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Comment by denkmoon | Hacker News Reader

yeah I wouldn't be able to put food on the table if my employer didn't have exclusive license to the glue we use to stick together all that open source code we rely on. Which we now generate exclusively using AI, products of which are of unclear copyright status.

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.

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Copyright was not designed to maximize productivity. It was designed to maximize creativity and inventiveness (or, as stated in the US Constitution, the progress of science and the useful arts).

> t was designed to maximize creativity and inventiveness

If you look at outcomes it has completely failed while making big corps very rich in the process

Linux is a marvel of the world and a large amount of its contributions have been made by people being paid to do so for commercial purposes - and I am not sure that would be true without the GPL. Is there a convincing argument there?

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.

> 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.

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLbqgG6o1n8

Unfortunately that will happen irrespective of the law.

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.

Then just outlaw big corps. Put a hard cap on company size or capital, possibly on a per-domain basis. Or just put what has to be big infrastructure under direct state control. Worked wonders in practice in France.

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.)

Nonsense. Thousands of new TV shows, songs, and apps that come out every year and put food on the table for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that help produce them.

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.

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