[belter]

Maybe a specific example will help here. An Author spends a year writing a technical book, researching subtle technical issues, creating original code and finding novel ways of explaining difficult abstractions.

A few weeks after the release it finds books on Amazon who plagiarized the book. Finds copies of the book available for free from Russian sites, and ChatGPT spitting verbatim parts of the source code on the book.

Which parts of copyright law would you say are out of date for the example above?

[ndsipa_pomu]

> Which parts of copyright law would you say are out of date for the example above?

The expectation that the author will get life+70 years of protection and income, when technical publications are very rarely still relevant after 5 years. Also, the modern ease of copying/distribution makes it almost impossible for the author to even locate which people to try to prosecute.

[CaptainFever]

The expectation to make money from artificially restricting an abundant resource. While copyright is a way to create funding, it also massively harms society by restricting future creators from being able to freely reuse previous works. Modern ways to deal with this are patronage, government funding, foundations (e.g. NLNet) and crowdfunding.

Also, plagiarism has nothing to do with copyright. It has to do with attribution. This is easily proven: you can plagiarise Beethoven's music even though it's public domain.

https://questioncopyright.org/minute-memes-credit-is-due