Between all the piracy, and all the AI training and the purchase/visitor-circumventing AI services, the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out.
We're killing the goose that lays the eggs, for selfish gain.
Even if projects like AA didn’t have nation-level support, academics would find a way to keep as much of it as possible going. After all, we’re the ones who compiled the bulk of pre-2020 material, and we’re the ones who do all the hard work of scanning from our institutional libraries stuff that doesn’t exist anywhere in digital form.
Most of the best literature in the English language was written before modern IP law was even a thing. There's very little good literature written by authors primarily motivated by money.
> best literature
What does that even mean?
But there is also some consensus. For music it would be Beethoven, Mozart, the Beatles, etc.
For literature it would include Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Austen, Tolkien, and many more. I would bet it will eventually include Stephen King but it's too early to make that call now.
Not to mention, many people would disregard your answer for putting Stephen King (and Tolkien, to a lesser extent) in the same sentence as Tolstoy and Shakespeare.
There is no "better" anything when we talk about culture. No consensus, etc. There are just opinions.
I can only think of one writer off hand who wasn’t a wealthy landowner, although it is a particularly notable example; that of William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare wasn’t poor (his parents seem to be of upper middle class standing), he was able to get a basic (but not a university) education and then pursue an acting career (with perhaps a side hustle as a teacher). Whatever the case he certainly wasn’t independently wealthy before he started writing, he needed to earn a living.
He did seem to be in it for the money (and fame) since he wasn’t just a writer he was an actor, theatre owner, and something of a celebrity, and he did make enough money to become a wealthy landowner by the time he died.
I’m not sure piracy or AI training are really affecting book publishing dramatically. But if you have data, I’d be curious to see it. AI scraper bots are a total pain for online publishers and FOSS sites, but AFAIK they’re not really harming book publishing directly.
The consolidation of publishers and Amazon’s own practices are probably worse for authors than “piracy”.
What you can do is make sure people can pay you easily, and not put (a lot of) hurdles in your readers way. And when people can’t afford to pay... maybe let them enjoy your work still, and you’ll get a couple more loyal fans who would pay you when they’re able to.
At least this was my world view before AI has arrived and ruined^W disrupted everything. Now I’m not so sure.
In such a world, isnt it useful that governments are stupid enough to give adversaries reasons to undermine it? When the government props up a corporate tyranny domestically, and racketeering, should we make a temporary alliance with all its enemies?
(Eg., the provision to AI companies of all corporate secretes and competitive practices via prompts, eventually to be used against their capital interests and their labour interests).
We already did that when the internet collectively agreed decades ago that everything digital should be free for anyone.
We're now 20 years downstream of ad-blocking being a virtuous good, and piracy being the ultimate show of liberty, and now suddenly everyone cares about the creator's revenue stream.
The mask slipped and unsurprisingly the internet is a bunch of selfish morally stunted children. Some of them even pushing 50 years old.
Yes, I am talking to you with the 4TB of pirated content, proud of not loading any ads in the last 15 years, and getting enraged over LLM training.
That's oddly-specific :-)
In any case, I have no pirated content that I know off, neither proud nor ashamed of blocking ads[1], but I still get annoyed that a bunch of VCs can use their invested-into companies to launder all the worlds IP, then sell it back to them.
[1] Who feels proud of blocking ads? It's like feeling proud of tying your shoelaces: "Good job, well done, but that's the expectation, son".