It's a one-way street with AI companies though, they are against IP protection for training data but support IP protection for the product of that training. Read the TOS/license of nearly any big model and it's clear the creator considers it and its output to be their IP and they will fight to restrict how you can use it for commercial purposes or training competing models, because those being a free-for-all would get in the way of their business model.
In practice it's less "abolishing intellectual property" and more "transmuting everyone else's IP into their own IP so they can be the ultimate IP landlords".
Sure. And I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. Micr.. OpenAI can manage to brib.. convince a judge to make government to enforce this by force.
But how ML is at least currently developing, other megacorporations and universities are only a year or so behind OpenAI etc, and publishing their weights and models. Of course disregarding training set IP because otherwise keeping up would be impossible.
If the media and advertising megacorporations manage to get a ban on training on IP material, Micr.. OpenAI would be a huge benefactor, as they could afford some weird licensing deal on everybody's data and the actual open efforts would be extinguished.
Luckily US hegemony is fading and many other powers DGAF anymore what a US judge says. Or a WTO judge, because USA kind of destroyed WTO themselves already.
Unless the entity they're taking from can defend themselves in court. Just ask Copilot to generate an image in the style of AI hater Tim Burton and you'll get a ToS wrong-think violation. So really it is just for taking from small fries.
Intellectual property in the form of trademarks is generally good for consumers, you don't want a new database product to be called Postgres despite no association with the developers of PostgreSQL.
Intellectual property in the form of patents and copyrights is often harmful for consumers. In music, academia and mechanical engineering it's clearly been harmful in slowing the spread of innovation. It sucks to wait 20 years for a new excellent new dishwasher tray shape.
If you think for more than a few seconds on the matter, you quickly realise that intellectual property is a moral necessity, because intellectual expropriation (which is what you are really talking about) would destroy a major incentive for positive contributions to society.
Everything political is rooted in morality, and while it is easy to point out political challenges on the topic, intellectual property is ethically an unambiguously good concept.
Most of the great art was created in a world without intellectual property, or with no effective IP enforcement on that art.
While I don’t think all IP should be abolished, I think in general there is too much of it, protected for too long, and society would be better off getting rid of patents and dramatically downsizing copyright to at most a few decades of protection.
(And yes I have thought a lot on this matter. The evidence behind patents being overall beneficial is weak, and there is no effective societal argument for the current copyright terms.)
I tend to agree with your takeaway, but I want to pick a nit on your point about great art being made without copyright.
"The Most Powerful Idea in the World" basically makes the case that intellectual property is what enabled the Industrial Revolution. I won't try to summarize or defend the entire thing here, but I think it makes a very compelling case that the notion of "owning ideas as property" was the thing that made Britain unique (among other factors of course) and led to runaway technological explosion. It points out how in earlier times, inventors were literally killed for coming up with better methods that threatened some established system. So there is a big difference between art and technology there, and while I think debating the merits of copyright as it pertains to art is valid (and 100% agree it's overdone in our current system), I'm not convinced the current issues are serious enough to undermine the entire concept of intellectual property.
Most creators work for hire and the company owns the IP. Anecdote: I can't remember the song written on a bus and sold to the record company for $250 to keep food on the table that has earnt billions for Warner, Sony, or Universal Music. Nothing more for the creator.
Big company stealing from another big company to benefit the rest of us? Seems like fair use. Nothing to do with creators.
That incentive was meant to be something like 20 years (same as patents) not almost "forever" like the Mouse wants who expropriated from all of those European folktales and sanitised them.
No incentive if you live off the earnings of a "one-hit wonder".
And without any form of copyright it would have gone "hey $RECORD_COMPANY here's this cool jingle I made" and they'd say "yeah we think so too, we'll use that and compensate you $0."
I have thought on the matter for millions of seconds.
Politics and economics don't have anything to do with morality. It's about power. The moral fairytailes are there to justify whatever the state of affairs are. When these change, new fairytales justifying them will be adopted.
If right to property is a God given right, why the hell I as a atheist should give a damn?
And if your argument ("... god given ... atheist ... etc.) can be copy-pasted into a valid defence of arbitrary evil (I like to use Hitler for a concrete example, but avoid it in public because some subset of people erroneously thinks that is an automatic fallacy), then it is trivial in the sense that it doesn't add anything to the discussion, regardless of your opinion or pov.
"Natural" rights are clearly a social construction, and indeed largely the same thing that was theologically justified with God.
They were literally just invented few hundred years ago. And have even changed since then (owning another human being was somehow a natural/god given right). Humans have organized (and keep on organizing) without any such conception for at least tens of thousands of years, but suddenly its natural?
Who is the absolute arbiter of "evil"? USA of course holds itself as a force for good, and e.g. islamism as evil. Islamists do the opposite. Very rarely anybody thinks themselves as evil, but readily point out evil in others.
This is in no way to support islamism, or USA. Just that morality is just mostly an arbtrary justification for whatever somebody wants to or doesn't want to get done.
