[solardev]

Well, just as another perspective...

I'm not convinced that the philosophy of copyright is a net positive for society. From a certain perspective, all art is theft, and all creativity builds upon preexisting social influences. That's how genres develop, periods, styles... and yes, blatant ripoffs and copycats too.

If the underlying goal is to be able to feed creators, maybe society needs better funding models...? The current one isn't great anyway, with 99% of artists starving and 1% of them becoming billionaires.

I'd much prefer something more like the model we have for some open-source projects, where an employer (or other sponsors) pays the living wage for the creator, but the resulting work is then reusable by all. Many works of the federal government are similarly funded, where a government employee is paid by your taxes but their resulting work automatically goes into the public domain without copyright.

I don't buy the argument that nobody would make things if they weren't copyrightable/paid directly. Wikipedia, OSM, etc. are all living proof that many people will volunteer their time to produce creative things without any hope of ever getting paid. As a frequent contributor to those and also open-source code, Creative Commons photography, etc., a large part of the joy for me is seeing how my work gets reused, transformed, and sometimes stolen by others (credit is always nice, but even when they don't mention me, at least I know the work I'm doing is useful to people).

But the difference for me is that I don't rely on those works to put food on the table. I have a day job and can afford to produce those works in my spare time.

I wish all would-be creators would have such a luxury, either via an employer relationship or perhaps art grants and the such. I wonder how other societies handle this... back in the day, I guess there were rich patrons, while some communities sponsor their artists for communal benefit. Not sure what works best, but copyright doesn't have to be the only way society could see creative outputs.

[marcosdumay]

> I'm not convinced that the philosophy of copyright is a net positive for society.

I'm ok with that. But the philosophy of copyrights is not under debate here. All that is being debated is if it should protect small people from big corporations too.

[solardev]

It's not? I thought we were talking about "AI SHOULD be trained on everything that is in the public sphere" and "[your work] will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. [...] Commercial art producers have always ripped off minor artists". Isn't that all about copyright and the ability to make money off your creative works?

When I put something on Wikipedia or any other commons, I don't worry about which other person, algorithm, corporation, or AI ends up reusing it.

But if my ability to eat tomorrow depended on that, then I would very much care. Hence, copyright seems an integral part of people's ability to contribute creatively.

My argument is that by detaching their income from the reusability of their work, we would be able to free more creators from that constraint. Under such a system, the little guy would never get rich off their work, but they wouldn't starve when a big corporation (or anyone else) rips them off either.

[ruthmarx]

> I'm not convinced that the philosophy of copyright is a net positive for society.

It absolutely is, just not in it's current overpowered form.

> where an employer (or other sponsors) pays the living wage for the creator, but the resulting work is then reusable by all.

Some creators want control over their own narrative, and that's entirely reasonable, at least for a limited time.

> I don't buy the argument that nobody would make things if they weren't copyrightable/paid directly.

That was never the argument as far as I'm aware. There are other concerns, like a creator losing all control of their creation before they had a chance to even finish what they wanted to do/tell.