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- cross-posted to:
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Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.
The point is that these big companies have enough money to get permission from whoever they want, so we’ll still end up with proprietary models destroying industries, but only the big corpos will be able to use this tech effectively and everyone else will have to beg. A future like the 70s where the only OS’ and programming languages were proprietary, or the 90s where all the DBs were proprietary. A paradigm where a powerful tech (good or not) is only available to the rich or for rent, is never a good one.
Yeah but this presumes “the best way to beat 'em is to join 'em,” right? Like, when all the operating systems or databases are proprietary, that’s bad because those things are really useful and help you do things better and faster than you would otherwise.
But this argument applied here is like, oh no, what if large entertainment companies start making all their movies out of AI garbage, and everyone else can’t do that because they can’t get the content licensed? Well… what if they do? Does that mean they’re going to be making stuff that’s better? Wouldn’t the best way to compete with that be not to use the technology because you’ll get a higher-quality product? Or are we just giving up on the idea of producing good art at all and conceding that yes we actually only value cheapness and quantity?
Also, just on a personal level, for me as a J. Random Person who uploads creative work to the internet (some of which is in common crawl), but who doesn’t work for a major entertainment corporation that has rights to my work, I would really prefer to have a way to say “sorry no, you can’t use my stuff for this.” I don’t really find “well you see, we need to be able to compete with large entertainment companies in spam content generation, so we need to be able to use your uncompensated labor for our benefit without your permission and without crediting you” particularly compelling.
The point is that this tech is not only made for one reason (replacing artists and authors etc). It has plenty of other valid uses, such as an assistant, a sex toy, personal entertainment etc and probably a lot we don’t know due to how young it is. I don’t want to pre-emptively see all the valid uses locked-in to proprietary models and everyone becoming a serf to openAI to use them.
Call me radical, but I don’t agree that anyone should have the right to tell others how to use their creative work. If you share it, it’s out of your hands. All culture is a remix and has always been this way until the last 120 years. Copyright and Patents have always been a mistake and should be abolished as they achieved the opposite of what they promised.
I happen to copyright my output (obviously not here or in other comments). The question I ask myself is: would I be ok if a Nazi organization used my photos in their propaganda? I’m not ok with that, so I like to retain control over who can use my stuff. If someone acceptable were to ask me, I’d let them use my work without compensation.
Death of the Author applies here. One can’t prevent how others interpret their work. The same way a neonazi org might use your work for propaganda, is how leftists repurpose Stonetoss comics for their own purposes. Or rather, it’s not that you can’t prevent it, it’s that the means by which you would try to prevent it, would create a functional dystopia.
Personally speaking, I hate permission culture.
I remember having this sort of conversation 20 years ago, and it didn’t convince me then.
I don’t really agree with this. Artists can’t (and shouldn’t want to) entirely control interpretation, but they still have a responsibility. If your work is palatable to nazis or advertisers or whatever kind of parasite, you need to reflect on why and make it less so, or you’re complicit in my book. I say this as an artist who’s repeatedly moved on to new forms of expression as fashion catches up.
Me asserting copyright means I can express myself however I want, and Nazis can get their images from Unsplash or make it themselves. There’s no risk of complicity on my part.
Haha, sounds like we might have to agree to disagree on this one.
Copyright is much older than 1904, though! It dates back to the printing press, when it became necessary because the new technology made it possible to benefit off writers’ work without compensating them, which made it hard to be a writer as a profession, even though we want people to be able to do that as a society. Hey, wait a minute…
It also kickstarted one of the biggest enclosures in recent memory, where profiteers went around and copyrighted indigenous and folk songs and then went against everyone using them.
That seems bad but also not super relevant to the point under discussion! Unless your point is that it’s bad when a cultural commons is exploited for business profits – in which case, I agree, but, well…
It’s as relevant as we make it in our discussion, no? You brought up the theoretical noble intentions of the copyrights, so I felt compelled to mention their actual results.
I mean, it seems like you’re reading my argument as a defense of copyright as a concept. I’m ambivalent on the goodness or badness of copyright law in the abstract. Like a lot of laws, it’s probably not the ideal way to fix the issue it was designed to solve, and it comes with (many) issues of its own, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’d be better off if we just got rid of it wholesale and left the rest of society as is. (We would probably be left with excitingly new and different problems.)
As I see it, the actual issue at hand with all of this is that people are exploiting the labor/art/culture of others in order to make a profit for themselves at the expense of the people affected. Sometimes copyright is a tool to facilitate that exploitation, and sometimes it’s a tool that protects people from it. To paraphrase Dan Olson, the problem is what people are doing to others, not that the law they’re using to do it is called “copyright.”
writer protection is not where copyright came from
The Berne Convention (Which the US only joined in 1989) is from 1886 and more concerned with author’s rights than the typical american flavor, and was kickstarted by successful writers such as Victor Hugo, it’s fundamentally commercial in nature but was at least partially sold/incepted has protecting a writer’s labour:
Translated: “The law protects land, it protects the house of the proletarian who has sweat; it confiscates the work of the poet who has thought (…)”
From the body of the convention, in some regards it does place the author higher than the publisher:
EDIT:
And contains from 1886 already the spirit of fair use.
None of that is its origin
I’m sorry for my imprecise wording, I was feeling flippant and I know what I said isn’t totally accurate. not a big history person here honestly. I’ll try and stick to joke-commenting next time. but also can you just say what you mean instead of darkly hinting.
iirc even though the origin of copyright is not really specifically about author protection, part of the broad-strokes motivation for its existence involved “we need to keep production of new works viable in a world where new copies can be easily produced and undercut the original,” which was what I was trying to get at. maybe they picked a bad way to do that idk I’m not here to make excuses for the decisions of 16th-century monarchs
also again I’m not a copyright fan/defender. in particular copyright as currently constituted massively and obviously sucks. I just don’t think copyright-in-the-abstract is like the Greatest Moral Evil either, bc I’m not a libertarian. sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Agreed, earliest stuff is definetly exclusive royal grant of printing overall to a particular person/guild/company. But some author protection is baked into the first international treaties about copyright, and those treaties are old.
The copyright clause in the US constitution (1789) also frames it in terms of granting rights to authors to “promote the progress of … useful arts”. Strictly speaking author protection is not the origin of copyright but also I was snarkily responding to a person who was arguing in favor of AI-training-as-fair-use and implying copyright was 120 years old, not trying to do a detailed explication of the origins of copyright law