Sounds more like we should end copyright worldwide.
Average of (current maximalist copyright; ending copyright) is what you called middle ground.
Average of a sensible position like (current maximalist copyright; ending copyright divided by 2) still does not yield a sensible world where culture and art - or even human interactions - can thrive.
The trenches between the different factions are far too deep for any middle ground to have any chance.
It'd be great for this to be the first major relinquishment of nation-state power to happen without violence, without backroom deals, without wedge politics and flag waving.
Just... let it go.
It's beyond obvious that copyright is not going to exist in 1000 years. Every creature on earth - especially the internet - survives by copying information. It's the most basic life force in the universe.
Copyright is serving exactly nobody today. It's time. Are there elder stateswo/men in the room who can see the writing on the wall and act with grace?
Except for nearly everyone who writes anything (including software) or other artistic pursuits to make a living. This includes a majority of people here on HN.
Not to mention that everyone using coding agents probably aren't even protected by copyright in the first place, at least in the US, since the courts are taking a pretty hard line on human authorship being required...
Despite the SaaS model under which many of us build, there is still a tremendous amount of packaged and distributed software that people use every day: your phone and its OS and apps, most computer OSes, databases, medical records, transportation, communications—the list goes on—that many of us work on to put food on the table.
Also, let's be real - human written (and therefore copyrightable) code is dying already. When the machines can write anything on demand, why do you need a profit motive?
That's like asking why gardeners like to grow food and flowers in their backyards, or why hobbyists like to build furniture in their garages. Some people need a creative outlet. It doesn't mean that a lot of people won't grow food, flowers, or furniture for free, and that there's no demand for food, flowers, or furniture to be bought.
> When the machines can write anything on demand, why do you need a profit motive?
Machines still need humans to power them. They're like any other tools that need direction and guidance, by humans that possess the innate creativity.
> Machines still need humans to power them. They're like any other tools that need direction and guidance, by humans that possess the innate creativity.
Yes but ideas are not copyrightable, only the fixed expression of those ideas in (in this case) written form. If the actual writing of the code is delegated entirely to machines, then software copyrights are dead.
I am not aware of any open-source license which tries to approximate the "there is no copyright" situation:
- Such a license would not compulse you to publish the source code of any modification you make for it.
- Such a license would allow you to distribute compiled programs only.
- On the other hand, such a license must not restrict you to de-compile, modify or re-destribute any binaries built from the source code.
- But any such derivate of such a binary or source code would have to stay under the same license (this is a different kind of virality than "normal" viral licenses).
Public domain is something different from an emulation of "there is no copyright":
You can take public domain material to build some program binary:
- In the current legal system, you can enforce restrictions on the usage of this binary, and can forbid redistribution, reverse-engineering, ...
- In a "no copyright world", you cannot enforce such restrictions.
IAAL and am pretty familiar with U.S. copyright law, and am curious where support for this proposition in the law is found. Can you provide sources, please?
1. Take some CC0/public domain source code.
2. Build a binary out of it and sell licenses for your software.
Case study: SQLite's source code is public domain. On the other hand, it is embedded in many commercial software products that are sold - and you are not allowed to reverse-engineer the software or redistribute binaries of it. This would be possible/allowed in a no-copyright world.
Let's say you write some software for your employer and they sell the product to several customers with a contract not to distribute it. However, the product appears on some pirate website anyway, and you can't identify who allowed the product to be leaked. Once it's there, your contracts are worthless as nobody who downloads it from the pirate site will be bound by your contract. You need copyright laws to prevent subsequent distribution.
Without copyright laws, you'd then end up in the situation where people who paid for the software then are bound by the contract and would have to keep paying, and those who just downloaded it from a pirate site would be completely fine legally and could use the software with impunity. That would create a disincentive for anybody agreeing to buy the software and entering into a contract in the first place, essentially killing the industry.
You might not see a problem with that if you believe in Open Source, but most licences require copyright laws to exist to protect the software freedoms so that people don't just take the software and close source it.
Almost my entire career was spent on such custom software. The rest was internal software. And even that one I was doing as a contractor, so in a way we could argue it was custom software even there.
