[glimshe]

Software copyrights are among humanity's worst inventions. We as a species are no better off because of it, and neither are the small creators that copyrights are supposed to protect. Software copyrights only exist to protect a renter model from big corporations.

There's an argument to be made for patent protections, but many of those are questionable considering the number of trivial software-related patents (there must be a patent somewhere for replying to an online conversation through an edit box and an "add comment" button).

I don't know if LLMs can somehow help the situation. I hope they can expose the ridiculousness of software copyrights but I won't be holding my breath.

[z3c0]

> I hope they can expose the ridiculousness of software copyrights but I won't be holding my breath.

I think it has already, but it's a hard pill for many to swallow. While I haven't actually counted, the conversations around the effectiveness of copyright/IP seem to be regular conversations now, both here and IRL.

[thomastjeffery]

Software is a particularly egregious case, but the problem is more general. Copyright itself is just a bad move all around.

Copyright demands that everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor. Therefore, we should not expect people to earn wages for labor; and we should instead expect people to earn royalties from their "works" (the countable commodity). Absurd.

Copyright grants "artists" (in the broadest sense of the word) a monopoly over their "work", again the imagined product of their labor. In practice, this actually means a monopoly on the labor itself, because all art is derivative work, and the derivation of work is the specific thing that copyright monopolizes. Twice absurd.

LLMs, in the best case, are calling that bluff. The problem is that they are calling it poorly, and the bluff itself is incoherent to begin with. Even worse is that LLMs can be monopolized as copyrighted "works", which is a clear abuse of the system.

We should get rid of copyright and patents. Dismantle all the moats and publishing houses (including social media). Liberate derivative work. Value labor directly.

[_kst_]

"Copyright demands that everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor."

Isn't it?

If you spend ten years writing the Great American Novel, and I spend ten years writing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over again, have I created as much value as you have?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value#Critique...

[swiftcoder]

> We should get rid of copyright and patents... Value labor directly.

Ireland's UBI for artists seems like the only real solution that gets to the heart of the problem

[CobrastanJorji]

> Everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor.

Is it not? If I spend 10 years writing the greatest novel of all time, and you, a publishing company, make copies and sell 10 million copies, I feel entitled to some recompense.

My labor has value to me, but only the product of that labor has value to anyone else.

[thomastjeffery]

You feel entitled to recompense from the publisher, because they are profiting from your labor. The problem I brought up is still there, just in the hands of the publisher, and not the writer. Now the publisher gets to profit from work they did not do, and you are lucky to get a good cut.

Your labor has value to everyone else, even if that value is speculative. If we don't have a mechanism to commoditize the ends of labor, then we can just speculate instead. Speculating the value of labor is more uncertain than valuing copyrighted works, which means that the business of labor speculation cannot compete with the business of copyright valuation. At the same time, copyright is a lie: the "product of a work" is a totally arbitrary imagined boundary that can't always be meaningfully drawn in the first place; meaning that entire categories of work are impossible to copyright at all. Removing that lie would put everyone on a level playing field, where all labor is valuable, and all valuation is fair.

[z3c0]

The goal is the product, but what is being exchanged is production, ie labor for a certificate of your own past production, aka money.