[DrewADesign]

I think the argument is that artificial comes in with IP law, which some people feel is superfluous.

I do think that corporate price gouging is a huge problem that does need to be addressed. But especially with smaller business types — creatives, et al— I still haven’t gotten any grownup answers about what would compel people to get professionally good at something and innovate in the complete absence of copyright: the vastly better business model would be waiting for someone else to do something new and interesting, stealing their work, and then undercutting them in the market because you don’t have R&D/et al costs to recoup. You can’t say that wouldn’t happen because it’s exactly what the AI companies did to billions of people, scoffing at any protest. And ironically, they’re now whining about the Chinese doing it to them.

[eszed]

I'm with you on all of that. There is, nevertheless, a strong argument that IP protection (particularly for creative / "culturally significant" works) is too long. Twenty years - interestingly enough, the original time-period in the US - of protection seems like a better (for society) deal than life of the author plus seventy. I think, in fact, most artists would agree: if you went back in time and asked a playwrite or filmmaker in (say) 1940, I'd bet they'd rather someone freely revives their work in 2026 than that it be sat on by a corporation that has forgot it (or they) ever existed.

[DrewADesign]

I’ve never met anyone that didn’t think copyrights were way too long in the US, and I’ve got a very large sample size of artists and attorneys. The only people that support such things are executives or counsel for large IP-holding entertainment companies.

I have, however, met a ton of very well-paid tech workers that were extremely against copyright, entirely, especially where it came to paying artists, such as musicians, for their labor. Pretty ironic because the market for software development labor market would probably land somewhere between graphic designers and company IT worker if the commercial software business had no IP protection.