Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/fuck/[email protected]/t/3317969
Court records show that NVIDIA executives allegedly authorized the use of millions of pirated books from Anna’s Archive to fuel its AI training.
Copyright needs to be shorter for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones would be that if copyright was a reasonable length (15 to 30 years), this would all be a moot point and everyone could use books from within a recent timeframe for any kind of use, including AI training.
Further, this would make it feel a lot less hypocritical like piracy is okay for giant corporations and their products as long as they make oodles of money but piracy for regular people is still bad. I mean for fucks sake they put the guys from The Pirate Bay in prison for less, under the same argument: that they were profiting off of pirated works, just like AI companies are. Yet somehow it’s totes okay for OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Meta, and Twitter, and they’re not being sent to prison over it. It really re-enforces the feeling that there’s two justice systems, one for the obscenely rich where as long as they make crazy profit they can do whatever the fuck they want, and one for the poor where they get fucked six ways to Sunday for doing on a small, individual level what giant corporations do at industrial scale.
The solution is to fix copyright and make more works public domain and then nobody is going to prison and nobody is getting a free pass over what’s considered illegal for others.
I actually don’t understand your reasoning here… What have you made in your life that leads you to think that copyright should be limited at all? Have you never written a story? Composed or recorded a song? Drawn a picture or taken a photograph? Written some computer code?
I’ve done all of these things, and I don’t see any logic in the idea that I shouldn’t have exclusive legal rights over a work that I’ve created throughout my lifetime, at the very least. I write a song and I only get 15 years to perform and sell it? I paint an illustration and I only get 15 years to prevent other people from drop-shipping t-shirts and posters of it on Amazon?
Copyright exists, in theory, to protect the original creators of works. Whether it does a good job of that or not is a secondary point. It seems that you’re essentially arguing that artists should have less rights, power and value simply to justify piracy. No offense, but this strikes me as the argument of a consumer trying to justify piracy, with zero consideration of protecting writers, artists, musicians, and other creators of “intellectual property”.
Indeed, one solution to corporations getting away with breaking the law is to make the law more lax for everyone. But another (much more preferable) solution is to simply enforce the laws equally and take action to protect creators.
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
The research has been done, and speaks for itself.
The more I think about how to fix copyright, the more I wonder whether we really need copyright.
I mean, think about it, the original idea behind copyright is to protect the small guy who creates media and wants to sell it from companies that might want to sell it themselves. Well, it’s not working whatsoever. The small guy gets pennies on the dollar, while the big companies rake in the profits.
So honestly, let’s just abolish copyright altogether and work on more of a donation base (that actually gets to the artists, since they control it) which is already being used with video a lot, and to ensure that artists can afford the necessities, add universal basic inco… OK shit I’m at it again.
See, I think copyright has value, I think it has just lost sight of its original goals and intentions because corporations (which never die) have vested interest in copyright being as long as possible.
According to the research of Rufus Pollock, optimal copyright term is between 15 and 38 years. This provides a range that the majority of copyright holders will make the majority of their income from copyright on, while also promoting the originals goals of copyright which was to allow artists to support themselves while also promoting creation of new media. The majority of copyrighted works only have a real shelf-life of 15 to 38 years before people aren’t really looking to pay for them, so why should we have copyright that exists beyond that when most will have already made all the profit they will ever make from their works within that timeframe.
I personally think UBI is a pretty weak replacement for copyright. UBI shouldn’t wholesale replace markets but rather be a safety net for people who are struggling and need a basic amount of support to reasonably survive.
The more I think about how to fix copyright, the more I wonder whether we really need copyright.
Are you think about this from the standpoint of a creator? Have you written anything? Have you composed or recorded a song? Have you drawn or painted a picture? Taken an artistic photo? Even written some source code?
Or are you simply looking at copyright from the perspective of a consumer, who sees it as little more than an inconvenience to your access to free media? (I understand the populism of this, because consumers always outnumber creators, and we all like having the power to pirate media in an economy where so much is becoming unaffordable to us.)
I mean, think about it, the original idea behind copyright is to protect the small guy who creates media and wants to sell it from companies that might want to sell it themselves. Well, it’s not working whatsoever. The small guy gets pennies on the dollar, while the big companies rake in the profits.
The original idea of copyright was that if you write a story (for example), you exclusively own it, and thus do not have to compete for the ability to print and sell it. This was meant to be a real solution to a real problem at the dawn of industrialization; how can the person who writes a story compete with a person who owns a printing press?
Sure, we can argue that the publisher still often wins today, because artists are so BROKE and desperate for cash that they will too often agree to a contract with bad terms. (See Spotify, for just one of many examples.) But without copyright, the writer loses and the printing company wins 100% of the time. The author would have zero ability to capitalize of their work, and the entity with the largest printing press would be unbeatable in the free market.
If AI is going to be treated like a printing press, artists should be protected from it like they were protected from the printing press. That demands stronger copyright laws, not weaker ones.
So honestly, let’s just abolish copyright altogether and work on more of a donation base (that actually gets to the artists, since they control it) which is already being used with video a lot, and to ensure that artists can afford the necessities, add universal basic inco… OK shit I’m at it again.
As an artist myself, I’m tired of hearing non-artists propose solutions in which artists can only “afford the necessities” while billionaire tech bros hoard 99.9% of the wealth for themselves. Whether it’s some kind of social safety net or UBI, what you’re proposing amounts to little more than an allowance or table scraps from society, for the people who do what I think is the important work of creating large parts of human culture. Promising creative people a meager future in which they scrape by on only the bare minimum needed to survive is not the glamorous sales pitch that some people seem to think it is…
Why is the prescription a society where creative people are the only ones who can’t capitalize on their creations?
If we are to abolish intellectual property, we might as well abolish all property (including land, patents and money as well) because then at least everybody is in the same boat. But if we do so, we’d better be careful to make sure that we aren’t simply giving the federal government (and the shitheads who run it) even more power and control over everything. A society like that would need a MUCH stronger Bill of Rights, and one that is actually enforced.
The small guy gets pennies on the dollar, while the big companies rake in the profits. So honestly, let’s just abolish copyright altogether
Or we could not do that and actually solve the problem that causes those kind of splits…
and to ensure that artists can afford the necessities, add universal basic inco… OK shit I’m at it again.
It’s “funny” how it always seems to come down to
thispeople shouldn’t need to make someone else richer just to survive…I think it’s simple, just make copyright non-transferable. Someone can sign a contract to distribute your works but can never own the rights to them. You can’t pass them to anyone when you die, they go to the public domain.
The problem with that is the rash of deaths of people with copyright over desirable content.
And this isn’t just speculative.
Fair point
Exactly. This is why you can’t tie property ownership to life and death, because then you’re simply creating a business incentive to seeing that people with valuable property die.
So to solve that, instead of tying the property to a specific person’s lifetime, you tie it to a generic estimation of human lifetime (say 80-110 years, optimistically), and that brings us right back to where we are.
Could you link a or the source?
The post links an image, and the description links a page with a login screen.
This is probably supposed to be a link to this: https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contacted-annas-archive-to-secure-access-to-millions-of-pirated-books/
There are a few communities where that link was posted correctly: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/53133358
Sorry. I’m not sure what happened here. I thought I copied the link last night, and it seems to work for me when I click it now. Maybe a mod fixed it.
