[sk0g]

With no copyright and intellectual property knowledge wouldn't be free, it simply would cease to be generated. If you can't profit (at least modestly) from your work, there's no incentive to perform that work.

Lots of things sound good in a perfect world, but we don't live in one.

[toyg]

Music composers existed before music sheets were copyrightable - and that was what copyright was invented for...

Without copyright, some business models would have to change, but to say that knowledge "would not be generated" is simply false.

[sk0g]

I was responding to an obvious exaggeration in kind, which was a bad move on my part.

Yes people can and will still continue to do stuff for the sake of it. Some of it will be amazing. The huge things like building the next 5 CPU generations though, is that going to be practical? Who will fund that, and why?

Trying not to get political but the end of copyright feels like communism to me. No private property and all that. While I didn't live through it myself, the associated trauma WRT the USSR certainly left some deep scars that people still haven't healed from.

In any case, if -- and it's a big if -- AI continues to develop at the current rate, a solution like UBI will have to be seriously considered. Economies probably don't function when people don't create value, earn, or spend.

[toyg]

There is some confusion between copyright and patents here. Copyright forbids transmission of knowledge; patents forbid manufacturing. The incentives to manufacture CPUs would still be there if copyright were to be abolished, because patents would still work.

What AI demolishes is the pretense that human art is rare and precious, a scarce resource to channel through forced rivers in order to make money.

What machine-learning will probably result in, is a U-turn from the "knowledge economy", based on gatekeeping information, back into manufacturing-oriented systems, based on actually making stuff.

[meiraleal]

> With no copyright and intellectual property knowledge wouldn't be free, it simply would cease to be generated. If you can't profit (at least modestly) from your work, there's no incentive to perform that work.

A certain group of people would stop creating content while a new bigger cohort would start, I'm sure it would be a societal gain.

[sk0g]

See my other comment for a more expanded take, but let's go with Intel for example. If they had to do all work out in the open, and share all progress they make, all they could compete on would be timing and pricing.

Pricing isn't going to be something they are likely to win on, and the timing is either time to market, or time to release IP. For the former, why buy i9 for $1000 when you can be an Indian alternative for $500 in, let's say, 6 months? For the latter, if companies can release findings after some fuzzy period like "when the prototypes have been validated," that's still IP but with a timed secrecy.

[yorwba]

I bet you didn't even get paid for writing this comment.

[sk0g]

I would contribute to a lot of open source projects if it took a few minutes at a time. Working full-time hours over many years is a different question however.