Comment on Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly OK to steal content if it’s on the open web
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 months agoI’m not in favor of piracy or LLMs. I’m also not a fan of copyright as it exists today (I think we should go back to the 1790 US definition of copyright).
masterspace@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
The problem with copyright has nothing to do with terms limits. Those exacerbate the problem, but the fundamental problem with copyright and IP law is that it is a system of artificial scarcity where there is no need for one.
Rather than reward creators when their information is used, we hamfistedly try and prevent others from using that information so that people have to pay them to use it sometimes.
Capitalism is flat out the wrong system for distributing digital information, because as soon as information is digitized it is effectively infinitely abundant which sends its value to $0.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Copyright is not a capitalist idea, it’s collectivist. See copyright in the Soviet Union, the initial bill of which was passed in 1925, right near the start of the USSR.
A pure capitalist system would have no copyright, and works would instead be protected through exclusivity (I.e. paywalls) and DRM. Copyright is intended to promote sharing by providing a period of exclusivity (temporary monopoly on a work). Whether it achieves those goals is certainly up for debate.
Long terms go against any benefit to society that copyright might have. I think it does have a benefit, but that benefit is pretty limited and should probably only last 10-15 years. I think eliminating copyright entirely would leave most people worse off and probably mostly benefit large orgs that can afford expensive DRM schemes in much the same way that our current copyright duration disproportionately benefits large orgs.