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.
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.
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.
Facebook's power comes from how it gathered and monetised data, how it acquired rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp, and how it locked in network effects.
If regulators had blocked those acquisitions or enforced stricter antitrust and data privacy rules, there's a chance the social media landscape today would be more competitive. Politicians and regulators probably received some kind of incentive or didn't get it. They didn't see how dangerous Zuk's greedy algorithms would become. They thought it was just a social site. They had no idea what Facebook employees were building behind the scenes. By the time they realised, it was already too late.
China was the only one that acted. The US and EU looked the other way. If they'd stepped in back in 2009 with rules on privacy, neutrality, and transparency, today's internet could've been a lot more open and competitive.
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.
Copyright predates mechanical copying. However, people used to have to petition a King or similar to be granted a monopoly on a work, and the monopoly was specific to that work.
The Statue of Anne - the first recognisable copyright law in anything remotely the modern sense dates to 1709. Long after the invention of movable type. Mechanical in the sense of printing with a press using movable type, not anything highly automated.
Having to petition for monopoly rights on an individual basis is nothing like copyright, where the entire point is to avoid having to ask for exceptions by creating a right.