The original intent was to provide an incentive for human authors to publish work, but has become more out of touch since the internet allowed virtually free publishing and copying. I think with the dawn of LLMs, copyright law is now mainly incentivising lawyers.
And yet the content industry still creates massive profits every year from people buying content.
I think internet-native people can forget that internet piracy doesn’t immediately make copyright obsolete simply because someone can copy an article or a movie if sufficiently motivated. These businesses still exist because copyright allows them to monetize their work.
Eliminating copyright and letting anyone resell or copy anything would end production of the content many people enjoy. You can’t remove content protections and also maintain the existence of the same content we have now.
A few weeks after the release it finds books on Amazon who plagiarized the book. Finds copies of the book available for free from Russian sites, and ChatGPT spitting verbatim parts of the source code on the book.
Which parts of copyright law would you say are out of date for the example above?
The expectation that the author will get life+70 years of protection and income, when technical publications are very rarely still relevant after 5 years. Also, the modern ease of copying/distribution makes it almost impossible for the author to even locate which people to try to prosecute.
Also, plagiarism has nothing to do with copyright. It has to do with attribution. This is easily proven: you can plagiarise Beethoven's music even though it's public domain.
But (under different accounts) I used to be very active on both HN and reddit. I just don't want to be anymore now for LLM reasons. I still comment on HN, but more like every couple of weeks than every day. And I have made exactly one (1) comment on reddit in all of 2023.
I'm not the only one, and a lot of smaller reddit communities I used to be active on have basically been destroyed by either LLMs, or by API pricing meant to reflect the value of LLM training data.
A writer or journalist just can't make money if any huge company can package their writing and market it without paying them a cent. This is not comparable to piracy, by the way, since huge companies don't move into piracy. But you try to compete with both Disney and Fox for selling your new script/movie, as an individual.
This experiment has also been tried to some extent in software: no company has been able to live off selling open source software. RedHat is the one that came closest, and they actually live by selling support for the free software they sell. Others like MySQL or Mongo lived by selling the non-GPL version of their software. And the GPL itself depends critically on copyright existing. Not to mention, software is still a best case scenario, since just having a binary version is often not enough, you need the original sources which are easy to guard even without copyright - no one cares so much for the "sources" of a movie or book.
Which evidence?
In hindsight, China wasn’t diligent in the enforcement of IP violations. However, it’s clear foreign presences and investment grew substantially in China during the early 90s upon the belief IP would be protected, or at the very least there would be recourse for violations.
Craftsmen don't claim copyright on their artifacts. Furniture designs were widely copied; but Chippendale did alright for himself. Gardeners at stately homes didn't rely on copyright. Vergil, Plato and Aristotle managed OK without copyright. People made a living composing music, songs and poetry before the idea of copyright was invented. Truck-drivers make a living; driving a truck is hardly a performance art. Labourers and factory workers get by successfully. Accountants and legal advocates get rich without copyright.
None of these trades amounts to "performance arts".
Also, craftsmen rely on the fact that the part of their work that can't be easily copied, the physical artifact they produce, is most of the value (plus they rely on trademark laws and design patents quite often). Similarly for gardeners. The ancient greek writers were again paid for performance, typically as teachers. Literature was once quite a performative act. And again, at that time, physical copies of writings were greatly valuable artifacts, not that much different from the value of the writing itself, since copying large texts was so hard.
Similarly, the work of drivers, labourers, factory workers, accountants is valuable in itself and very hard or impossible to copy (again, the physical world is the ultimate copyright protection). The output of lawyers is in fact sometimes copyrighted, but even when it's not, it's not applicable to others' cases, so copies of it are not valuable: no one is making a business that replaces lawyers by re-distributing affidavits.
Well you'd be mistaken. Lately, it was custom software, for a particular client, and of no interest to others. Earlier, it was before software copyright was a thing, and computer manufacturers gave software away to sell the hardware.
At the very beginning, yes, it was "very specific" hardware; it was Burroughs hardware, which used Burroughs processors. But that was before microprocessors, and all hardware was "very specific".
> (plus they rely on trademark laws and design patents quite often)
Craftsmen and labourers were earning a living long before anyone had the idea of a "trademark", still less a "design patent".
> The output of lawyers is in fact sometimes copyrighted
You're right. That's why I didn't say "lawyers", I said "legal advocates". Those are people who speak on your behalf in courts of law, not scribes writing contracts. Anyway, the ancient Greeks and Romans had written laws, contracts and so on; they managed without trademarks and copyrights.
Then I am not mistaken: the company was initially selling hardware, with the software being just a value add as you say (no copyright: no interest in trying to sell, exactly my point). Then, you were being paid for building software that (a) was probably not being made public anyway, and (b) would not have been of interest to others even if it were.
