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Comment by charonn0 | Hacker News Reader

Exclusive rights over their published work encourages artists and inventors to publish their work, which is a clear benefit to society at large. The period of time it should remain exclusive and the specific rights that are made exclusive can be debated, but the utility of IP rights in general is obvious.

And generative AI is not a person in the first place, so I don't think the appeal to learning makes much sense here.

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> Exclusive rights over their published work encourages artists and inventors to publish their work

Do they? Please cite your studies.

It was obvious enough to the founders of the USA to bake it into our constitution.

US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:

> [the United States Congress shall have power] 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.

We don't have that. We have functionally unlimited times now. Publishing something new today puts you at risk of litigation from existing rights-holders.

I don't believe it's morally right to license music but, if I did, I'd look at the climate of lawsuits in the the last 10-15 years and conclude that the risks might outweigh the potential rewards.

I'm all in favor of reverting copyright terms to what they were before the Walt Disney Corporation was founded, but I think the idea of having a limited time to profit off of your creative works in order to incentivize their creation is still a sound concept.

The original agreement was fair to both creators and society and would never be remotely palatable to today's industry of middle-men and rights hoarders.

I wish we could have it back. I would feel a lot better about "intellectual property", morally, if we did.

That isn't a study? Even if it was a perfect idea at the time things have changed dramatically. I wouldn't want my ideas applied uncritically to some alien future. It also says "useful Arts", what it is suppose to be useful for?

People have been publishing their work for thousands of years before IP even existed. We don't know if the system we have is the best one we could have, I doubt it though.

Historically most artistic works, books, etc. were privately commissioned and one-of-a-kind. Publishing as we understand the idea came with the printing press and widespread literacy.

Publishing as we understand the idea came about at a time when physical scarcity was the limiting factor in dissemination of copies of works. That time has passed. We're in a completely different world now. The elevator operators and buggy whip manufacturers of the publishing industry would like things to remain the way they have been.

I don't think the issue is the scarcity of copies, but rather the scarcity of artists. Not just anyone can write a book that people want to copy, and we should encourage and reward those that can and do.

Filtering the crap is now orthogonal to the concern that, historically, information dissemination has been tied to physical scarcity. Those concerns ran together because it cost money to publish something. It doesn't now.

We can come up with new models that compensate creators more directly. We can also come up with models that don't involve effectively killing any ability to build upon existing culture in the time-scale of a human life.

What came before isn't how it has to be, except that the interest that profit from the current system want it to remain so.

Some of the earliest accounts of proto-IP laws date from Ancient Greece, with protections for new works (particularly recipes and plays?!?) being granted to their creators for a set period of time.

Then you have guilds, trade marks, potter's marks, royal warrants, etc... all "IP" protections of their days.

Would open-source license violations be possible to penalize if not for intellectual property laws?

This! Benn Jordan hasn't published anything in months because of scrapers for AI modeling.

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