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Meanwhile, book publishers are suing Amazon because they added a captioning feature to make audiobooks accessbile for copyright infringement: https://gizmodo.com/is-captioning-an-audiobook-illegal-major...

Reply All also has an interesting story about how impossible is it to have ANYONE accountable AT ALL for DMCA takedown machinery that harasses people: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h5ro A person got strikes on his internet connection due to previous owner and there was noone in the insane chain of IP strike machinery that could be appealed to or own up to the mistake.

The current state of copyright is so broken that it's downright evil.

This is all historically bound up. Audiobooks and printed books used to be separate physical things. The publishing rights ecosystem was built assuming this.

Now that they're fungible, its not making much sense any more. But millions of publishing contracts exist, that enforce the distinction. What do we propose to do about it? Without dismantling fundamental contract definitions.

20 years ago I made the observation that the whole intellectual property domain was fundamentally based around all of the individual aspects of intellectual property being cleanly and completely distinguishable from each other, e.g., this is a book, this is a song, this is a movie (which is made of this song and this script), etc. But even then it was becoming clear these categories were getting fuzzier and fuzzier and in many cases outright merging, and the categories weren't going to just go together nicely because of the various contradictory assumptions in them.

The worst then, and I think still today, is computer software, which is covered by both patents and copyright. Copyright has always covered them, in the last 20 years, patents have covered more and covered less at times, but still have always covered some of it.

I'm actually a bit surprised that I've still seen no hint of the legal system directly grappling with this problem. It just keeps getting worse. I've been keeping my eyes out but I haven't seen anything.

And this is another example; nobody wrote the copyright laws for the YouTube case. If you get down to it, you have this intricate interplay of video, audio, automated systems generating some content, automated systems checking them, an extra-judicial system for mediation where I will not say the incentives are 100% misaligned, but they are certainly nowhere near 100% aligned with what they should be, with a lot of mismatches between YouTube, the copyright holders, and the video producers in terms of powers and responsibility (that is, there are many places in the system where there is power without responsibility, and responsibility without power), and we're trying to adjudicate it on 20th century law that was already, at times, kinda cobbled together. (Don't look, but we're already 1/5th of the way into the 21st century.) It's madness.

>I've still seen no hint of the legal system directly grappling with this problem. It just keeps getting worse. I've been keeping my eyes out but I haven't seen anything.

IP is modern capitalism's goose that lays the golden eggs. I suspect that they are somewhat nervous to do the kind of root and branch reforms that would be neccessary to solve the problems you have outlined. Part of the genius of open source licences is that they are built out of some of the aspects of law that capital is most wary of breaking.

> but we know they cannot because of the LAWS that are protecting IP owners

I don't think that's a fair assessment. I played a bunch of less well defined tactical competitive games when I was younger and even though the rules were not perfect we were able to yield outcomes that sufficiently would be satisfactory to everybody and in many cases also representing of the skills of the competitors, i.e. good games.

The problem with "real world games", e.g. like this question of "who gains the most from a creation?" is not that the rules are not perfect, but that there are many players who don't have the slightest intention to play good games. There is good argument for why the creator should gain the most, or his family, or the company that produced the company in a market worthy format. There is even an argument for that the person should take it who through his cunning or strength is simply more able to take the gain. But there is a big difference between competitors trying to win while enjoying the game and those who want to win no matter the cost to everyone, including themselves.

On the gaming table you simply exclude these people, but in the real world you can't.

On Youtube they will probably not take down a video if nobody claims its protection rights. So someone came and claimed these videos.

And that's the problem in my eyes. If everybody is trying to create an enjoyable environment for everybody else nobody would attempt to "generate every possible sequence of notes [for personal gain]" because it wouldn't even be fun even for that player for long.

The problem with awarding only complete works is: bad people exist. Laws need to have enough flexibility so that truly devious people are covered by the law as well.

Example: I copy 99% of a popular song, but the first 3 seconds of my song = me playing a trumpet at full blast. Technically it's not a copy of the complete works, so I can argue in court that it's a sub-section of the original song. No judge/jury would agree with me, but my point is shown in this example. Even if you specify your definition sub-section to be < 50%, you would still be unhappy, because I copied half your song. What sub-section is OK?

The YouTube/AI issue is that loose/vague laws assume a certain degree of "common sense" among the population. When you try to give a loose task to a computer, it must make assumptions (either with AI, or pattern matching) and will invariably screw up. Computers are not human brains so they don't have "common sense"... yet.

And the flip side is that if you wanted to write the 1812 overture you couldnt because that quotes La Marsailles.

I'd argue dotcom domain squatting has a big part in the lack of names available. Eventually, most startups that could use them will go bust and sell the domain 5-10 years down the line anyway, it's outliers like google.com that are always going to be taken.

New namespaces like .app should help with the problem, but at the end of the day, the culture itself has a limited namespace.

I've always gotten fairly lucky with .coms for my projects (managed to snag feedsub.com recently, had minfolio.com at one point, etc..), though the ones I've let slip ended up being squatted upon for thousands of dollars because of their potential (I think) branding value, which is a shame because it could've been put to better use since I couldn't follow through with a project.

BTW "Google" is a kind of good, inventive, unique name, rather unlike to be squatted. I wish more companies came up with unique names that are not common words.

But have you recently visited pets.com, mail.com, delivery.com, or whatever were the generic names commanding millions in 1999? Pets.com in particular just redirects to a different domain, more trademark-able.

Yeah I chose a really poor example admittedly.

> Try naming a business. NOTHING is available. If you want to run a competing business in a saturated market, the naming options are almost non-existent, especially if you want to name your company something that embodies what your business does.

To be fair, this is only really a problem for a new tech-ish company. Most other companies are geographically limited and can operate just fine sharing an operating name with a different company. There are lots of different companies operating as "John the Plumber" (seriously, Google it), "Rose & Crown Pub", or "Pho Noodle House".

The US government has two options as I see them:

1) Reform the copyright system (unlikely due to powerful lobbyists and lawyers)

2) Eventually lose control over the industry to other countries as consumers vote with their feet.

You missed:

3) Bribe and capture legal system so everyone is forced to pay to the big copyright owners and you can't vote with your feet anymore.

I suppose that's the current reality right?

I'm imagining a future where everyone (re)discovers torrenting. Or Russia/China make a Spotify competitor with entirely stolen content and the government officials there turn a blind eye to Universal's rights.

"generate every possible sequence of notes"

do you have any idea how many songs that would be? your computer won't be finished in this lifetime

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion

When constrain the search space based on commonly-used scales in Western music the space collapses dramatically. Given that there have been successful copyright claims made on short phrases I think the idea of exhausting the search space for popular western music becomes a lot more plausible.

the actual computation was left as an exercise for the reader, but the issue is not the length of the scales, it is how they can be combined. take 10 notes and combine them in 16 ways. two small numbers, but how long to count to all 10^16 possiblities? or rephrased: how many days in 10 quadrillion seconds?

> I'm sure YouTube would love to be more lenient...

I downvoted you because this is not true. YouTube has built their own takedown system that goes above and beyond the legal requirements. They could be more lenient to users and follow the law but instead they made it easier for content to get taken down.

The problem is that there's evidence that YouTube was purposefully uploading and allowing copyrighted content, which means they are no longer fully protected by the safe harbour provisions of the law, and risked losing the Viacom lawsuit. ContentID came as a compromise from that.