[CamperBob2]

Conflating natural law -- our need to eat -- with something we pulled out of our asses a couple hundred years ago to control the dissemination of ideas on paper is certainly one way to think about the question.

A pretty terrible way, but... certainly one way.

[strogonoff]

I am sure it had nothing to do with the amount of innovation that has been happening since, including the entire foundation that gave us LLMs themselves.

It would be crazy to think the protections of IP laws and the ability to claim original work as your own and have a degree of control over it as an author fostered creativity in science and arts.

[soulofmischief]

Innovation? Patents are designed to protect innovation. Copyright is designed to make sure Disney gets a buck every time someone shares a picture of Mickey Mouse.

The human race has produced an extremely rich body of work long before US copyright law and the DMCA existed. Instead of creating new financial models which embrace freedoms while still ensuring incentives to create new art, we have contorted outdated financial models, various modes of rent-seeking and gatekeeping, to remain viable via artificial and arbitrary restriction of freedom.

[strogonoff]

Patents and copyright are both IP. Feel free to replace “copyright” with “IP” in my comment. Do you not agree that IP laws are related to the explosion of innovation and creativity in the last few hundred years in the Western world?

Furthermore, claiming “X is not natural” is never a valid argument. Humans are part of nature, whatever we do is as well by extension. The line between natural and unnatural inevitably ends up being the line between what you like and what you don’t like.

The need to eat is as much a natural law as higher human needs—unless you believe we should abandon all progress and revert to pre-civilization times.

IP laws ensure that you have a say in the future of the product of your work, can possibly monetise it, etc., which means a creative 1) can fulfil your need to eat (individual benefit), and 2) has an incentive to create it in the first place (societal benefit).

In the last few hundred years intellectual property, not physical property, is increasingly the product of our work and creative activities. Believing that physical artifacts we create deserve protection against theft while intellectual property we create doesn’t needs a lot of explanation.