I’m not a big fan of patents and copyright. Since I’m not an inventor I’d specifically say software patents. I just generally don’t like the idea of someone trying to put something in the open and still somehow hoard it for themselves. An idea or concept is really only yours until it gets published for others to see. After that it’s out and if one isn’t okay with that then it should’ve probably not been published in the first place. I get that if someone puts a lot of effort into developing something then he probably wants something for that as a compensation which a patent can ensure by giving the inventor a timed exclusive right to produce and sell their idea. But this isn’t about patents.
It’s about copyright. Something that for some reason seems to be quite a touchy subject for a lot of people. Some seem to think that they’re ideas are so important that no one should be allowed to do anything with them. I have been on some websites that disable text selection, the right-click context menu and the ctrl+c shortcut and instead open a dialog with an insulting message that reminds the user that all the content is copyrighted. I really can’t imagine what one has to smoke to become this retarded. It obviously also doesn’t actually stop anyone with half a working brain from copying anything. I understand that people would like to retain some kind of ownership over the things they create but copyright really isn’t something that helps all that much. Sure you can file a DMCA take down notice, which, depending on the infraction might or might not work, but in general the average small musician, artist or writer really shouldn’t have to worry too much about people copying your stuff. In general if you’re not one of the really big shots your stuff will most likely not be available via the usual means of pirating because those only work effectively with really popular stuff. In turn if your stuff does end up on the internet for free you should probably just take that as a compliment. It means your shit is popular enough for someone to bother saving and re-uploading it. If you personally get involved in getting it taken down you’re no only fighting against windmills you run the risk of pissing people off. Generally if you make it easy enough for people to purchase and access your content via legitimate means so they can support you (that means no bullshit DRM or region locks) you’ve done the most you can do. Anyone who still pirates your stuff might at some point consider to throw some money your way or he would’ve never given you money, regardless of whether or not the option of pirating existed. So it’s best to just consider pirating a form of advertisement to get your stuff out to more people. If you want to get really fancy you could even do what some indie game developers have done and publish the first torrent yourself so you can bundle it with a readme that nicely asks people to consider buying a copy. Anyways that’s just my two cents in regards to Copyright and pirating. Plagiarism obviously is something else. If people take your shit and just claim it’s theirs then that is something different. I don’t think that getting angry about that is a particularly good use of time either but at least you’d be in the right.
So I think that copyright and the incessant fight against piracy is stupid. I also think that copyright really only is useful for two things. The first one is pretty obvious. It’s a way for giant corporations to try and maximize their profits. Hollywood and the music industry are the main two culprits of this. They want to make sure that they have full control over how people can access their ,,intellectual property’’. So they spend millions of dollars on lawyers and lawsuits to fight against piracy to make sure that the average user only has one official way to access their movies and music. At the same time they can then change the rules of the game to their liking. Initially they’d sell you a tape that you could watch, lend and copy however you pleased. Then they introduced DRM to physical media which tried to restrict the copying. After the pivot to digital content distribution they then gained the ability to also clamp down on lending and controlling how you can access the media. Now copyright and lawsuits have never fully stopped pirating, it just kept it at bay (hah). With how there’s now dozens of streaming services and people losing access to media when they shutdown or lose a license it seems to slowly dawn on some people that this entire thing of streaming and DRM is stupid and that things used to work better. Sure you didn’t have access to the same amount of content but at least you didn’t have to deal with bullshit like not getting the highest video quality because you’re using a normal web browser instead of some fucking garbage smart TV. The other use for copyright is that people can use it to nuke unsavory stuff off the internet. See the rampant DMCA abuse on YouTube. YouTube takes basically all reports at face value; removes content first and asks questions later. That’s basically what they had to agree on years ago. Had they not bent the knee back then the music and movie industry would’ve leveled the website to the ground. This obviously doesn’t just happen on YouTube. There are plenty of people who file DMCA complaints against any website that has any information (usually pictures or videos) on them that they don’t like and there’s not much one can do unless they want to get entangled in a stupid lawsuit that has to argue for the umpteenth time what fair use is.
I’m not an artist. I’m at best a mediocre software developer so what I create aren’t artistic masterpieces but rather a bunch of boring indecipherable piles of text. In general programmers seem to be a lot less anal about copyright compared to artists. Maybe that’s just my biased opinion. With free software and similar movements it’s just very normal that things get shared around freely. Copying is encouraged. That’s how most people get started in the first place. With music, images and videos that’s not quite as easy. Artists usually, if at all, share the finished product. The song, the drawing or the movie. Those finished versions can’t easily be picked apart into their original puzzle pieces anymore. Technically the same holds true for finished programs and applications but that’s why we also share the source code. From my experience artists very rarely share the project files. Probably because it’s not feasible, but they usually also do not share stems, image layers or raw video footage. The sharing of source code doesn’t translate that well into the artistic realm, but that isn’t that important since artists have managed to remix things just fine it’s just that the process of sharing, copying and modifying doesn’t seem as prevalent to me as it is in software development.
This brings me to the last topic in relation to copyright. As I’ve said I think that Copyright benefits large corporations while being essentially useless to everyone else. Most artists are basically forced to publish their music on the large streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, etc. even though they all pay like dog shit compared to something like Bandcamp. On top of that there’s the fact that a few labels basically own most of the music. Enter LLMs. It’s a tired old song at this point, so I’ll keep it quick. Artificial intelligence every now and then makes a large jump forward. We’re currently going through another one of those. So now we have text generators that can generate helpful answers and convincing bullshit. Cool. We also have image generators that can create quick concept art, hilariously offensive memes and copy almost every artists style while struggling to put the right amount of fingers on a hand and we have models that can create stupid songs with dumb lyrics with just a few instructions. You can find all of this impressive, annoying, extremely worrying, funny or boring but there’s one question that arises from it: What about the copyright? Who owns the generated content? If I recall correctly it has already been ruled at least once that the generated content can’t be copyrighted. But what about the copyrighted content used for the training? This one is interesting since I feel that copyright is stupid ant should be abolished. This stance has for years been the complete opposite of big corporations because they profit from copyright. Now suddenly there’s this new technology that requires huge amounts of data for training and almost all of the available data is copyrighted. So now we have big corporations fighting against each other. We have Universal Music, Sony etc. against Udio and Suno arguing about whether using music to train AI models for generating music is ok. We have YouTube and Reddit against OpenAI arguing whether using text and video content to train ChatGPT is ok and we have artists against OpenAI and others arguing whether using images for training image models is ok. All three of those issues basically ask the same question: Is it copyright infringement to use copyrighted material for training machine learning models? On both sides are big heavyweights that have millions to burn on lawsuits. It’s hard to guess what the outcome will be but I assume it will not benefit individual artists. The training data does not appear verbatim in the resulting models. At the same time the models can recreate some of the (alleged) training images with pretty good accuracy. Then again a skilled artist could as well without it being copyright infringement. My hope is that this destroys copyright to the point where it becomes useless to big corporations and DMCA abusers but there’s also a very real chance that it will result in special exceptions for a hand full of big corporations so they can keep training their models while the music and movie industry can continue their crusade against ownership. Only time will tell.