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.

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.

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'

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?

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.

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.

Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.

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.

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.

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

(2) This probably led to an proliferation of authors and new works, motivated by the prospect of royalties. In some cases, it enabled talented authors who would otherwise languish in obscurity. In other cases, it produced works of little value beyond revenue generation, by catering to whatever immediate demands for consumption that existed in the market.

(3) Obviously, intellectual pursuits, invention, creative writing, art all existed before the 1700. But as per (2), it probably greatly accelerated them, while also diluting quality.

(4) Mass production and distribution led to economies of scale, which meant a larger portion of the population now had access to such works.

If these four propositions are true, then it follows that abolishing (or severely curtailing) copyright will not outright eliminate any creative human output, but will probably mean that as a whole, humanity will take longer to produce the same output. Since the cost of production and distribution of digital media is now a negligible fraction of the cost of the creation process, this is unlikely to negatively impact availability.

Given that the world could probably afford to slow down a bit, perhaps some sort of curtailment of exclusive ownership of intellectual output might be a good thing.

Instead, shorten the length to 25 years or so. We simply need copyright to not be extreme. And zero years is still extreme.

I think what doesn't work is a massive, blanket term applied across all works. The situation we have currently is a handful of extremely valuable works which get milked for decades and decades, and huge bulk of material which is left to rot into obscurity because it is untouchable under current copyright law.

I have experience of this with a project I run collating historic material on climbing and mountaineering: pre-internet a lot of the discourse happened in magazines, and this discourse is generally pretty hard to get your hands on. You need to track down physical copies of obscures mags that have been mouldering away in someone's attic for the last 40 years. If you talk to the authors of the content in these magazines, none of them are bothered about trying to make money of 500 words of copy they wrote 40 years ago, but because of the current massive copyright terms this stuff will not become public domain for 80-90 years in many cases, by which time I am sure finding physical copies of this material will be very difficult.

I would like to see a much more limited term by default (20 years from publication perhaps?) which still gives an author plenty of time to capitalise on their work. I think it should then be possible to renew your copyright claim (every 10 years say?) but at an increasingly high cost. £250 the first time, £500 second time, £1000 third time etc. This would mean the bulk of material would fall out of copyright on a much shorter timescale, while if you happen to have made something popular and you want to keep benefiting then you can up to a point.

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

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

I'd never expected to see commercial entities with a lot of money and political/military connections depending on the weakening of copyright for survival.

For now, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobb...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

The "Abolish copyright!" and "Abolish intellectual property!" memes are quite old themselves. But those repeating them never explain how the world would work without copyrights. The meme has been repeated endlessly for the last thirty years but I haven't seen anyone present a vision for how things would work without copyrights; maybe I missed it

As it happens, we know how things would work without software copyright. We only have to look at hobbyist programming in the 1970's

For example, in a world without copyright law it's possible that

There would be no more Microsoft Windows or MacOS. Anyone could copy that software without risk of being sued

There would be no more enforceable "copyleft" licenses, e.g., GNU licenses. Online debates about open source software licenses and public domain software, e.g., SQLite, djb, would be pointless. "Your" software is now everyone's software and vice versa

There would be no more enforceable "website terms of service" because "your" website is now everyone's website and vice versa. Anyone can copy anything

Beyond software copyright, consider "your" submissions to www sites

"Your content" would now be everyone's content and vice versa. Anyone could copy anyone else's work without permission, including "big corporations"

For example, in the Mastodon terms of service, users grant the Mastodon GmbH company a license to use their content. Without copyright law, this license would not be necessary

https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/terms_of_service

But it would not be necessary for "big corporations" to obtain a license from users either

NB. The meme I'm referring to is not "modify copyright". It is "_abolish_ copyright". Quite a difference

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.

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.

Copyright does far more harm than good and should be abolished. It doesn't protect the livelihood of individuals and small businesses in practice. Instead, it's a weapon wielded by large corporations to protect their monopolies. It's abused to take down content that's not in violation of copyright and to restrict people being able to use/repair/modify/backup their property. Large corporations getting special exceptions from it didn't start with LLMs.

I agree that copyright should be abolished, and have said such thing in the past, and other people have said such things too. These are some of the significant problems with it, but not necessarily the only problems. Even if there are some cases where it is beneficial, I think that they would generally work better if copyright were abolished and then such cases would become unnecessary.

Patents should also be abolished.

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.

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.

So, which one is it?

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.

It has to be said basically every time one of these things comes up here.

The U.S is also connected via lots of treaties regarding copyright. Essentially to do any of the things that are always suggested about copyright in these threads you would need to violate all those treaties. Good news that Trump is President I guess, because there's a real shot.

While I agree that many of the problems of Copyright, especially from the American view, is its length, that is not all of them. The DMCA is not at fault for the length of copyright, and it is one of the main sources of copyright problems nowadays.

When discussing the solutions to lengths of copyright, which I've noticed here go down to as little as a couple of years, it's instructive to consider the cases of outliers such as Peter Beagle and the years he had to spend to get the rights to earn money on his book https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-sad-strange-legal-battle...

Obviously you can create a law to handle these situations, but the fact is he has spent much of his life not earning from that book. Someone will probably make the observation that outliers are not a good source for structuring laws but that's in cases for example where you are making laws regarding trade or similar things, and then the outliers have to lump it, but if you are making laws about rights you should consider the outliers.

Of course the American conception does not have copyright as a right, whereas the European conception does, so it is unlikely that if the U.S shortened the term of copyright that the EU would go along, and essentially everyone would have to still keep to the EU rules for anything they sold there. So if you wanted to make use of EU copyrighted material you would essentially not be able to make money in that market, meaning it isn't going to happen if you're in the business of making money.

Furthermore if you are a big moneymaking entity with copyrighted stuff and some of your stuff is in parts of the world with longer copyright terms than the U.S, then, depending on how your business is structured it might totally be possible to sue and get all the money made in the U.S for what the local courts consider copyright infringement, so if you're a big moneymaking entity you will not be doing any business with the stuff making use of things still in copyright in longer copyright terms of the world.

Normally when I read HN it is refreshingly non-parochial, and knowledgeable about the world, but when copyright comes up, it is not that.

Let us now go back to the DMCA and similar things that effect how copyright is policed as opposed to how long it is.

I think here Beagle is instructive, although I can also find other authors. One of the reasons for the creation of copyright is so that people do not get ripped off (that is to say in America, to foster innovation you allow people to profit from it, and make it so that it is criminal for various people to profit from your work). If they have copyright for all their lives if they get ripped off they can probably recoup their losses etc.

However as HN readership is generally aware, the ease with which one does DMCA takedowns etc. means that the people who have made something and own the copyright have a hard time getting their rights enforced against people who are taking advantage and screwing them over.

Personally I would expect if copyright were shortened to a really short period of time that, much as was the case before copyright even existed, people would run around creating fake versions of things and selling them, and people who control distribution channels would try to screw those who had the copyright out of any money for the few years in which they had to pay the money and then it would be a free for all.

Why do I expect this? Because there is already a lot of screwing of people over who make things, if you only had to worry about them for a couple of years think how easy it is to screw someone over and delay paying for a couple years and then having to pay is gone and you restructure some stuff and yippee you keep all the money!!

It would be the greatest theft of human labor since slavery.

If we switch to a communist system with UBI, then that might be acceptable. Otherwise not. You can't arbitrarily abolish laws as soon as they become inconvenient to capital.

Also, there could be an excemption for LLM training purposes.

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.