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EFF to Courts: Don’t Rewrite Copyright Over AI Hype (www.eff.org)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1372994/eff-to-courts-dont-rewrite-copyright-over-ai-hype

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[–] 20 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I mean, you are describing modern copyright.

But copyright is an example of something where the US Constitution, at least, explicitly says its purpose is to "promote" something:

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

I like how straightforward the Copyright Clause is. It even gives a testable standard. The length of "exclusive Right" for IP should be the "limited" length of time that "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

So, the plain reading here is that IP laws need to give exclusivity long enough to encourage creation, by making authors and inventors think it is worth the time and money investment, but not so long that they discourage creation, for example, where a person doesn't create something because they are afraid of violating IP laws.

Originally, in the US, copyright lasted 14 years, with an option for renewing for 14 more years, and this is one example where I think they got it about right.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 weeks ago* (1 child)

    The problem is that it specifies both a purpose

    • To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts

    and a mechanism by which to do so

    • by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

    The purpose is great, the mechanism is dogshit in the 21st century, as it just lazily crams information into capitalism rather than adapting capitalism to the realities of information.

    The problem is that capitalism is a system entirely based around things that are scarce, and it only functions in that context. Air for instance is completely free and valueless, even though it's wildly critical, just because it is abundant. In capitalism things don't have value when they are useful or needed, just when they are scarce.

    That works fine-ish when you mostly deal in physical goods, because the way that energy and mass scale means that they are somewhat inherently scarce, it takes just as much mass/energy to make a second copy as the first. Information blows this apart though, starting with the written word, escalating with the printing press, and being oblitered in the digital connected age, as information does not scale like energy / mass and as a result it has become trivial to infinitely copy and distribute information, making it abundant the moment it's digitized.

    So now you have the Constitution enshrining mechanisms that enforce scarcity where there is absolutely no need for scarcity.

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