AI developers don't care about intellectual property.
In practice it's less "abolishing intellectual property" and more "transmuting everyone else's IP into their own IP so they can be the ultimate IP landlords".
But how ML is at least currently developing, other megacorporations and universities are only a year or so behind OpenAI etc, and publishing their weights and models. Of course disregarding training set IP because otherwise keeping up would be impossible.
If the media and advertising megacorporations manage to get a ban on training on IP material, Micr.. OpenAI would be a huge benefactor, as they could afford some weird licensing deal on everybody's data and the actual open efforts would be extinguished.
Luckily US hegemony is fading and many other powers DGAF anymore what a US judge says. Or a WTO judge, because USA kind of destroyed WTO themselves already.
Intellectual property in the form of patents and copyrights is often harmful for consumers. In music, academia and mechanical engineering it's clearly been harmful in slowing the spread of innovation. It sucks to wait 20 years for a new excellent new dishwasher tray shape.
Everything political is rooted in morality, and while it is easy to point out political challenges on the topic, intellectual property is ethically an unambiguously good concept.
While I don’t think all IP should be abolished, I think in general there is too much of it, protected for too long, and society would be better off getting rid of patents and dramatically downsizing copyright to at most a few decades of protection.
(And yes I have thought a lot on this matter. The evidence behind patents being overall beneficial is weak, and there is no effective societal argument for the current copyright terms.)
It was also created at a time when copying work was almost as hard and expensive as creating it.
"The Most Powerful Idea in the World" basically makes the case that intellectual property is what enabled the Industrial Revolution. I won't try to summarize or defend the entire thing here, but I think it makes a very compelling case that the notion of "owning ideas as property" was the thing that made Britain unique (among other factors of course) and led to runaway technological explosion. It points out how in earlier times, inventors were literally killed for coming up with better methods that threatened some established system. So there is a big difference between art and technology there, and while I think debating the merits of copyright as it pertains to art is valid (and 100% agree it's overdone in our current system), I'm not convinced the current issues are serious enough to undermine the entire concept of intellectual property.
And without any form of copyright it would have gone "hey $RECORD_COMPANY here's this cool jingle I made" and they'd say "yeah we think so too, we'll use that and compensate you $0."
Way better.
Politics and economics don't have anything to do with morality. It's about power. The moral fairytailes are there to justify whatever the state of affairs are. When these change, new fairytales justifying them will be adopted.
If right to property is a God given right, why the hell I as a atheist should give a damn?
"God given" means "natural". [Natural rights does not require a god](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...)
And if your argument ("... god given ... atheist ... etc.) can be copy-pasted into a valid defence of arbitrary evil (I like to use Hitler for a concrete example, but avoid it in public because some subset of people erroneously thinks that is an automatic fallacy), then it is trivial in the sense that it doesn't add anything to the discussion, regardless of your opinion or pov.
They were literally just invented few hundred years ago. And have even changed since then (owning another human being was somehow a natural/god given right). Humans have organized (and keep on organizing) without any such conception for at least tens of thousands of years, but suddenly its natural?
Who is the absolute arbiter of "evil"? USA of course holds itself as a force for good, and e.g. islamism as evil. Islamists do the opposite. Very rarely anybody thinks themselves as evil, but readily point out evil in others.
This is in no way to support islamism, or USA. Just that morality is just mostly an arbtrary justification for whatever somebody wants to or doesn't want to get done.
We can discuss the merits and shortcomings of e.g. ownership based on its societal consequences just fine without conjuring metaphysics.
You can argue it from political necessity.
Some kind of property rights are necessary for the operation of any social group. Even in a communist society you can't have the air force stealing land from the navy, or the transport department taking electricity from hospitals, or neighbours taking each others food allocations.
There needs to be some kind of organised transfer of property or you get chaos.
Some kind of systems to allocate scarce resources is needed. This doesn't have to be property. Access to e.g. the moon and earth's orbits and international waters and polar regions have systems of allocation, but they are not property.
Those arguments can be incorrect without entailing all arguments from political necessity are false.
I can incorrectly argue a justification of the flat earth theory from physics - but that would discredit my own intellect rather than the subject of physics.
> Some kind of systems to allocate scarce resources is needed. This doesn't have to be property.
