Copyright is intended to promote technological progress. I'm all for ignoring it, since it's so obviously a broken system anyway.
The stated goal is to encourage creation of the arts, but looking at how hit-driven arts are, and also at how much more is created than bought[0], there's too much content being made.
Most people want to read books in the top 100 best seller list, of which there are necessarily 100 in whatever period that list is re-calculated; or to watch the latest blockbusters, whose number in any given month I don't know but assume isn't much higher than the number of screens in a large cinema complex.
But that doesn't mean get rid of it entirely; my (admittedly just a) gut feeling is that 20 years should be enough to claim a monopoly on derivative works, even if we retain an average human lifespan for the original and direct translations. This is separate to trademarks: I think by this point, I should be able to combine Short Circuit and The Matrix into a shared universe if I want to, but it's still a matter of consumer protection to make sure nobody mistakes such a creation for either of the source materials.
One thing I absolutely I don't buy is the arguments for copyright protection being "life plus 70 years", which seem to circulate around authors wanting their kids to inherit their residual income. Most people don't get to inherit almost anything, but even if they did, someone's kids will probably[1] live for as many years after the parent's death as the parent lived before that child's birth, not usually 70 years after the parent dies.
[0] with exceptions; furry artists report viable income.
[1] barring radical changes to life expectancy from global thermonuclear war and/or post-singularity life extension.
What is your reasoning here? Copyright law doesn’t seem to do that at all. Are you thinking of Patent law?
It's not just about science, but those goals have to work together. If a relatively narrow* section of copyright blocks much larger sections of science, something has gone wrong.
* When I say narrow, one benchmark is the original stable diffusion, which has fewer parameters than there are images in the training set. Or at least, a hypothetical version without overtraining mistakes. At that point it's remembering next to zero specifics from each image.
This line covers both: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”
Arts > Authors > Writings > Copyright
Science > Inventors > Discoveries > Patents
It’s arguable how effective this is, but I doubt anyone is spending 100’s of millions making a movie if there’s no copyright protection or something similar.
Mr Beast is pushing the limits of what you can spend per minute of video to ~150-250k, but he’s subsidizing that with in your face advertisements. With just product placement you’re down to perhaps ~10-15 million for a 90 minute blockbuster which just isn’t enough.
Mr. Beast spends over 2 million per video btw, not 250k
The point I'm making is that while copyright based business models might be the prevalent for high expenditures productions, that doesn't mean aggregate spending is increased. It may just mean that copyright incentives higher spending inequality and higher concentration of production, while aggregate spending remains the same.
> that doesn't mean aggregate spending is increased
But the actual spending does. An Olympic Games costs as much as total aggregate compensation from YouTube for an entire year. They have multiple revenue streams but it just shows the scale we are talking about.
Netflix spends roughly as much on content as YouTube pays content creators. Add global OTA TV, cable, Movies, pay per view, and the other streaming services like D+ and you’ll get some idea of just how much is being supported by copyright. Hell, even some of YouTube’s compensation goes to old movies because of copyright.
Seems like that's an incomplete sample. I'm sure I can get lower revenue numbers for movies by ignoring major revenue sources.
Now YouTube itself might volunteer to pay something to actually get new content because that’s in its own self interest. But that’s going to be at roughly current levels rather than an extra “blockbuster” rate because again any website could trivially have the top 10,000 videos on YouTube so they can’t gatekeep the content behind a paywall etc.