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Benn Jordan is a musician who is probably one of the most critical of the current copyright regime in his space. For context, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4

Copyright exists to enrich the interests of the publishers of a work, not the artists they funded. A long time ago, copyright was a sufficient legal tool to bring publishers to artists' heels, but no longer. Long copyright terms and the imbalance of power between different wealthy interests allowed publishers to usurp and alienate artists' ownership over their work. And the outsized amount of commercial interest in current generative AI tools comes down to the fact that publishers believe they can use them to strip what little ownership interest authors have left. What Benn is doing is looking for new tools to bring publishers to heel.

IP is fundamentally a social contract, subject to perpetual renegotiation through action and counter-action. If you told any game publisher in the early 2000s, during the height of the Napster Wars, that they'd be proudly allowing randos on the Internet to stream video of their games being played, they'd laugh in your face. But people did it anyway, and everyone in the games biz realized it's not worth fighting people who are adding to your game. Even Nintendo, notorious IP tightwads as they are, tried scraping micropennies off the top of streamers and realized it's a fool's errand.

The statement Benn is making is pretty clear. You can either...

- Negotiate royalties for, and purchase training data from, actual artists, who will then in exchange give you high-quality training data, or,

- Spend increasing amounts of time fighting to filter an increasingly polluted information ecosystem to have a model that only sorta kinda replicates the musical landscape of the late 2010s.

A lot of us are reflexively inclined to hate on anything "copyright-shaped" because of our experiences over the past few decades. Publishers wanted to go back to the days of copyright being a legal tool of arbitrary and capricious punishment. But that doesn't mean that everything that might fall afoul of copyright law is automatically good or that generative AI companies are trying to liberate creativity. They're trying to monopolize it, just like Web 2.0 "disintermediation" was turned into "here's five websites with screenshots of the other four". That's why so much money is being poured into these companies and why a surprisingly nonzero amount of copyright reformists also have deeply negative opinions of AI.

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constantcrying 5 days ago | parent [-]

I am not against IP because it does or doesn't benefit artists. I am against the idea because it does not make sense. It gives ownership and control over imaginary things to people, a song you create and public isn't "yours". You do not get to decide what others do with it and how they use it.

I believe that artists see the current IP laws critically, of course they do as it directly impacts how they finance themselves and how they bargain. But I do not care how good/bad the bargain for the artist is. IP laws should be abolished regardless of what artists want.

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kmeisthax 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Every kind of property is imaginary. Yes, physical property has an element of physical possession, but that's not enough legal infrastructure to, say, rent that property out for a recurring fee that must be paid on pain of eviction or repossession. All of that has to be enforced by violence dealt by the state, which renders it just as "imaginary" as the copyright laws that are also backed purely by the fact that the state allows authors to call down the full force of the US government on people that infringe their copyright.

What you are mad about is not imaginary-ness, but centralization[0]. Any critique of law should be done on this yardstick - i.e. is that law protecting the interests of the many, or the few?

In prior decades, ordinary people did not have to care about copyright law, which is why the bargain was tolerable then: copyright took money out of the pockets of the few (publishers) and gave it to the many (authors). But now that publishers figured out how to buy up all the valuable assets and you can practically enforce copyright on individuals, the system has changed to one that takes money from the people at-large and puts it in the pockets of about four publishers. On that basis alone you can argue for abolishing copyright[1] because it no longer serves the interests of the public.

Now, let's look at the business model of AI companies. AI compute is hideously expensive, and so every company involved is already a highly centralized tech monopoly. And with only a few exceptions the largest models are all jealously protected trade secrets you're only allowed to access through heavily monitored APIs. Models with published weights do exist, but they are invariably either too big to run on most hardware or lag in capability and performance. The practical fact of the matter is that most people will use AI - even open models - through inferencing servers ultimately owned by tech monopolies. This is a deeply, incredibly centralizing force.

And, unlike copyright, trade secrecy is one of those few IP laws[2] that aren't completely imaginary. It's rooted in possession, just like physical property rights are. The "no imaginary rights" argument still gets us horrible tech monopolies that can censor or marginalize you.

[0] aka "wealth inequality"

[1] What you replace it with is a separate question, but again, Benn Jordan wants socialized ownership.

[2] "Laws that allow you to dictate the conduct of your competitors"

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voidhorse 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

But that's precisely the problem—while in theory the ideal is good, it is impractical unless you fundamentally change the economic model.

Artists rely on some form of IP to help secure payment for their creative works. They need this payment to be able to afford their own subsistence so that they can continue to live and create.

In an alternative system, maybe you could abolish all forms of IP outright, but how will you do that under capitalism while sustaining (already impoverished) artists?

If you are against the principle of IP, you are essentially saying that an entire segment of capital should be deactivated, and effectively the only jobs remaining would be those of active service/tangible goods. In the age of digital media, basically everything is instantly and infinitely replicable, so you are effectively asking for a world in which it becomes rapidly impossible to make money off of any kind of digital good (music, literature, film, software, etc.) This has an obvious material consequence of disincentivizing creation of these works simply because if the creators need to earn wages in tangible good/service markets they have strictly less time to devote to the creation of creative works.

	▲	constantcrying 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		>In the age of digital media, basically everything is instantly and infinitely replicable, so you are effectively asking for a world in which it becomes rapidly impossible to make money off of any kind of digital good (music, literature, film, software, etc.) Plainly false. YouTube clearly proves this wrong. You can be funded by your fans. Besides, if you are a musician and get just tens of thousands of plays on Spotify you are basically not making any money of it. Only extremely few artists make any kind of money of the copyright of their songs. Already distribution rights are near worthless. Again. I am not opposed to IP rights because of what artists want or do not want.