But there is far, far more in the world that just SaaS or internal only software. Sure, companies are generally shifting towards SaaS (in part because it allows them another way to combat piracy, but also to extract recurring revenue rather than one off purchases), but there's still plenty of software you can go out to the shop and buy. Most of that wouldn't exist without copyright laws, because those developers would have found some other way of making a living instead.
Not necessarily? Any infra software is invisible to the end consumer. It's bundled into the price the customer pays for what they see, but they themselves don't know or care about the former.
> there's still plenty of software you can go out to the shop and buy
... is there? I haven't bought software in a shop in 20 years at least. Outside of games, I don't really buy software digitally, even. It's either FOSS or it's a subscription.
But anyway, the method of software delivery is tangential to the main point. Plenty of software exists that runs locally, regardless of how is paid for - whether subscription or one-off purchases, if it runs on your computer it relies on copyright law to protect the revenue stream for the developers. Without copyright laws, if one physical sale could be freely copied with impunity, sales would be vastly diminished to the point that many developers would just not bother and find a different industry to work in to earn a salary.
Modern IP law inhibits productivity more than it helps, imo. LLMs have fundamentally changed our line of work, and they have done so by completely ignoring the existing legal framework for IP. We should not defend the current implementation just because some people might suffer reduced earning potential.
If you look at outcomes it has completely failed while making big corps very rich in the process
If you want permissive rules then corporations will just resell your IP (like we see with SaaS). And if you want tighter rules then you just create a higher barrier for entry that benefits corporations rather than independent entities.
Either way, it’s easier to operate when you already have a leading position.
Oh, and also put a hard cap on individual wealth while we're at it. No one, no matter how hard working, deserves a billion dollars. And no one should be trusted with that much power, it's too goddamn dangerous.
(The caps should be indexed to stuff like median income or wealth. Wanna get richer? There's a way: help everyone get richer. That way we're actually in this together.)
And outside open source there has been a staggering amount of creative work at all quality levels done for commercial purposes under the protection of copyright. Is there a convincing argument that the last century of software and music and books and etc would have been just as staggering without copyright?
I would love to hear such an argument. In my youth I thought copyright was blatantly stupid and should be abolished. I still sorta think that but I don't have a convincing argument in the face of the absolutely massive amount of good work that has been produced under it.
> I would love to hear such an argument.
Fortunately, one of the many tentacles of the octopus most obviously at the forefront of the zeitgeist of the freedom that arises from a culture of free information - The Grateful Dead - had the outcome of producing - in the form of gripping autobiography - an extremely compelling, and seemingly utterly true and beautiful and good, instrument to fulfill your request:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36750087-mother-american...
If you don't want to read a whole book and just want a stump speech which kicks ass in the department of argument you're requesting, it's here:
Yes, some people and companies benefit disproportionately, but those tend to be the ones who finance the process and bear the risk of loss due to failures and flops.
I'm not just shooting from the hip here.
You wrote "copyright is serving exactly nobody today." If that's not what you meant, choose your words more carefully next time. This is a forum of writing, and, much like songwriting, the right words and nuance matter.
To be frank, it sounds like you are part of the problem, and that your income may partly be derived from rent-seeking via the intellectual property regime. Is that correct?
> You wrote "copyright is serving exactly nobody today." If that's not what you meant, choose your words more carefully next time.
Well, I suppose it depends what sorts of engagement we can understand as "serving". By "serving", I do not mean merely enriching. Of course we all recognize that there are massive industries which are enriched by this system; where we may disagree is whether any actual services in rendered to the folks doing the writing and recording and touring in exchange for that enrichment.
At present, I think it's perfectly reasonable to observe that _musicians_ are not _served_ by this configuration. To the contrary, it has spawned a complicated system of publication, with many musicians facing the subpar customer service experience of services like distrokid and cdbaby facilitating distribution to services like spotify and apple music, while the RIAA and MPAA employ legal threats and harassment to the more musician-friendly DRM-free and direct-to-consumer counterparts.
