not make a dime off of your invention. Every tech company out there will take your idea, incorporate it into their systems and make bank off it. As a small time inventor, you will not have the ability to compete with them. Copyright forces them to pay you to use your technology. Others will see you profiting from your own creation and be inspired to create their own works.
Sadly, the system, like so many others, has been corrupted. Copyright was supposed to protect the creator for 14 years with the ability to renew it once. After that, anyone would be allowed to use it. Copyright was also intended to protect the inventor of an idea, not corporations. Companies now use the copyright process like a sledge hammer to keep all profits to themselves. Using massive amounts of money and armies of lawyers, they have completely twisted copyright laws to their own benefit. Creating loopholes to allow copyright to last essentially forever and even going so far as claiming ownership of ideas created by employees, the very people that copyright was originally supposed to protect.
The idea of copyrighting works to protect and inspire inventors and authors is noble but, like everything else, the implementation has been corrupted by the greedy and power-hungry.
You are confusing copyright with patents.
Both have similar purpose, although radically different implementations
Ultimately, it's because the human creators need to eat and take longer to do what they do. If they are uniquely able to create something valued, then we want to afford them some protections so that they can keep doing that value.
For AI works, the effort is trivial (and frankly, the output is very much uninspired, but there are places for that). So there's no connection between human labor hours and the content, and therefore no reason we should prioritize protecting it.
On the stance of whether copyright helps achieve that, if you simply remove copyright without an alternate system, then the creators get nothing at all once a single copy of their work is made available for free. It was bad enough when works had to be printed/manufactured, in the digital context duplicates are perfect and essentially free. Straightforward enough case on perfect duplication, but then it gets rough on "derivative works". You include something created by another person but contribute your own thing and make it new, well, you clearly derived some value from the inspiring works but clearly also created your own value, and that's so subjective. Finally you have the terms of copyright, which seem crazy long, and could stand to be shortened.