"This website" is a diverse bunch of people with diverse goals and policy positions. Please don't make generalizations.
Copyright in its current form is ridiculous, but I support some (much-pared-back) version of copyright that limits rights further, expands fair use, repeals the DMCA, and reduces the copyright term to something on the order of 15-20 years (perhaps with a renewal option as with patents).
I've released a lot of software under the GPL, and the GPL in its current form couldn't exist without copyright.
martin-t · 29m ago
Current copyright is too strong in terms of length but too weak in terms of derived work. Well, pending some lawsuits, perhaps.
What copyright should do is protect individual creators, not corporations. And it should protect them even if their work is mixed through complex statistical algorithms such as LLMs.
LLMs wouldn't be possible without _trillions_ of hours of work by people writing books, code, music, etc. they are trained on. The _millions_ of hours of work spent on the training algorithm itself, the chat interface, the scraping scripts, etc. is barely a drop in the bucket.
There is 0 reason the people who spent mere millions of hours of work should get all the reward without giving anything to the rest of the world who put in trillions of hours.
monetus · 22m ago
Indefinite royalties on Spotify are one thing, but how are they supposed to work in neural nets? Dividing equal share based on inputs would require the company to potentially expose proprietary information. Basing it on outputs could make sense as well I suppose, but would take some slightly ridiculous work for an arguable result.
Your point remains, but the problem of the division of responsibility and financial credit doesn't go away with that alone. Do you know if the openAI lawsuits have laid this out?
__loam · 1h ago
The top comment in this thread is about deprecating copyright
izacus · 57m ago
And the dumb strawman the post is answering to isnt.
bruce511 · 2h ago
Simplistically yes, because many see copyright as the thing that protects corporate interest from the social hacker.
The reality of course is more complicated. Without copyright there's no GPL. Which I guess is fine if you're in the OSS camp more than the FSF camp. MIT and BSD licenses basically (functionally) give up copyright.
Copyright is also what allows for hybrids like the BSL which protect "little guys" from large cloud providers like AWS etc.
Copyright allows VC startups to at least start out life as Open Source (before pivoting later.)
Of course thus is all in the context of software copyright. Other copyrights (music, books etc) are equally nuanced.
And there are other forms of IP protections as well (patents, trademarks) which are distinct from the copyright concept.
So no, I don't think most people here are against copyright (patents are a different story.)
tokai · 1h ago
GPL was always about fighting the system with its own tools. The end goal is not good licenses but free software as a baseline.
kelnos · 1h ago
How else would you enforce Free Software, though? Without copyright, I cannot release the source to my software and require anything of any recipient.
It would be nice of FOSS was the baseline, but I don't see that ever happening, especially in a world without an enforcement mechanism.
Karliss · 19m ago
That's the thing you don't need to enforce anything if there is no law which forbids you from doing things. It's the copyright law which restricts you from doing most of the things that GPL license gives you permission. GPL gives you back the rights to copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any GPL licensed software you receive. Without copyright law you could copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any software you receive.
Sure having source code would be nice, but then again half the software nowadays is using electron and written in javascript anyway. Also plenty of examples of hardware manufacturers using software/firmware copyright as excuse and making legal threats to people who have made their own software to control hardware they bought even though they didn't have access to original source code.
There are probably more examples of people reverse engineering an reimplementing or decompiling large nontrivial software than there examples of companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library (as opposed to avoiding the GPL licensed code or violating the GPL by not releasing the source code).
martin-t · 2m ago
> companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library
Does not mean that GPL is ineffective. IT forces them to reimplement the functionality, thus giving copyleft more time to compete with them. Imagine if they were to free to take all public code and just use it. They would always be ahead and open source products wouldn't stand a chance competing.
Not to mention I feel like GPL being so strong is why big companies pretend to love open source but permissive licenses so much - to drown out the GPL competition they hate so much and to attract more developers to permissive rather than copyleft open source projects.
ronsor · 1h ago
1. I'm OK with no GPL if there's no copyright, because then proprietary programs can be copied and reverse engineered without restrictions from law or EULAs.
2. I generally don't like the BSL.
3. No comment. I think OSS projects that exist incidentally versus being the company's main product have always been more reliable (and less susceptible to the company pivoting to closed-only offerings).
4. Copyright has perhaps been the most evil in the music industry; books, less so. I'd rather not even talk about movies or TV right now. Nonetheless, I'd tolerate an extremely limited duration copyright, if no copyright at all isn't an option.
5. Trademarks are mostly fine, because they're primarily supposed to serve customers, not the companies. I'd like to get rid of patents now, however.
latexr · 2h ago
No? Copyright reform, sure, copyright abolished, maybe, but an uncertain future which may result in worse laws overall? Not really.
redwall_hp · 2h ago
Also consider that Thomas and Alito dissented in the Google/Oracle ruling, and wrote something inflammatory, to the effect of it being unreasonable that Google was being allowed to infringe upon Oracle's copyrighted code (by implementing a compatible API). And that was before the Supreme Court was stacked with more like-minded people.