I agree not everything has to be property, but some things must. Essentially anything that's both important and "stealable" needs to be protected by property rights of some kind.
Regardless of how your food and water come into your possession (trade, charity, gov allocation), it's necessary that some of it remains in your possession for you to consume.
> I can incorrectly argue a justification of the flat earth theory from physics - but that would discredit my own intellect rather than the subject of physics.
Do you mean the right to (certain very specific form of) property is somehow an empirically shown fact like the geometry of the earth?
Am I right in guessing that you have inclination towards praxeology?
> I agree not everything has to be property, but some things must.
Why do some things must? Because it leads to more desirable consequences than other options, or because it is some metaphysical truth you're somehow privy to?
The first kind of argument is fine, the latter is just blunt rhetorics. I don't see why the former should be spoiled with the latter.
> Am I right in guessing that you have inclination towards praxeology?
Yes for both. I’ve not formalised it but I suspect we can a draw a line from philosophy -> game theory -> evolutionary dynamics -> socially stable systems of “rights”
Also, I don't believe ownership rights like we have currently lead to stable societies. This is kind of core of Marx's critique of capitalism.
But we do have clear systems of who gets power, through what means, and what they can do with it. The various classes of society have a relatively peaceful system of competing with one another.
I’m writing from a British perspective but it largely applies to most developed countries.
From a Finnish perspective, where ownership rights are somewhat lesser, the British system's trajectory didn't seem particularly stable when I lived there 2019-2020, and looks even less so now.
Britain never seems stable at first glance. Read a newspaper from 5, 50, 150 or 250 years ago and they'll all be lamenting economic uncertainty, geopolitical dilemmas and social injustice. Yet in that time no revolutions have killed more than 1% of the population, long term economic growth has averaged couple percentage points annually and nobody has successfully invaded the Islands.
I should not be coerced to give output of my labor (whether physical or mental) to others based on some burocrat’s allocation system or my neighbor’s wishes. That would be immoral.
I should not be coerced not to enter a piece of land just because somebody made a contract with somebody who killed or evicted by force the people (and other animals) who previously inhabited the land. That would be immoral, right?
Ideally there would other ways than economical to facilitate production of intellectual goods. Ownership economies are exceptionally bad in non-scarce resources.
There are some alternative and less destructive ways to handle the economy already in place. Academic institutions generally don't claim or enforce IP (paywalls are more a corporate than academic thing). Many library systems pay authors (notably not the publishers) for each loan from public funds. Open source software is funded via services (and increasingly with ads, which is not necessarily great).
State enforced monopoly on ideas or lumps of matter isn't the only way of structuring the economy. Alternatives haven't been discussed in 30 or so years, so it's understandable that many have hard time even conceptualizing such.
Arguably "first come, first serve" policy on names per domain is a good one and serves to reduce confusion.
Yes, they should lose the "property" if they do so, but in practice they lose it decades too late if even then.
Also trademarks being sellable means that at any moment the product with a trademark can have nothing to do with the original holder, partly defeating the rationale.
If we lived in an economic system where people don't starve or lose their house when they don't have a job then I wouldn't care. Until then, OpenAI and its ilk are looters.
I think the AI industry is motivating this for themselves with the idea that this does (at least partially) lead us to that world.
It maybe wrong how it is now, but it exists for a reason.
Same with patents.
Even now they can fight in court until smaller opponents go bankrupt but without any IP they wouldn't even have to fight.
Remember when Amazon copied successful products on their marketplace? That would be the norm and you could even blame or sue them.
Right now, AI is taking people's original works and rehashing them in a way that directly competes with the original work. Some AI firms (e.g. perplexity) just have their LLMs paraphrase the work lightly.
This is a problem because it drives original work out of business. Even setting aside matters of originality, artistic value, and AI being vapid slop:
Gen-AI is and will remain a derivative work that is reliant on original human-made work
ChatGPT is not going to do investigative journalism. If we let AI push all journalists into bankruptcy, the news just becomes an endless sewer of PR statements recycled into AI slop.
If you don't want Google's woke "diverse nazis" to push real news into bankruptcy, copyright is needed to stop them.
> Right now, AI is taking people's original works and rehashing them in a way that directly competes with the original work.
Good. Taking people's original works and rehashing them in direct competition fosters, not harms, cultural flourishing.
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