All of them are needed for society to function, but at the same time all of them are convenient fictions for us to build upon.
Storytelling is as old as language itself and might even be older than our particular species, and is basically copyright infringement. The same goes for tool-making, which is thought to be one of the sparks that gave rise to our species' vast intelligence. That's how imaginary copyright and IP in general is, let's take the thing we've been doing since literally the dawn of time, copying and sharing information for free and building upon and improving it, and portray this practice as "unnatural" and "unlicensed" and in fact let's set up a restrictive framework under which most of the technological and cultural achievements in human history and before would have been impossible or severely hampered. It reeks of artificiality, way more than money and other things do.
It was created by corporations to make it easier for them to form monopolies around unchallenged control over a particular intellectual property or idea, and now that it is becoming inconvenient for them with the advent of AI, they will probably get rid of it or re-invent it in some way that even further benefits them.
It also matters very little what we do because in the end we will be out-competed by other countries like China that don't draw these artificial intellectual lines that hamper progress.
I think there's probably some modern bias in this perspective, about how "natural"/"real" money is. Early human populations certainly didn't have the same concepts of currency, land ownership, etc. that we do today. Communally sharing resources to help each other/ourselves is older than our species, in fact common to multiple species, and the other social constructs like "money" get in the way of it too.
> That's how imaginary copyright and IP in general is, let's take the thing we've been doing since literally the dawn of time, copying and sharing information for free and building upon and improving it, and portray this practice as "unnatural" and "unlicensed" and […] It was created by corporations to make it easier for them to form monopolies around unchallenged control over a particular intellectual property or idea, and now that it is becoming inconvenient for them with the advent of AI, they will probably get rid of it or re-invent it in some way that even further benefits them.
Wikipedia says that King Diarmait Mac Cerbhaill adjudicated what was basically a copyright case over the Cathach as early as the sixth century, and the legal basis of copyright is founded in moral, economic, and property rights that existed in ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman societies. Apparently, it took the printing press for unauthorized copying to become a big enough issue to be codified in law, but the poet Martial was complaining about missed profits from unauthorized copying and "book sellers would sometimes pay a well-regarded author for first access to a text for copying" (I.E. there was something resembling IP licensing, enforced by physical access rather than law) back during Roman times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#Early_dev...
## "Rhetoric and Reality in Copyright Law" by Stewart E. Sterk
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
> Why give authors an exclusive right to their writings? Copyright rhetoric generally offers two answers. The first is instrumental: copyright provides an incentive for authors to create and disseminate works of social value. By giving authors a monopoly over their works, copyright corrects for the underincentive to create that might result if free riders were permitted to share in the value created by an author's efforts. The second answer is desert: copyright rewards authors, who simply deserve recompense for their contributions whether or not recompense would induce them to engage in creative activity.
> The rhetoric evokes sympathetic images of the author at work. The instrumental justification for copyright paints a picture of an author struggling to avoid abandoning his calling in order to feed his family. By contrast, the desert justification conjures up a genius irrevocably committed to his work, resigned - or oblivious - to living conditions not commensurate with his social contributions. The two images have a common thread: extending the scope of copyright protection relieves the author's plight.
> Indeed, the same rhetoric· - emphasizing both incentives and desert - consistently has been invoked to justify two centuries of copyright expansion. Unfortunately, however, the rhetoric captures only a small slice of contemporary copyright reality. Although some copyright protection indeed may be necessary to induce creative activity, copyright doctrine now extends well beyond the contours of the instrumental justification. ...
## "Copyright Nonconsequentialism" by David McGowan
Missouri Law Review. https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
> This Article explores the foundations of copyright law. It tries to explain why those who debate copyright often seem to talk past each other. I contend the problem is that copyright scholars pay too much attention to instrumental arguments, which are often indeterminate, and too little to the first principles that affect how one approaches copyright law.
> Most arguments about copyright law use instrumental language to make consequentialist arguments. It is common for scholars to contend one or another rule will advance or impede innovation, the efficient allocation and production of expression, personal autonomy, consumer welfare, the "robustness" of public debate, and so on.' Most of these instrumental arguments, though not quite all of them, reduce to propositions that cannot be tested or rejected empirically. Such propositions therefore cannot explain existing doctrine or the positions taken in debate.
> These positions vary widely. Consumer advocates favor broad fair use rights and narrow liability standards for contributory infiringement; producer advocates favor the reverse.' Most of the arguments for both consumers and producers prove too much. It is easy to say that the right to exclude is needed to provide incentives for authors. It is hard to show that any particular rules provide optimal incentives. It is easy to point to deviations from the model of perfect competition. It is hard to show why these deviations imply particular rules.
But for the sake of this discussion: I don't think anyone can assume those permissions when using a tool to generate the base image. Ironically enough, it may make more sense to have artists for concepting, copyrighting the character or world so you obtain those permissions, and then using AI to ramp up production. That's an inversion of what's happening for early AI usage.
The main question is how much concepting is needed to copyright a character? Making a few sketches in private? Releasing a full work first with no AI on what you want to copyright?
I know that everyone is chomping at the bit to logically own me in this thread, and that's fine -- have your fun. There are a dozen comments informing me that "IP law around AI" and "fiat currency" are both made-up, and that's obviously true.
