Copyright (or IP law more broadly) does a variety of things, good and bad. I’d like to see us keep the good and ditch the bad.

The good:

1. Accurate attribution. It’s important to know who actually came up with something, so you can continue the conversation with them.
2. Faithful replication. It’s important to know what the canonical version of a thing looks like, so you can identify what has changed about any derivatives.

Until AI, these were pretty trivial concerns.

You could easily Google something to find out who made it. And computers produce exact copies by default, so how likely are you to run into a malformed approximation of the original thing?

But now, these are both under serious threat.

The bad:

1. Keeping culture and knowledge away from people who could do something with it, until they pay up.
2. Preventing interoperability.
3. Coercing authors into signing over the rights to their concepts, so they can’t continue working on them unless it’s profitable for the rights-holders.

You’ll notice I left out the most obvious thing: “It gives creators a legal monopoly to prevent them getting out-competed by wealthy vulture corporations copying them.”

That’s cuz as long as they can pre-emptively force creators to sign over the rights, copyright doesn’t protect creators — it does the opposite.

I think AI only gets rid of the good parts of copyright, while doing nearly nothing about the bad parts.

We desperately need copyright reform. But it should not be rewritten by big AI interests.

I think the end of the torrent of ai slop is the better thing at the moment. I don’t hate the underlying concept behind copyright, protect the people who create a thing for a limited amount of time. The problem is when those limits are lobbied to be extended over and over and the laws are used as a bludgeon by corporations against individuals.

If I were to fix copyright to something equitable:

1. Copyrights must be held by a singular person, no corporations, no estates, no organizations, none of that. If an elderly creator dies while in control of a copyright then it goes to next of kin until it expires. If corporations want protection for logos and corporate designs, that’s what a trademark is for.

2. copyrights last for 30 years, that’s plenty of time to profit off of a work, but not so long that multiple generations lose out on the creative potential of that work being in the societal consciousness.

3. Copyright damages cannot be calculated by some theoretical loss of profits to the copyrifht holder. The damages are some significant portion of revenue made by the offending party.