this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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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.
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."