Right now "fiat currency" or "contracts" is settled. We are not radically redefining what those are (despite the web3 crowd's insistence). The story around IP with regards to AI is quite different. We are at a fork in the road. It is actually up to us to decide what AI fundamentally is, as it relates to IP. It's genuinely up in the air, and gives us an opportunity to re-examine some aspects of how we treat ownership of information. In my opinion, this is a good thing and an exercise worth doing. A chance to re-do some of what the internet failed at. Remember Aaron Swartz?
Personally, I'm quite cynical: I think the existing social power structure will win and absorb AI into its IP regime. AI will be locked down even faster than the internet was, because value can so obviously captured. The winners will be Disney, Sony, Warner, Elsevier... we'll all be poorer for it. But yeah! Good thing people can't make images of Spider Man?
>Personally, I'm quite cynical: I think the existing social power structure will win and absorb AI into its IP regime
Yes, that's my fear as well. Which is why I hope these LLVMs get reigned in before it gets out of hand, as it did with DMCA (very rarely used to make sure proper parties are compensated and used just as often to make digital creators kowtow to the whims of the elite).
In your words, I don't see a future where AI wins these cases and the little guy gets to make images of Spiderman without Sony/Marvel/whoever squashing them down. All while probably using that artist's own prompts and existing art to make Spiderman 57.
> - I think you're sowing the seeds to undermine your own arguments
> licensing fee...
It took them exactly one reply. New record
Therefore, people talking about morals or ethics or creativity or human inspiration or whatever are wasting their time on a false premise.
1. You can derive realness from materialistic, physical phenomena. So in this case, quark-gluon-electron interactions are real, and basically everything else is like 99% imaginary. "Society" is no more and no less real than anything else.
And/or:
2. You can derive realness from minds' conscious perception, experience, and interaction. In this case, "society", being an aggregate of many minds' mutual and conflicting experiences and interactions, is probably one of the most real things there are.
And of course you can unify the two, by framing the latter within the former based on the information-theoretic complexity of the physical substrate of the minds, and by framing the former within the latter as the common, shared basis of perceived and lived experiences.
---
But I'm not sure what concept of realness would let you say ""Society" is the most abstract illusion of them all".
Or do you mean that the rigidity of currently existing societies and their specific laws and customs, as universal and immutable constants, is what "has always been a complete fiction and pretend"? In that case I would fully agree; You can have multiple possible societies, in any number of shapes and configurations. But that does not make extant societies, as they are right now, any less real for those that live in or otherwise interact with them.
> So, maintaining a bunch of fictions in order to maintain another fiction becomes circular reasoning.
Uh, no. Not circular reasoning. Fear of starvation, more like. Fear of marauders killing your loved ones to take their resources. Fear of entropy.
Agriculture, presently existing as a function of society, is certainly very real– assuming your body obeys the laws of thermodynamics.
The second category of what exists in reality is human souls / consciousness and animal souls / consciousness. Beyond those two categories, there is nothing that exists, unless you enter supernatural territory. Which is not to be discarded, but here we're talking about man-made stuff. We can talk about money, society, ownership of land, and such. But they are always only imagined by people, they themselves can never transcend from the realm of idea and imagination into the realm of the real. Even though we have to relate to these ideas in everyday life because how they control the behaviours of our peers and ourselves, we can never forget that they are not real. But most forget.
In the past and in some regions even today, people held deep beliefs about curses and individual taboos. That a jealous neighbour or romantic rival would curse them, or more likely that a Shaman at their birth informed their family that this person can not eat this or do that, or they would die. And from accounts I've read, people believed this so deeply that they would have convulsions and even die if they broke their taboo by mistake. Just by the power of a false belief. Or the countless who waste their lives believing in some lie about "society". Or people who live under the curses of shame and guilt. And the curse of pride for that matter.
It is much more beneficial and easy on the soul to disregard all and any idea of society and instead deal with people as individuals. Because you're almost always dealing with individuals. And stay away from those who are too deep in the illusion and false belief of "society" or any such thing, because they only know how to bow to those they perceive as higher and kick down on those they perceive as lower.
As humans and individuals, the best thing we can do for ourselves is cleanse our mind from false beliefs. That doesn't mean that we will forget how these ideas work on people, it means we can see them from a higher perspective and that they do not exist. They can be used as pleased, but should never control a superior being.
Agriculture is not a function of society, it's a function of tilling the earth with a plow and sowing seeds. Nothing about it is abstract. I frankly didn't understand that example.
The Bible goes on and on about not having other gods besides God, but it also says that you should not _make_ idols, which I think is a very important and overlooked part. Anything that is undeniably created by humans is a false idol and worshipping it is a mistake. Most people alive right now worship their government, or more accurately their idea of what their government is. Because most do not know how their own government works on paper. Most people would die and kill for their government, while at the same time being nonplussed by other things that should make their blood boil. The slightly smarter ones worship money. One day when they're old, they'll be rich and have their own yacht. If they forgot about their fake money god for a moment, they could go sail the oceans as crew on a yacht while they are young and can enjoy the experience. Can they buy back their youth with some fake money printed in limitless quantities? No, because reality does not bow to the non-real, even if every single person on the planet believed in a falsehood. But a lot of people will have a whole lot of suffering from false beliefs. That's how literal hell on earth is created.