We can discuss the merits and shortcomings of e.g. ownership based on its societal consequences just fine without conjuring metaphysics.
> If right to property is a God given right, why the hell I as a atheist should give a damn?
You can argue it from political necessity.
Some kind of property rights are necessary for the operation of any social group. Even in a communist society you can't have the air force stealing land from the navy, or the transport department taking electricity from hospitals, or neighbours taking each others food allocations.
There needs to be some kind of organised transfer of property or you get chaos.
You can argue divine right of kings or white supremacy from political necessity.
Some kind of systems to allocate scarce resources is needed. This doesn't have to be property. Access to e.g. the moon and earth's orbits and international waters and polar regions have systems of allocation, but they are not property.
> You can argue divine right of kings or white supremacy from political necessity.
Those arguments can be incorrect without entailing all arguments from political necessity are false.
I can incorrectly argue a justification of the flat earth theory from physics - but that would discredit my own intellect rather than the subject of physics.
> Some kind of systems to allocate scarce resources is needed. This doesn't have to be property.
I agree not everything has to be property, but some things must.
Essentially anything that's both important and "stealable" needs to be protected by property rights of some kind.
Regardless of how your food and water come into your possession (trade, charity, gov allocation), it's necessary that some of it remains in your possession for you to consume.
> Those arguments can be incorrect without entailing all arguments from political necessity are false.
> I can incorrectly argue a justification of the flat earth theory from physics - but that would discredit my own intellect rather than the subject of physics.
Do you mean the right to (certain very specific form of) property is somehow an empirically shown fact like the geometry of the earth?
Am I right in guessing that you have inclination towards praxeology?
> I agree not everything has to be property, but some things must.
Why do some things must? Because it leads to more desirable consequences than other options, or because it is some metaphysical truth you're somehow privy to?
The first kind of argument is fine, the latter is just blunt rhetorics. I don't see why the former should be spoiled with the latter.
> Some kind of systems to allocate scarce resources is needed. This doesn't have to be property.
I should not be coerced to give output of my labor (whether physical or mental) to others based on some burocrat’s allocation system or my neighbor’s wishes. That would be immoral.
Per your morality perhaps. But morality is just an opinion, and one that can't be justified otherwise.
I should not be coerced not to enter a piece of land just because somebody made a contract with somebody who killed or evicted by force the people (and other animals) who previously inhabited the land. That would be immoral, right?
Ideally there would other ways than economical to facilitate production of intellectual goods. Ownership economies are exceptionally bad in non-scarce resources.
There are some alternative and less destructive ways to handle the economy already in place. Academic institutions generally don't claim or enforce IP (paywalls are more a corporate than academic thing). Many library systems pay authors (notably not the publishers) for each loan from public funds. Open source software is funded via services (and increasingly with ads, which is not necessarily great).
State enforced monopoly on ideas or lumps of matter isn't the only way of structuring the economy. Alternatives haven't been discussed in 30 or so years, so it's understandable that many have hard time even conceptualizing such.
Is IP on names also a huge drag? Would it be beneficial to the mankind if I—or anyone—were able to just make their own Linux or Nginx, with no relation to the group that originally made it?
Arguably "first come, first serve" policy on names per domain is a good one and serves to reduce confusion.
Monopoly on usage of a name not so much, although how it is implemented (or enforced) has substantial problems too. Companies regularly hijack commonly used words as "property" and/or push their monopolized names to the general vocabulary (e.g. iPhone, iPad, App Store, Googling, Kleenex, Xerox) especially in the USA and then literally police how people can use the words.
Yes, they should lose the "property" if they do so, but in practice they lose it decades too late if even then.
Also trademarks being sellable means that at any moment the product with a trademark can have nothing to do with the original holder, partly defeating the rationale.
I agree but in the mean time, stealing from millions of artists and writers to build systems with the goal of replacing them is incredibly shitty.
If we lived in an economic system where people don't starve or lose their house when they don't have a job then I wouldn't care. Until then, OpenAI and its ilk are looters.
No. AI firms are a good example of precisely why copyright was put in place.
Right now, AI is taking people's original works and rehashing them in a way that directly competes with the original work. Some AI firms (e.g. perplexity) just have their LLMs paraphrase the work lightly.
This is a problem because it drives original work out of business. Even setting aside matters of originality, artistic value, and AI being vapid slop:
Gen-AI is and will remain a derivative work that is reliant on original human-made work
ChatGPT is not going to do investigative journalism. If we let AI push all journalists into bankruptcy, the news just becomes an endless sewer of PR statements recycled into AI slop.
If you don't want Google's woke "diverse nazis" to push real news into bankruptcy, copyright is needed to stop them.
We should find new ways to fund essential services like journalism and the arts, rather than artificially crimping the possibilities of new technology in order to get a half-assed solution under the current paradigm.
In practice it's less "abolishing intellectual property" and more "transmuting everyone else's IP into their own IP so they can be the ultimate IP landlords".