Copyright law is not about logically perfect system, but creating a general environment in which artistic, academic and other creations can appear and benefit the general population.
Yes ... and because it's not a logically perfect system, its lifetime has to be limited. One day we should abolish copyright and find a better, more functional way to drive progress.
Where goes wrong, is when individuals and cooperation believe that such monopolies should be indefinite, and pushed the monopolies beyond the lifetime of the author. A dead author can’t produce new works, so it’s now clear how allowing such long monopolies increases the amount of creative work produced.
The original primary objective of copyright was to create an environment to could produce an endless supply of public work, freely available to all. It’s only abuses of copyright over the past 50 years that have destroyed objective, and ironically it’s copyright holders like Disney that really starting to suffer the consequences.
Winding back copyright durations to better balance the public and private interests would go a long way to resolving many of our issues with copyright today.
> Yes ... and because it's not a logically perfect system, its lifetime has to be limited.
It’s also worth pointing out that no system of law is “perfectly logical”. It’s almost certainly impossible to produce a perfectly logic system because humans are inherently illogical, and binding them into a perfectly logical system of law would almost certainly produce more injustices.
Anything that has infinite supply and zero marginal costs, as Nobel Prize winning economist Samuelson argues when he was looking at the context through lighthouses[0], should be free to all. By using copyright to make it a monopoly and allowing the extraction of monopoly rents you are drastically reducing the value and reach of the thing that was discovered. Copyright is a hack and this hack is now fundamentally breaking. Instead of trying to save the hack, we need a full rewrite. If winding back the duration of copyright is correct, the best winding back is zero.
As we are a remix culture where idea A and idea B combine to create idea C, we drastically reduce the innovation in our economy through reduced discoveries. This failure ends up with large monopoly holders consolidating into bigger and bigger entities in order to right some of this failure, but that only makes the monopoly extraction worse.
The discoverer should be subsidized for the discovery of that information but it should immediately go to the public domain. How you work out what that works out to is just as abstract as what Spotify works out what each play costs. This is no doubt monstrously complex to figure out the dollar number what some discovery is worth, but it is the economically correct path. Copyright isn't.
[0]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph
There is zero creativity, zero art, zero original thought, zero newness.
When actual AGI happens, then your arguments mean something. Such as in, at least 50 or 100 years down the road.
Try to make a car using the best ideas developed by each car maker. You will be surprised.
No, obviously not, as that would clearly be unworkable and ridiculous. Mainly because we have a very unclear understanding of human creativity, and there’s no way to analyse an individuals mind to understand how they created an idea. Additionally copyrights reach generally stops at the point of “transformation”, once you take any idea an transform it “enough” it’s considered a new idea.
The reason none of the above applies to AI is simply because we’ve declared that only humans can transform and produce new ideas. AI aren’t human, thus they’re not afforded the same rights. Arguing about if there’s an inherent difference between AI creations and human creations is pointless, the law doesn’t care, it has already declared that there’s a difference between AI and human.
If you disagree with declaration, then you need to lobby to change the law. But until the change occurs, your believes are meaningless in the eyes of the law.
In my opinion things like selecting a training dataset and then writing prompts are not creative processes they are mechanical processes. Input in, output out, with barely any interaction from the human.
Consider when you commission an artist to make a painting. You give them a "prompt" by explaining what you want. Maybe you even give a "training dataset", a few examples similar to the look and feel of the result you want.
Then they go off and make something. They show you in process stuff and you make suggestions so the next version they show you is closer to what you want. This repeats until you are both happy. Then you own the drawing. Because you paid them for it.
In this case however it's absolutely clear that you did not create the work. You had input into the creation, but the artist was not a tool you are using to realize your own creative vision. They are the creator, you're a customer for them.
The difference is that I buy books, pay for visiting museums and buy music in several formats, or pay it accepting to receive advertisement between songs.
It Is expected that If I buy a book I will be allowed to read it without asking for a permission.
What I don't do is copypasting paragraphs of other books to write a new book and claim that is mine. Is a different situation.