[thomastjeffery]

The irony of copyright is that it demands copied design.

Want an online menu for your restaurant? Well, you can't just go copying someone else's design; so you must create your own from scratch. Will yours look and behave practically identically to the other? Yes. Will both websites be overall worse quality than if everyone just collaborated on a standard design? Yes. Would it save the world an incredible amount of redundant work to just allow people to copy each others' work? Yes. Who wins in this arrangement? Only those who have already won.

Keep looking at this pattern, and you will enter a deep cavernous rabbit-hole. At the bottom, you will find yourself at the very core of design itself: the goals, philosophies, and systemic failures of every design we use today can be traced back to this point: collaboration must be avoided at all costs. Compatibility is the cardinal sin, and it must be punished.

So we go on, building silos upon silos. When will we ever learn?

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There is a lot of talk lately for change. They say, "AI will be the end of copyright. It's too important to hold back the potential of AI over a petty argument for intellectual property." I don't believe for a minute that LLMs will ever reach the lofty goal of "General Intelligence". I don't believe for a minute that megacorps like OpenAI, Google, and Meta deserve a free pass to siphon data for profit. So why is it that these words ring true? AI has nothing to do with it: it's design itself that has incredible potential, and we should absolutely stop holding it back. Intellectual Property is nothing more than a demand against progress.