[m3sta]

The quoted text makes sense when you understand that the EU provides a carveout for training on copyright protected works without a license. It's quite an elegant balance they've suggested despite the challenges it fails to avoid.

[Oras]

Is that true? How can they decide to wipe out the intellectual property for an individual or entity? It’s not theirs to give it away.

[elsjaako]

Copyright is not a god given right. It's an economic incentive created by government to make desired behavior (writing an publishing books) profitable.

[klabb3]

Yes, 100%. And that’s why throwing copyright selectively in the bin now when there’s an ongoing massive transfer of wealth from creators to mega corps, is so surprising. It’s almost as if governments were only protecting economic interests of creators when the creators were powerful (eg movie studios), going after individuals for piracy and DRM circumvention. Now that the mega corps are the ones pirating at a scale they get a free pass through a loophole designed for individuals (fair use).

Anyway, the show must go on so were unlikely to see any reversal of this. It’s a big experiment and not necessarily anything that will benefit even the model providers themselves in the medium term. It’s clear that the ”free for all” policy on grabbing whatever data you can get is already having chilling effects. From artists and authors not publishing their works publicly, to locking down of open web with anti-scraping. Were basically entering an era of adversarial data management, with incentives to exploit others for data while protecting the data you have from others accessing it.

[vidarh]

Why? Copyright is 1) presented as being there to protect the interests of the general public, not creators, 2) Statute of Anne, the birth of modern copyright law, protected printers - that is "big businesss" over creators anyway, so even that has largely always been a fiction.

But it is also increasingly dubious that the public gets a good deal out of copyright law anyway.

> From artists and authors not publishing their works publicly

The vast majority of creators have never been able to get remotely close to make a living from their creative work, and instead often when factoring in time lose money hand over fist trying to get their works noticed.

[bryanrasmussen]

I generally let it slide because these copyright discussions tend to be about America, and as such it can be assumed American law and what it inherits from British law is what pertains.

>Copyright is 1) presented as being there to protect the interests of the general public, not creators,

yes, in the U.S in the EU creators have moral rights to their works and the law is to protect their interests.

There are actually moral rights and rights of exploitation, in EU you can transfer the latter but not the former.

>But it is also increasingly dubious that the public gets a good deal out of copyright law anyway.

In the EU's view of copyright the public doesn't need to get a good deal, the creators of copyrighted works do.

[vidarh]

> There are actually moral rights and rights of exploitation, in EU you can transfer the latter but not the former.

And when we talk about copyright we generally talk about the rights of exploitation, where the rationale used today is about the advancement of arts and sciences - a public benefit. There's a reason the name is English is copy-right, where the other Germanic languages focuses more on the work - in the Anglosphere the notion of moral rights as separate from rights of exploitation is well outside the mainstream.

> In the EU's view of copyright the public doesn't need to get a good deal, the creators of copyrighted works do.

Most individual nations copyright law still does uphold the pretence of being for the public good, however. Without that pretence, there is no moral basis for restricting the rights of the public the way copyright law does.

But it has nevertheless been abundantly clear all the way back to the Statute of Anne that any talk of either public goods or rights of exploitation for the creator are excuses, and that these laws if anything mostly exist for the protection of business interests.

[klabb3]

> Why? Copyright is 1) presented as being there to protect the interests of the general public, not creators

Doesn’t matter, both the ”public interest” and ”creator rights” arguments have the same impact: you’re either hurting creators directly, or you’re hurting the public benefit when you remove or reduce the economic incentives. The transfer of wealth and irreversible damage is there, whether you care about Lars Ulrichs gold toilet or our future kids who can’t enjoy culture and libraries to protect from adversarial and cynical tech moguls.

> 2) Statute of Anne, the birth of modern copyright law, protected printers - that is "big businesss" over creators anyway, so even that has largely always been a fiction.

> The vast majority of creators have never been able to get remotely close to make a living from their creative work

Nobody is saying copyright is perfect. We’re saying it’s the system we have and it should apply equally.

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Defending the AI corps on basis of copyright being broken is like saying the tax system is broken, so therefore it’s morally right for the ultra-rich to relocate assets to the Caymans. Or saying that democracy is broken, so it’s morally sound to circumvent it (like Thiel says).

[ramses0]

You've put into words what I've been internally struggling to voice. Information (on the web) is a gas, it expands once it escapes.

In limited, closed systems, it may not escape, but all it takes is one bad (or hacked) actor and the privacy of it is gone.

In a way, we used to be "protected" because it was "too big" to process, store, or access "everything".

Now, especially with an economic incentive to vacuum literally all digital information, and many works being "digital first" (even a word processor vs a typewriter, or a PDF that is sent to a printer instead of lithograph metal plates)... is this the information Armageddon?

[daedrdev]

copyright is the backbone of modern media empires. It both allows small creators and massive corporations to seek rent on works, but since the works are under copyright for a century its quite nice to corporations

[isaacremuant]

Governments always protect the interests of their powerful friends and donors over the people they allegedly represent.