I think it's also fair to say that, since the beginning of music, no musician ever has wanted a system whose function is to call the cops of their fans. And ultimately, that's what copyright is - it lets me send the cops in to fuck with fans who... try to share my music with their friends? It's awful from first principles, even if the implementation weren't as rotten as it is.
You said, "Except for nearly everyone who writes anything (including software) or other artistic pursuits to make a living" in response to this statement. So I think you have no leg to stand on in terms of demanding disambiguity; your statement is flatly and demonstrably false. Every musician I know (including, I'll bet, musicians you listen to) - and I'll bet, every one that you know too - has seething daily contempt for lawyers who make these asinine claims.
That is not correct. My current role is a technical one, not a legal one.
> where we may disagree is whether any actual services in rendered to the folks doing the writing and recording and touring in exchange for that enrichment.
Besides studio time, connections to expert studio musicians, producers, engineers, advances and royalties? You may think the amount of support is insufficient, but that's different from claiming it's zero.
> no musician ever has wanted a system whose function is to call the cops of their fans
Have you ever heard of Metallica, Dr. Dre, or Slipknot? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallica_v._Napster,_Inc.) While they didn't call the cops on their fans, they fought hard against businesses who facilitated mass copyright infringement and made it known they were vehemently against piracy. They took a lot of heat for it from entitled children, but the vast majority of fellow artists quietly supported them.
> Every musician I know (including, I'll bet, musicians you listen to) - and I'll bet, every one that you know too - has seething daily contempt for lawyers who make these asinine claims.
Of course they do, but they sure as shit aren't giving up their advances and royalty checks that feed themselves and their families.
I would humbly suggest you spend some time among professionals in Hollywood (music, movies, and TV). You'll learn a lot. There are entire neighborhoods--not just posh ones in the hills--of people who earn their daily bread in the industry. I know; I grew up among them. Middle class, salt-of-the-earth folks.
Well then I apologize for my presumption.
> Besides studio time, connections to expert studio musicians, producers, engineers, advances and royalties?
The first four of these have nothing to do with IP schemes and are widely available to those of us who grind not only our music but our social connections. I publish all of my music as CC0 or CC-BY-SA (and of course all DRM-free, as is nearly all bluegrass now), and I think my studio records and collaborations show quite clearly that I have not suffered from lack of access to top talent. If anything, the notoriety of my IP activism and development of p2p tools seems to have made me _more_ interesting to most of my favorite bluegrassers; I'm not sure I'd have been able to make either of my studio records without the good will that has come from this.
Royalties are obviously a complex topic with a strange history, but I see no reason to lose confidence that we can engineer a system by which funds flow form fans to musicians in a way that is at least as just (and is more direct) than royalties.
Advances are obviously an issue, I grant that. And it's not just the check getting cut, but the negotiating power from the label side to do the tour launch, get on the studio and mastering calendars, push to playlisters and radio stations, etc. - a lot of these activities are (in my opinion, cringely) crosswired with the systems of contracts and advances.
I have almost no familiarity with the motion picture industry, and only a passing connection to soundtrack musicians.
But I have repeatedly been shocked to find that even when one of my friends writes a big hit, they receive what seems to be a joke in terms of financial compensation.
Yes, of course Metallica made that fuss. But they didn't outwardly say, "we want our fans arrested" - they dressed up their complaint as a qualm toward an industry too tolerant to the presence of p2p file sharing (what today we might even call freedom of general purpose computing).
In other words, they kept the quiet part quiet. And in any case, if that's the closest thing we can picture to a band wanting to call the cops on their fans, I feel reasonably secure in my assessment.
Much of your comment seems designed to question why I want to take money out of the pockets of these entire neighborhoods of salt-of-the-earth folks. I don't. My contention - the obvious observation I believe - is that the framework of casting their work as intellectual property has impoverished rather than enriching them, and that a better way is coming.
If you stand on the east bank of the Cumberland and look west, I hope you notice that nearly all of the glitzy logos atop the high-rises are financial firms - Third Fifth, Wells Fargo - I can't immediately remember the rest. Obviously the batman building notwithstanding. :-)
The intensity of financial firms in and around downtown Nashville is a testament to how many billions have been diverted from their fan-=>artist path and have instead made their way into the pockets not only of studio execs, but their underwriters and insurers.
