I think it’s fine to criticize the hypocrisy of viciously defending the copyrights you own, while gleefully running roughshod over the ones you don’t.

But it’s also possible that copyright as a concept, or in its current implementation, is bad and unjust.

I’m sure some copyright holders would like nothing more than to see an argument that elevates copyright violation to the level of murder, morally or legally. But I think it’s more akin to jaywalking - violating an unjust law that mostly shouldn’t exist.

the reform needs to happen at the layer where whether a copyright is valid or not is decided upon, not before (at the point of "should copyright exist") and not after (enforcement).

a world without copyright means those with the largest advertising budgets will reap nearly all the rewards from new IP created by small artists. BigCorp Inc. can just sit around and wait for talented musicians to post something interesting on soundcloud, for example, then just have their in-house people copy it and push it out to radio and streaming platforms via their massive ad budgets and favorable relationships for getting new material onto the waves immediately. meanwhile the original artist gets nothing.

the position of advocating against all copyright protections at all only makes sense for people who are already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from their art to survive.

I don’t think this is true. At least in music, bands make far more money from touring and merch than they do from music sales.

If copyright disappeared altogether, most smaller artists would be just fine because they have loyal fans and adjacent monetization strategies.

See: Grateful Dead. They did just fine despite encouraging infringement of IP.

IMO copyright mostly serves to protect the very biggest artists and companies, not the small ones.

I think the point was that the big corporations get the money from selling music.

And saying that bands currently make more money from touring kind of proves the point. They get too low % cut of music sales.

But the point of the response is that "getting money from selling music" is, in digital era, artificial scarcity. I.e. the copyright laws that big corporations are lobbying for continued enforcement and tightening, are the very thing that create this artificial scarcity that they are best positioned to profit off.

Cut out copyright, and no one will be getting any money from selling music per copy (or equivalent) - as it should be.

digital music is not artificial scarcity, because it's not the copied bits that are the resource, it's attention. we only have so much time and attention for consuming media, and only so much attention and memory space in our brains for keeping track of where to find it. large budgets can easily dominate these channels and limit the average person's apparent choice.

this is what I mean when large players would outcompete smaller players in a digital marketplace with no copyright. the only way for this to work would be with a benevolent neutral 3rd party managing the marketplace, like Steam, so users can easily see when a large player is cloning a smaller players work - but even then it still depends on the good will of the general public to prefer the "original" artist which is not guaranteed.

Are you talking about mere distribution? In that case, a few large players leveraging scale to drive costs down to near zero sounds great.

I’m still not seeing how lack of copyright hurts small artists or consumers. Small distributors, maybe, but that’s not doing harm to the arts.

> the position of advocating against all copyright protections at all only makes sense for people who are already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from their art to survive.

This makes it sound like the majority of people produce more content than they consume.

The reality is that 99.99999% of people do not produce "art", let alone with the intention of living of it.

Whatever harms you might envision for the tiny minority who do want to try living off copyright, those concerns are dwarfed by the benefits for the rest of us.

Further, not many people who are serious about reform are literally "advocating against all copyright" A reform that simply curbed the duration to something less insane than 150 years would resolve much of what makes copyright bad, even if it continued to exist.

Cain was severely punished.

וְעַתָּ֖ה אָר֣וּר אָ֑תָּה מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר פָּצְתָ֣ה אֶת־פִּ֔יהָ לָקַ֛חַת אֶת־דְּמֵ֥י אָחִ֖יךָ מִיָּדֶֽךָ׃ Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.

https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.4.12

Jack the Ripper killed people and got away with it!!! Happy?

Better! Thanks.

But the crime is creating something new. If laws are enforced that criminalise creation, then the world will be rather static.

It seems to be a consistent direction of history's arc that the people who make it easy to create and innovate get ahead.

We don’t allow indiscriminate human experimentation in medicine. We have crimes against this, and yet we still have new medicines. Sure, it won’t be as quick if we could just use humans as test subjects from the start, but that’s an unethical line. Innovation done immorally is progress that shouldn’t have been made. The ends don’t justify the means, but I’m not an ethical nihilist.

The crime is downloading and copying and distributing copyrighted materials! Not creating the LLM! Get the crime right

Those medical policies have condemned thousands, possibly millions, to lives of unnecessary pain and suffering. They're more damaging than copyright.

You actually don’t know that. The question would be, what proportion of human experiments are successful, and you don’t know the answer to that question, so the victims of experiments could dwarf the beneficiaries of successful research. That’s always the hard thing with basic utilitarianism.

1) It is an experiment. The point is to test something that nobody is sure about. Whether the result is expected or unexpected there isn't really such a thing as "unsuccessful"; even duplication of work is considered useful.

2) If you think the cost-benefits are bad, my advice is don't sign up to be experimented on. Nobody has to be experimented on if they don't want to be.

1) Experiments, by their nature, must spend resources in order to produce tangible results. In this case the relevant results are saved lives, and the expenditure is often going to be lives. You framed your comment in these terms, I’m arguing the costs very well may not be justifiable by the benefits. You’d need to make a case for that.

2) What if the families of experimentees receive payment? Allowing that would be a short way down the slippery slope from allowing the experimentation, and would make the matter of consent more difficult to assess.

Ok, I’ll go tell the Nazis that their medical experiments using live humans were A-OK!!!