[pardoned_turkey]

Oh come on. Copyright is a fairly ancient concept that benefits normal people as much as it benefits big corporations. Most book authors, songwriters, and so on aren't fat cats, and they would be harmed if we had zero protections for the duplication of their work. They'd need to depend on state sponsorship or charitable private patronage, both of which are problematic for obvious reasons and limit the range of artistic expression more than the market does.

Instead, we came up with a system where you can actually derive fairly steady revenue by creating new works and sharing them with the world. And critically, I think you misinterpret it as calling dibs on shared culture or on stories. Copyright is usually interpreted fairly narrowly, and doesn't prevent you from creating inspired works, or retelling the same story in your own words.

Generative AI is a problem largely because it destroys these revenue streams for millions of people. Yeah, it will be litigated by wealthy corporations with top-notch lawyers, for self-interested reasons. But if we end up with a framework that maintains financial incentives to artistic expression, it's probably a good thing.

[shkkmo]

This is full of so many inaccuracies.

> Copyright is a fairly ancient concept

The idea is fairly old, but it's current implementation in law is not nearly that old.

> that benefits normal people as much as it benefits big corporations

Clearly false if you measure that benefit in monetary terms.

> Copyright is usually interpreted fairly narrowly, and doesn't prevent you from creating inspired works, or retelling the same story in your own words.

Absolutely false. You can absolutely be stopped from retelling copyrighted fictional stories. You can even be stopped from telling new stories with derivative characters or settings.

> Generative AI is a problem largely because it destroys these revenue streams for millions of people.

How? The restrictions on selling images of Mickey Mouse exist regarless of if they were created with or without AI assistance.

> But if we end up with a framework that maintains financial incentives to artistic expression, it's probably a good thing.

We already have that framework and arguably it is already far more restrictive than it needs to be to maintain incentives for artistic creation. Indeed, these rules now often limit new artistic expression or prevent artists from monetizing their creations.

The types of art that are helped the most today by the copyright laws of tosay are the kinds that require large budgets to produce. The types of art that are most hurt are those produced by fans who want to build new things upon the narratives in our shared culture.

We need to shorten copyright durations and expand fair use protections and monetization options for derivative works. We don't need to make copyright even more powerful than it already is.

Edit: If you disagree, I'd be curious to hear your answer to this question. A character like Harry Potter is so widely known that it is now a ubiquitous part of our culture. To incentive new novels, what is the minimum duration we need to give J K Rowling control of who is allowed to write stories about this cultural touchstone?

[ben_w]

> How? The restrictions on selling images of Mickey Mouse exist regarless of if they were created with or without AI assistance.

Scale.

GenAI automates creation of things that are derived from but strictly aren't the same as the original content; as it's (currently) not possible to automate the detection of derivative works (which is something copyright is supposed to be about), this means actual humans have to look at each case, and that's expensive and time consuming and O(n*m) on n new works that have to be compared against m existing in-copyright works for infringement.

I also think copyright is too long, FWIW; but the way most people discuss arts, I think humans can be grouped into "I just want nice stuff" and "I want to show off how cultured I am", and the latter will never accept GenAI even if it's an upload of the brain of their favourite artist, simply because when it becomes easy it loses value. I'm in camp "nice stuff".

[intended]

I feel this is true for the internet. I do not find scale being a valid defensive aspect for copyright here.

For that matter, Photoshop has made art creation so easy, that we dont need GenAI to be swiming in more copyright infringement than we know what to do with.

There is absurd amounts of content being created, no human will ever be able to see it all.

Copyright will continue to work - if someone creates a rip off so popular that it becomes an issue for copyright holders, the DMCA and the rest of the tools they forced into the fabric of the net still exist.

A few steps furhter down this argument, you get back to deep packet inspection, and the rest of the copyright wars which ended up making life worse.

[ben_w]

The internet is a lesser example, but yes, it is also true for a million fans posting their own fan art.

Arm those million fans with GenAI instead of pen and paper and MS Paint, and it gets more extreme.

But I disagree WRT Photoshop; that takes much more effort to get anything close to what GenAI can do, and (sans piracy) is too expensive for amateurs. Even the cheaper alternatives take a lot of effort to get passable results that take tens of seconds with GenAI.

[shkkmo]

> Arm those million fans with GenAI instead of pen and paper and MS Paint, and it gets more extreme

"More extreme" is not an explanation of how the change in scale matters here.

Indeed, what I would argue is there is no fundamental change in scale. Digital reproduction plus the internet already caused the change in scale. We already had the capacity for anyone to produce fan art and publish it or reproduce existing work and publish that. What has changed is not a question on quantity, but one of quality. Those fan artists now have tools so thay even the lower skilled artists can produce higher quality work.

Indeed, this is the real threat to artists from generative AI. Narrowing that skill gap is understandably threatening to those who make money with their artistic skills. I think trying to restrict the development of this technology is a losing battle. I think trying to do so by expanding the powers granted by copyright will exentuate the existing flaws with our modern copyright laws.

Instead, I'd prefer to solve that problem by reducing the strength of copyright. If we make AI generated or derived works un-copyrightable than companies that want to own copyright on their content will have to keep paying people to create it.

[shkkmo]

> actual humans have to look at each case, and that's expensive and time consuming and O(n*m) on n new works that have to be compared against m existing in-copyright works for infringement.

That scale already exists. The amount of community generated derivative works already dwarfs the capacity of copyright holders to review each piece. The ease of publishing reproductions already makes endorcement a question of priorizing the larger infringers and ignoring those with no reach.

Indeed, prohibitions of training on copyrighted work without a special license seem like they make it harder to develop the sorts of AI can detect derivitave works.

As case law makes clear that people running the prompts and picking the output to keep are liable for infrinent then there will be demand for tools to detect derivitave works and either filter or warn the user.

[fulafel]

What kind of support is there for the hypothesis that our current copyright system is close to ideal in incentivising production of new works? It seems to me that there's a very strong "winner takes all" distribution and we could be a better culture if we had a system that took some of the opulent resources poured into to star wars franchise, rehashed murder simulators and tiktok and distributed it to some poor artists whose worthiness was decided in some other way than being a mass market best seller.

[therealdrag0]

What had been proposed that would help with that?

Winner takes all is a function of popularity and network effects; how does it relate to copyright?

[fulafel]

> What had been proposed that would help with that?

It's a big question, and I'm not really familiar with the latest thinking of the copyright regime critics & reformists. Off the top of my head, some of the policy tools used in other similar regulation scenarios, where the aim has been to cap the windfalls for network effect winners, have been to install some kind of cross-subsidization / income transfer mechanism, for example to require media to carry a certain share of legislator decided content categories. Rolling back some of the copyright, patent etc extensions favouring IPR capital over creators and consumers is a boring but obvious policy action as well.

> Winner takes all is a function of popularity and network effects; how does it relate to copyright?

I don't know how to succintly answer this, it seems obvious to me so I'd have to spell out a lot of things about those 4 concepts and their interplay. But consider eg the negotiating position of an garage songmaker vs Spotify or book author vs Amazon and reflect on how the concepts relate there.