Bonus points if you have any actionable scheme beyond waving your hands and talking vaguely about "basic income".
Keep in mind that the life of a professional artist is currently very perilous, anyone working freelance is constantly battling against the social media giants' desire to keep everyone scrolling their site forever. Words like "patreon" and "commission" and links off-site to places an artist can exchange their works for money are poison to The Algorithm and will be hidden.
And also if I am reading this right, you have absolutely no problem with an image generator that's been trained on copyrighted work producing work that's either copyrighted or copylefted? You are utterly fine with disregarding the copyrights of the original artist and/or whoever they may have assigned the copyright to as part of their contract?
Why isn't it a concern for any other automation?
How do we progress, exactly, if we randomly decide that nothing can disrupt any of the current ways of earning income?
What about, IDK, coal miners?
> And also if I am reading this right, you have absolutely no problem with an image generator that's been trained on copyrighted work producing work that's either copyrighted or copylefted? You are utterly fine with disregarding the copyrights of the original artist and/or whoever they may have assigned the copyright to as part of their contract?
Copyright maximalism is bad. It also doesn't make any sense. Someone learning to reproduce your capabilities by looking at your stuff isn't violating copyright. If we allowed copyright to somehow mean that someone's skills can't be reproduced...
If an economic loss is currently occurring, that means that, if copyright is abolished, an economic gain will accrue. Where that economic gain is captured is therefore the core focus. What we want to occur is for society and the author to share in this increased economic gain, what we don't want is for monopolistic rent-seekers to grab all of this value for themselves.
I am not yet sure of this, but I think a land value tax would accomplish this goal. One would then discover some method to find the weight for each artist or piece of software through a market means that might only be an approximation and take from the land value tax revenue and distribute it to artists and other creators. I think a decent way to find this value is through a revenue neutral(or slightly negative) opt-in sortition process in which, when you go to use an artists work, you are entered into an auction wherein the 50% who bid more than the median value get to use the work at the median price, and the 50% who bid less do not get to use the work, but receive their bid in cash. This is surely not the full system, but it is just me working out how we can move forward from such an unjust system like copyright.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson
[1]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph
> How do you propose to keep artists able to pay their bills and live a decent life if you're completely cool with training AIs on them?
1. Software being able to imitate artists doesn't mean people will stop wanting art from other people.
2. If it does, I would say that it's unfortunate, but it's the world we live in. Nobody has a guarantee on being able to make a living doing any conceivable profession whatsoever, and artists are no different. I would very much like to make a living from working on my personal projects, but people don't seem to want to take me up on my offer.
Why do you hold that opinion? There's a few very clear benefits to creating artificial scarcity, mostly around incentivizing creation (and sharing!) of innovations.
If we can't create artificial scarcity around ideas, then ideas are in a sense less monetizable than, e.g., creating a piece of furniture. But this is just an accident of the way the world works - I can physically prevent you from taking a chair that I made, but I can't prevent you from taking an idea I had. Why does it make sense that the world works this way? Isn't it a whole lot better to encourage innovation, vs. encouraging more people to make physical objects, just because those are inherently scarce?
(The other side is that innovations also have the great property that copying them isn't depriving anyone else of use of the original idea, but that's a side issue to the encouraging innovation one, IMO.)
I think it is self evident why creating artificial scarcity is immoral, but the point you are trying to make is that from a utilitarian standpoint you think it is preferable to behave in a way that is immoral in the micro scale since it will create greater good in the macro scale. If you agree, then I don't think there's any need to justify my belief here :)
That said, I also think that it is unclear that copyright is a net positive increase to creation and sharing of innovations. The current state of monetization is not inspiring since the actual creators usually are not well compensated and money tends to stay with large corporations that are essentially just "right holders". There's also many factors that actively stifle innovation and creativity.
Patents are the most well known example, but being unable to borrow chord progressions or characters or storylines from other works is also stifling (you can't exactly release your "edanm's cut of Spiderman Homecoming" publicly, nor can you create your own sequel or alternate interpertation of the story). Quite a few fan games or fan remakes have also met their demise at the hands of aggressive copyright enforcement.