Even so, if someone came to your client and offered to take on the software maintenance for a much lower price, you might have lost your client entirely. This has very much happened to contractors in the past.
And my point is you couldn't have a Microsoft or Adobe or possibly even RedHat if you didn't have copyright protecting their business. So, you'd probably not have virtually any kind of consumer software.
We didn't charge maintenance for this software. We would write it to close the sale of a computer. It was treated as "cost of sale". I'm sure it was cheaper (to us) than the various discounts and kickbacks that happened in big mainframe deals.
As far as Microsoft and Adobe is concerned, I wouldn't regard it as a misfortune if they had never existed. I'm not convinced that RedHat's existence is contingent on copyright.
And I should mention YouTubers wouldn't be making that much money if YouTube weren't enforcing copyright, as you could just upload their videos and get the ad money. Without copyright, you could also cut off their in-video promotions and add your own, including your own Patreon - so you would get 100% of the money off their work if you can out-promote them.
It's only live performances which are protected by the physical world's strict no-copying laws (the ones that don't allow the same macro object to be in two places at the same time).
So basically, no medium which allows copying of the works in whole or nearly whole has been successfully run with public works.
I believe you equate incentive to monetary rewards. And while that it probably true for the majority of news outlets, money isn't always necessarily what motivates journalists.
So considering the hypothetical situation where journalists (or more generally, people that might publish stuff) were somehow compensated. But in this hypothetical, they would not be attributed (or only to very limited extent) because LLMs are just bad at attribution.
Shouldn't in that case the fact that information distribution by the LLM were "better" be enough to satisfy the deeper goal of wanting to publish stuff? Ie.: reach as many people looking for that information as possible, without blasting it out or targeting and tracking audiences?
> Also, presumably NYT still has a business model unrelated to whatever OpenAI is doing with [NYT’s] data…
That’s exactly the question. They are claiming it is destroying their business, which is pretty much self-evident given all the people in here defending the convenience of OpenAI’s product: they’re getting the fruits of NYTimes’ labor without paying for it in eyeballs or dollars. That’s the entire value prop of putting this particular data into the LLMs.
You seem to be assuming an "information economy" should exist at all. Can you justify that?
Much of it is only cost-effective to produce if you can share it with a massive audience, I.e. sure if I want to read a great investigative piece on the corruption of a Supreme Court Justice I can hypothetically commission one, but in practice it seems much much better to allow people to have businesses that undertake such matters and publish their findings to a large audience at a low unit price.
Now what’s your argument for removing such an incentive?
Why did you specify that this stuff you like, you only like if it's "not free"?
The hidden assumption is that the information you like wouldn't be made available unless someone was paying for it. But that's not in evidence; a lot of information and content is provided to the public due to other incentives: self-promotion, marketing, or just plain interest.
Would you prefer not to have access to Wikipedia?
There are ways to make it free to the consumer, yes. One way is charity (Wikipedia) and another way is advertising. Neither is free to produce; the advertising incentive is also nuked by LLMs; and I’m not comfortable depending on charity for all of my information.
It is a lot cheaper to produce low-quality than high-quality information. This is doubly so in a world of LLMs.
There is ONE Wikipedia, and it is surely one of mankind’s crowning achievements. You’re pointing to that to say, “see look, it’s possible!”?
I contribute to Wikipedia, and I don't consider my contributions to be "charity"; I contribute because I enjoy it. Even in the age of printing presses, copyright law was widely ignored, well into the 20thC. The USA didn't join the Berne Convention until 1989 (and they promptly went mad with copyright).
Yes, there's only one Wikipedia; but there are lots of copies, and lots of similar efforts. Yes, there's one Wikipedia, like there's one Mona Lisa. There are lots of things of which there's only one; in that sense, Wikipedia isn't remotely unique.
Does your personal satisfaction pay the server bills too?
There's a tendency among some people to take the nostrums of economists about the aggregate behaviour of populations as if they described human nature, and to then go on and conclude that because human behaviour in aggregate can be understood in terms of economic incentives, that an individual human can only be motivated economically. I find that an impoverished and shallow outlook, and I think I'm happier for not sharing it.
I never made the claim that paying server bills would produce great content.
I never made the claim “an individual human can only be motivated economically.”
Your strategy for personal happiness is unrelated to what actually works in the real world at scale.
Personally, I think it would be a lot simpler if the internet was declared a non-copyright zone for sites that aren't paywalled as there's already a legal grey area as viewing a site invariably involves copying it.
Maybe we'll end up with publishers introducing traps/paper towns like mapmakers are prone to do. That way, if an LLM reproduces the false "fact", it'll be obvious where they got it from.