Since the internet seems wont to route around IP laws anyway, I feel strongly that we live at a moment of opportunity to right this wrong.
Some hit artists might disagree with you.
Besides, the ones who flopped don’t owe the rightsholders money from their own pockets. It’s not a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation for the artists. In some ways an advance is a better deal than a typical business loan. In fact, a business loan is a pretty good approximation of a typical early record deal. The challenge is that it’s often difficult to get artists to understand that.
> The intensity of financial firms in and around downtown Nashville is a testament to how many billions have been diverted from their fan-=>artist path and have instead made their way into the pockets not only of studio execs, but their underwriters and insurers.
Well, yeah. For every hit artist there are thousands of flops. Someone has to bear the risk of developing the artists, building repertoires, fronting the money to make first records, and marketing. It’s an axiom of capitalism that the party that takes the biggest financial risk gets the biggest share of the rewards.
I think what you’re really saying is that you think artists deserve a bigger share of the profits. That’s a fair position to hold, but it’s a rather differ one from the statements I was previously responding to.
Are you sure about that?
So just to be clear;
You're advocating for the end of software licensing? Ie the removal of GPL or Open Source licenses? A landscape where any source code (or binary) can be snapped up by say Amazon or Microsoft and run via a paid subscription?
You're advocating for a business model which removes your access to local code and only allows access via a terminal or browser?
Because removal of copyright doesn't mean corporations go away. Rather it incentivizes business models that protect their products in other ways.
In the 80's and 90's, pre-internet, binary programs were distributed on media. An arms race of copiers and copy protection ensued. The copiers won, and since copyright enforcement has always been weak, business changed to favoring remote access (with subscription) over running locally via purchase.
At the same time Open Source and Free Software have thrived. Copyright protects that software being used outside the terms of the license. Indeed there's even outrage when it's used within the terms of the license (by AWS etc.)
Of course OSS still thrives under a copyrightless environment. (Free Software less so). But equally it means AI can simply be trained on it (probably no great loss since it's likely most of OSS will be AI generated anyway.)
Business however will adapt. And the easiest way to prevent coping now is simply remote execution. With a suitable Terms Of Use declaration.
Outside of software it would destroy music, movies, books etc. Basically it becomes a race to the bottom in terms of production costs (think user-generated You-Tube as the high-water mark.) But I assume you meant in the context of software.
Yes, I agree, that in much less than 1000 years copyright is dead. Because by then so much is in the public domain it doesn't matter anyway. Also because by then the last human programmer is long dead. AI will write anything you want, only you won't even ask because computer interfaces and abilities will be long past where we are now. You would have no need to create software any more than you need to build a plane or car today.
And those industries have taken less than 150 years to invent, explode, consolidate and commoditize. Indeed most of the complexity disappears when we go EV.
In 1000 years copyright is gone. But today it serves a lot of people.
As a budding wannabe fiction author, I certainly hope you are wrong.
Intellectual property serves corporate interests and the idea of "nations" you are forced to have in your head are the exclusive servants the interests of capital. Ironically, tragically, that's what's holding us back from dismantling it in the first place, even a critic of it can't articulate it properly.
Sorry that will be undecipherable for HN. Let me try again: The defense you get in this pigstall is the individual that copyright is protecting. You just hate the small businesses and individual artists. Instead of the trillion dollar industry holding the copyrights and the practice of exploiting copyright on works by authors who died decades ago. The commodification of copyright of something produced by the lowest bidder, crappiest AI and cheapest third world labor you can get your literal bloody hands on. Or even a vaccine against the literal plague or cure for cancer protected by intellectual property.
To make something immaterial with no cost to reproduce, a commodity, to trade and invest and speculate in is the part to argue if you want to dismantle it, identify the rotten bits of the system even peasants can smell. If you are a billionaire or even trillionaire then just argue like everybody on HN always does, because it's identical.