They've just mastered the art of lying to gullible idiots or complicit psycophants.

It's not new to anyone who pays and kind of attention.

[bryanrasmussen]

actually in much of the EU if not all of it Copyright is an intrinsic right of the creator.

[vidarh]

It is a "right" created by law, is the point. This is not a right that is universally recognised, nor one that has existed since time immemorial, but a modern construction of governments that governments can choose to change or abolish.

[bryanrasmussen]

what is a right that has existed since time immemorial? Generally rights that have existed "forever" are codified rights and, in the codification, described as being eternal. Hence Jefferson's reference to inalienable rights, which probably came as some surprise to King George III.

on edit: If we had a soundtrack the Clash Know Your Rights would be playing in this comment.

[vidarh]

Except of course that the point is that copyright is generally not described this way.

See my more extensive overview in another response.

The history of copyright law is one where it is regularly described either in the debates around the passing of the laws, or in the laws themselves, as a utilitarian bargain between the public and creators.

E.g. since you mention Jefferson and mention "inalienable", notably copyright is in the US not an inaliable right at all, but a right that the US constitution grants Congress the power to enact "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". It says nothing about being an inalienable or eternal right of citizens.

And before you bring up France, or other European law, I suggest you read the other comment as well.

But to add more than I did in the other comment, e.g. in Norway, the first paragraph of the copyright low ("Lov om opphavsrett til åndsverk mv.") gives 3 motivations: 1 a) to grant rights to creators to give incentives for cultural production, 1 b) to limit those rights to ensure a balance between creators rights and public interests, 1 c) to provide rules to make it easy to arrange use of copyrighted works.

There's that argument about incentives and balancing public interests again.

This is the historical norm. It is not present in every copyright law, but they share the same historical nucleus.

[cjs_ac]

Copyright originates in the Statute of Anne[0]; its creation was therefore within living memory when the United States declared their independence.

No rights have existed 'forever', and both the rights and the social problems they intend to resolve are often quite recent (assuming you're not the sort of person who's impressed by a building that's 100 years old).

George III was certainly not surprised by Jefferson's claim to rights, given that the rights he claimed were copied (largely verbatim) from the Bill of Rights 1689[1]. The poor treatment of the Thirteen Colonies was due to Lord North's poor governance, the rights and liberties that the Founding Fathers demanded were long-established in Britain, and their complaints against absolute monarchy were complaints against a system of government that had been abolished a century before.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689

[bryanrasmussen]

at any rate rights that are described as being eternal or some other version of that such as inalienable, or in the case of copyright moral and intrinsic, are rights that if the government, that has heretofore described that as inviolate, where to casually violate them then the government would be declaring its own nullification to exist further by its previously stated rules.

Not to say this doesn't happen, I believe we can see it happening in some places in the world right now, but these are classes of laws that cannot "just" be changed at the government's whim, and in the EU copyright law is evidently one of those classes of law, strange as it seems.

[kriops]

Yes it is. In every sense of the phrase, except the literal.

[Zafira]

A lot of cultures have not historically considered artists’ rights to be a thing and have had it essentially imposed on them as a requirement to participate in global trade.

[kolinko]

Even in Europe copyright was protected only for the last 250 years, and over the last 100 years it’s been constantly updated to take into consideration new technologies.

[pyman]

The only real mistake the EU made was not regulating Facebook when it mattered. That site caused pain and damage to entire generations. Now it's too late. All they can do is try to stop Meta and the rest of the lunatics from stealing every book, song and photo ever created, just to train models that could leave half the population without a job.

Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft and Google don't care about people. They care about control: controlling influence, knowledge and universal income. That's the endgame.

Just like in the US, the EU has brilliant people working on regulations. The difference is, they're not always working for the same interests.

The world is asking for US big tech companies to be regulated more now than ever.

[kriops]

Coincidentally that’s about when we discovered god-given rights (John Locke died in 1704), so that makes sense.

[wavemode]

To be fair, "copy"right has only been needed for as long as it's been possible to copy things. In the grand scheme of human history, that technology is relatively new.

[vidarh]

Copying was a thing for a very long time before the Statue of Anne. Just not mechanically. It coincided with the rise of mechanical copying.

[arccy]

"intellectual property" only exists because society collectively allows it to. it's not some inviolable law of nature. society (or the government that represents them) can revoke it or give it away.

[impossiblefork]

Yes, but that's also true of all other things that society enforces-- basically the ownership of anything you can't carry with you.

[CaptainFever]

Yes, that is why (most?) anarchists consider property that one is not occupying and using to be fiction, held up by the state. I believe this includes intellectual property as well.

[layer8]

The same is true for human rights.

In the EU, an author’s moral rights are similar in character to human rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors'_rights

[figassis]

You're alive because society collective allows you to.

[lioeters]

A person being alive is not at all similar to the concept of intellectual property existing. The former is a natural phenomenon, the latter is a social construct.

[victorbjorklund]

Copyright is literally granted by the gov.