Whenever I say this, I am told the goal of copyright is to incentivize innovation, not protect creators.
So it doesn't matter if every particular person is truly rewarded for their work or if the rewarded person is the one doing the actual work (employers own copyright even though employees do the work). What matters is the impression and the aggregate effect.
And of course if humans not necessary for innovation, it loses its meaning. Copyright is already pretty much dead since many people and organizations get away with running copyrighted work through ANNs and claiming it's not derivative work.
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But the bigger issue is copyright is only about creativity, not about the human time and effort put in. It doesn't protect most normal work.
Ultimately, every person has a limited time to be alive and that's one area where we're all roughly equal. Even taking skill differences into account, the difference in productivity between people is not that high.
Take a passenger jet and all the work, skill and knowledge that goes into building one. There's no way a single person could do all of that, even ignoring study time as if he magically started with the required knowledge at birth. Yet there are people rich enough to own one. That makes no sense.
> reward people for the full transitive value of their work
> the goal of copyright is to incentivize innovation, not protect creators.
Both statements can be true. IP law attempts to incentivize innovation by instituting a system that is hoped to (very approximately) award creators in proportion to the transitive value of their work. This is much easier to see with patents, where each use of the idea itself requires an explicit license. In the case of copyright it is assumed that both buyer and seller are able to accurately assess the value, that the market is efficient, etc. Generally a bunch of stuff that's only approximately true in the most hand-wavey sense.
> There's no way a single person could do all of that ... Yet there are people rich enough to own one. That makes no sense.
Presumably you own a smartphone. Presumably it was relatively cheap in comparison to your total yearly income. Yet I am quite certain that you could not manufacture an equivalent device from scratch on your own. A modern CPU is hundreds of man years of work just for the blueprint; you still need to figure out fabrication. And then there's the rest of the SoC, the RAM, the display, the radio, ...
Sure. I mentioned it because some people have been pretty hostile to the idea that IP should protect people. They argued as if a technology that makes human innovation obsolete should automatically invalidate copyright because it's would be no longer needed either. And screw the people whose work that innovation was built upon - licenses, consent, etc.
> Presumably you own a smartphone
Maybe the plane was a bad example, I used it because it was one of the first things which made me realize how many orders of magnitude individual wealth spans.
There are everyday items which you could make on your own (e.g. furniture) and on the other end there are massive projects which require their own specialized supply chains (e.g. planes). Smartphones fall somewhere in the middle, probably. They benefit immensely from economies of scale and that the same infrastructure (fabs) can make parts for smartphones, computers and make other device types - both unlike planes.
A more telling comparison perhaps would be how many people you need to get together to make 1) one of the item, 2) how many to make enough to serve that group, and 3) how many so each person in the group has one. A plane can, after all, serve many people at once. Having one for yourself is, in part, where the extravagance of owning one as a singular person comes from.
I may well have been one of those people in a previous exchange. I argue that IP law only protects people as a means to an end. As a severe restriction of individual freedoms, I firmly believe that its only legitimate purpose can be the net benefit of society as a whole. If any given aspect of IP law (including copyright) is no longer required to encourage innovation then it should be abolished.
All of that is perfectly consistent with the ideal of rewarding people for the full transitive value of their work which itself follows naturally from the goal of incentivizing innovation.
Regarding the plane, I apologize if my tone tended towards quibbling. I understood and agree with the point you were trying to make about income inequality. Private jets constitute an almost absurd level of physical resource allocation to the individual. Jet engines alone require significant quantities of rhenium, an element that's slightly rarer than platinum. I don't really see how any of that relates to copyright or AI though.
I think the discussion should move away from freedoms/rights to consent.
Compare with rights in the physical world:
- If I own a property, whether it's a house or plot of land, I can consent or not consent to other people being there. Walking across a field of grass doesn't damage or depreciate is in any measurable way but nobody is allowed to do that unless I allow it.
- If I own a bike I never use and never intend to use, nobody is allowed to take it for theirs, not even borrow it, without my consent.
It should be the same with my work which is not physical. If I publish code online, my consent should be required for using it in any way - especially if i give specific instructions such as a license file.
Without that, those who are best able to capitalize on an opportunity (typically those who are already in positions of power and have enough wealth) gain the most from it, not those who contributed to the opportunity through their labor.
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And it shouldn't be about innovation either. If i record my cat doing something funny, I can a) keep the video to myself, or b) upload it to youtube where it has a tiny but real chance to hit millions of views for meaningless internet points, ad money and presumably preferential treatment of my future videos from the algorithm, or c) I can upload it to my website where almost nobody will see it. But the choice c) should not allow Youtube to take my video and host it on their platform. Because I don't consent to that. In fact, I should be able to say for example "you can only rehost this video if you include a link to my website and don't make money from it".
And I should definitely be allowed to say "you can't use this video to make a statistical model of all videos on the internet which can then reproduce non-verbatim patterns from them". And by "you can't", I mean "I don't consent to it and society/law agrees with punishing you if you do".
There's nothing innovative about funny cat videos (for all we know, the exact situation has been recorded thousands of times and posted on youtube already and only one of those videos reaches more than a few views by random chance). Innovation shouldn't be relevant, consent should.
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> All of that is perfectly consistent with the ideal of rewarding people for the full transitive value of their work
Not sure if I understand but I think I agree in a theoretical sense but disagree in a practical one. Theoretically, IP law isn't a requirement for reaching this ideal, maybe there is a different rule system which can achieve that. Practically, IP law is a flawed mess but we shouldn't throw it away until we find a better alternative. (I've seen a discussion here where a person basically argued for destroying copyright but only several posts later revealed he was doing it because he had an alternative in mind. Ironically his alternative didn't require copyright to be abolished, it was perfectly compatible AFAICT but also was opt-in so it was effectively powerless and couldn't work towards his stated goals.)
> I apologize if my tone tended towards quibbling
It's fine, I used the example because it was one of the things which caused cracks in my acceptance/ignorance of how the world works and made me think more deeply about it. It's good to be able to refine it even further.
> I don't really see how any of that relates to copyright or AI though.
I think the point I was trying to make is that without rules limiting people's behavior, what happens is that those who already have vastly more than other people tend to be able to use that wealth to gain more even faster than the rest.
Being in high decision making ("leadership") positions allows one to capture a disproportional cut of the income. Ownership doesn't even require any work to generate more wealth for the owner. And now, similarly, huge companies are using their position to repurpose past labor with 100% of the wealth thusly generated going to them instead of those who performed that labor.
So it doesn't matter if every particular person is truly rewarded for their work or if the rewarded person is the one doing the actual work (employers own copyright even though employees do the work). What matters is the impression and the aggregate effect.
And of course if humans not necessary for innovation, it loses its meaning. Copyright is already pretty much dead since many people and organizations get away with running copyrighted work through ANNs and claiming it's not derivative work.
---
But the bigger issue is copyright is only about creativity, not about the human time and effort put in. It doesn't protect most normal work.
Ultimately, every person has a limited time to be alive and that's one area where we're all roughly equal. Even taking skill differences into account, the difference in productivity between people is not that high.
Take a passenger jet and all the work, skill and knowledge that goes into building one. There's no way a single person could do all of that, even ignoring study time as if he magically started with the required knowledge at birth. Yet there are people rich enough to own one. That makes no sense.