My own suspicion is that if the current models of creation will be disrupted by copyright abolition, we'll just end up seeing that a lot of the money that was spent on them will move to other avenues of funding like Patreon style or Kickstarter style funding for works. We may even see some new models created. I'd also expect that it will actually shift the balance away from large corporations (whose primary value is having lots of money that allows them to hoard rights) to smaller creators which will now have more direct funding available to them.
I also think an interesting case to look at is Video Games, where the concensus is that a game's mechanics aren't copyrightable, and so whenever a new interesting Indie game comes out on steam, there is a rash of other cool Indie games with their own takes and remixes of the same concept, like the glut of Roguelike deckbuilders after Slay the Spire or the current glut of "Vampire Survivors"-likes that have their own interesting takes on the core idea. Eventually when there's enough buzz around such ideas they can even penetrate the AAA sphere (where adding "Roguelike" elements has started to appear slightly). It is also quite common to see games that are in Early Access for a very very long time, essentially letting the community fund the future creation and expansion of the game.
> If we can't create artificial scarcity around ideas, then ideas are in a sense less monetizable than, e.g., creating a piece of furniture. But this is just an accident of the way the world works - I can physically prevent you from taking a chair that I made, but I can't prevent you from taking an idea I had. Why does it make sense that the world works this way? Isn't it a whole lot better to encourage innovation, vs. encouraging more people to make physical objects, just because those are inherently scarce?
So as I said, I'm not sure it really will make ideas less monetizable (or that if it will, that it will do so significantly). Even today I can get any video game I want for free (illegally, but that effectively doesn't matter since no one will persecute me for it), and yet I still buy video games. In fact, a strong reason for why I buy video games today is because as a child I had a friend that had easy access to pirated CDs and I'd play a lot of games at their house, fueling my passion for them.
And relatedly, it is no accident that "software is eating the world", it is exactly because it is so easy to share, the low marginal costs make it easy to have a strong worldwide impact without too much real world effort :)
I'll start with the end, I don't think the "immoral on the micro scale" idea makes much sense. Like, you can say it's "bad" or "annoying" on the micro scale, but if it is good for society as a whole to create artificial scarcity, it just isn't immoral for society to provide mechanisms to create it.
I also don't think it's self-evident that it's "immoral" on the small scale (though not sure what that means, since artificial scarcity is kind of a society-level mechanism.)
That said, maybe I'm just bumping on your use of the word immoral and we're not really disagreeing.
> That said, I also think that it is unclear that copyright is a net positive increase to creation and sharing of innovations. The current state of monetization is not inspiring since the actual creators usually are not well compensated and money tends to stay with large corporations that are essentially just "right holders". There's also many factors that actively stifle innovation and creativity.
This has been a talking point of people against copyright for a long time (I've been having these discussions for at least 20 years, personally).
But I think that you're basically wrong. It's pretty easy to see that you're wrong too - just look at the state of news, the state of music, etc. In most cases, artists today make far less money than they made before the rise of pirated alternatives. Patreon/other models/etc have helped some, but nowhere near where things were before.
In fact, you talk about the current state of compensation being bad, but I think that it would make more sense to listen to actual artists about whether or not copyright helps them or not. I've listened to a bunch, and most of them couldn't come close to doing what they love without copyright.
Also, personally, I'm a software dev. Most of what I do on a day-to-day basis is create IP. I'm fairly happy that someone can't just come along and repurpose everything I built, for free. Otherwise, I'm fairly sure I'd be out of a job.
(I'm fairly sure that without copyright/IP, most software we use wouldn't exist either.)
Copyleft is a license that weakens copyright (and thus inherently good :)), so using machine learning to weaken copyleft by allowing you to copyright "clones" of copyleft code is bad.
If I try to generalize here, the problem in both cases is only if you produce copyrighted works, especially if you trained on copyleft works. If instead both models would stipulate that all produced works are copyleft I would be much more fine with it (and I feel it would respect the license of the copyleft works it was trained on, even if that may be legally shaky).