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In the past, many developers were against copyright law because they saw it as a way for big corps to stifle competition and curb creativity in order to increase their profits. A lot of people right now invoke the violation of the same copyright law because the tide has changed and now companies, by ignoring copyright law, are hurting artists/smaller companies and/or not contributing back or unlawfully closing the code in the case of GPL.

I don't see any kind of hypocritical stance here honestly. All this time the criticism of the enforcement of copyright law or now the lack of it just reflects the fact that some people are genuinely concerned that bad actors(big corps) are using the law to damage society in order to pursue their own interests.

Most people in my social circles are various flavours of anti-AI, and it drives me crazy how many of them, who were once stridently anti-copyright, are now using copyright as one of the great pillars of AI opposition

Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry, that is until they started doing it themselves at scale and now they are claiming it’s the law that’s broken, it’s crazy.

Basically a rage bait. If the law was bad, does it make it okay to violate it? In fact Anthropic is literally paying $1.5B on the copyright settlement, that indicates its completely a settled issue that AI companies have been violating this law. Some have been caught and fined, others are been lucky or that influence over the government.

> Copyright Law Was Built for Human Scale

No where in the law it has this kinda scoped limits. It has a time limit and scale doesnt not matter. Scale matter in a way that its gets harder to enforces buts that not the fault of copyright law. If you steal at a big scale, its still stealing.

Sorry...what?

Money, money broke copyright.

Remember the DMCA?

The law (and the system/society) generally serves capital, instead of humans. That's why big corporations can both use copyright against smaller companies and individual creators, while also ignoring the same copyright laws when it suits them.

I think this is unjust. As we see capital concentrate, we see more injustice as the power balance becomes more lopsided. This isn't good for anyone, not even the super wealthy because it undermines the stability of the whole system upon which their wealth depends.

Copyright law has always been excessively restrictive, and is long overdue for reform. The informal practices that people have been following (i.e. free creation and distribution but no monetization and no confusion with official releases) are pretty close to what a reasonable law would state.

Personally I feel that the excessive duration of copyright just weakens authors arguments against AI.

If even WWII-era documents are still under copyright, building a model respecting that would be impossible.

The article fundamentally misrepresents what AI is doing.

It claims that people using AI to create works that violate copyright is equivalent to individual artists painting pictures or people writing fan fiction. But that is not at all what is happening.

OpenAI and others are taking money from customers to generate copyrighted works. That's back-letter copyright infringement.

The states that it is unreasonable to go after all the individual customers. That's true, but that's not how copyright law has ever been enforced. If you have a company selling copyrighted works without permission, you go after that company not after their customers.

The argument here is founded on motivated reasoning.

Copyright was founded on similar principles to property rights, it encourages desirable economic by ensuring investment in RnD doesn’t have a free-rider disincentive. Whether it’s the right tool for the job and how enforcement carries out its a another matter. While these laws for property and IP aren’t without issues they do address actual problems.

Personally I would be more open to the idea of open AI flouting copy rights if they weren’t planning on taking a portion of the claim of other peoples creations used via the product while failing to properly compensate the sources of its training data.

Always have been broken.

Hopefully, future legislation will cater less to publishers and copyright trolls. I'm not optimistic though. While certain kinds of publishers are indeed becoming less powerful, sports-related media conglomerates are successfully lobbying for more surveillance.

The general population will likely get the worst of both worlds, with copyright trolls getting to enforce unjust laws against regular people, while big tech gets to pay their way out.

This is a particularly well written article. Plaudits to poster and original writer. It took me from no clue to a context or sieve I could organize the noise through. And darn it, it made it look easy. Like the John Daily line it's so good I'm mad. Sheesh, thanks a lot!

copyright is not “broken,” it was always a two-faced scam designed to protect “owners” at the expense of creators. don’t expect this blatant hypocrisy to kill copyright, either - death of copyright is a slippery slope leading straight to communist utopia, and the death of the global acqui-parasite class

Not copywrite but the whole democracy is broken. A big company with an army of lawyers and an OS project will claim exactly the same case. Who has more probability to win? It happens in every occasion, it's just that copywrite ones are more common. Only when two giants collide justice is rendered, eg Oracle vs Google over Java on Android.

> AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

"I twist the truth, i rule the world"...

Tell this to kids raided by BSA for downloading pirated Microsoft and Adobe programms.

I’m happy with what’s happening.

It never made sense to me that just because you drew a shitty picture of a mouse, somehow I’m no longer allowed to do that.

laws that were already broken can still be broken. AI exposed how broken copyright law was. AI companies also broke (and continue to break) that law

> If you paint a picture of Sonic the Hedgehog in your living room, you are technically creating an unauthorized derivative work

Is this even true? It might violate a trademark, but I don't think it would violate copyright law unless it was a copy of an existing picture.

IMHO AI generated content should be treated the same way with how human generated content and I don't see the problem. However as with technology the problem is a bit different, e.g.: When subletting your apartment requires manual effort, this is not a problem. Automated, it became an industry and that's a huge headache. I think this is the key point where the derived work has unlimited possibility that they want to curb it early on. In a way it's a fair effort to keep human's competitiveness but may prove to be futile.

"AI did break copyright law and by doing that exposed how broken it was."

Fixed that for you.