Not having sensible people steering copyright in a direction toward winding down its scope is being paired with a court that's likely to make it far more draconian, and create some massive problems that will be a problem for software development.
standardUser · 1h ago
Reform comes through legislation, not through executive incompetence and malfeasance.
unsnap_biceps · 2h ago
There's a huge difference between "We don't want copyrights" and "We're just going to have no one enforcing laws for a random period of time and it's unknown if there will be historic enforcement activities if/when that changes"
qingcharles · 2h ago
"This website" is a sweeping statement for a group of people who have a wide range of views on this.
If I was to guess, I would imagine most on here believe in some copyright, and not total anarchy.
welder · 1h ago
You're confusing Copyright (implementation) with Patent (idea).
We don't like gatekeeping ideas because many people have the same ideas.
eikenberry · 2h ago
Reform would be best, abolishment would be better and status quo would be worst. Of course there's always making things even worse... but we're talking about what people want, not what might happen.
chisleu · 2h ago
Not this way
ronsor · 2h ago
Copyright is finally being deprecated as it should be.
I'm still waiting for an update on the final removal timeline.
heavyset_go · 1h ago
> Copyright is finally being deprecated as it should be.
If you hide behind corporations and have millions of dollars, sure, but not for us normies it isn't.
kelnos · 1h ago
That's a dangerous assumption to make. Dropping staffing levels at the US copyright office doesn't change the law. The next administration (or even this one, given how fickle Trump can be) may ramp up enforcement again and go after people committing violations during the current period.
And it's not like copyright outside the US is a wild west; most national and international copyright regimes in the developed world are based on the US's system (often because the US has strong-armed other countries to comply).
analog31 · 1h ago
How does the copyright office enforce the law?
Brian_K_White · 22m ago
They don't have to. youtube and every other company are doing it for them, only without any of that annoying due process or assumption of innocense or burden of proof or right to recourse or any of that stuff a real public legal process should have.
__loam · 1h ago
Software engineers and tech workers will make their living off producing IP then say shit like this.
idle_zealot · 50m ago
> You criticize society and yet you participate in it. How curious.
coderatlarge · 20m ago
without siding with the perspective being voiced, i feel compelled to point out your comment sounds like you believe there is a real alternative to criticize yet participate. even if you attempt to disengage and decide to go live in a cabin in the woods off the grid, the irs and any number of other agencies will go after you and your loved ones for doing basic human things like having and raising kids in a non-sanctioned way. so is there really any practical alternative to just voicing dissent?
rurp · 1h ago
It's being deprecated for billionaires. IP laws are one of the most blatant cases I've seen in this country of wealthy connected people being immune from laws that affect everyone else. I know it happens in many other areas, but usually it's much quieter and less in the public's face.
gametorch · 59m ago
Yes. I am an anti-copyright extremist.
May the best implementation win.
Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can artificially collect rent through a government-enforced monopoly.
Accelerate.
ordinaryradical · 55m ago
I write novels. What am I supposed to do to earn in this new, copyright-free regime where anyone is free to “implement” my novels?
gametorch · 32m ago
Why would someone buy the "stolen" version of your work if it was worse?
A fair amount of humanity finds value in reading the original author's work anyways. That's your value to have. Not the better distribution nor the better, augmented story.
I understand my view is unorthodox and extreme. Not trying to be incendiary or argumentative. Just presenting my side. I respect your side, too.
idle_zealot · 48m ago
Attract an audience and ask for patronage or get a job writing on behalf of an employer.
heavyset_go · 30m ago
Leads to a class system where those who actually create for society are parasitically leeched on by a class whose wealth only exists because of another government enforced monopoly.
logicchains · 20m ago
> those who actually create for society
If someone's unable to find anyone willing to pay them in advance for their work or purchase a subscription, is their work really creating much value to society?
tobias3 · 3m ago
Why would someone that is somewhat constrained w.r.t. spending pay for something they would get for free?
martin-t · 39m ago
So basically instead of doing real work (positive sum games - producing value), everyone has to either:
a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion, advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)
or
b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?
martin-t · 34m ago
Ever since I learned that my open source work was stolen and is being resold to me (laundered through statistical algorithms) without any credit or compensation, I stopped writing open source.
Any copy-left code is basically free to be used in closed source software, as long as it's not a verbatim copy? Count me out.
LLMs are used to subvert the spirit of GPL, if not the letter.
heavyset_go · 22m ago
That's where I'm at as an author of several popular open source libraries.
That's it, they're in maintenance mode and I'm not releasing anything again in the future.
My model used to be to build products and spin off components into generic open source libraries others could use, and some caught on. Now I'm just keeping them for myself or attempting to monetize them somehow.
hatthew · 45m ago
Downwards acceleration is free
mouse_ · 3h ago
The purpose of copyright has evolved from protecting creators to mass oppression.
AI is way better at mass oppression, however, and copyright is a threat to it, so it (copyright) will be dismantled.
martin-t · 7m ago
The idea of actual AI being used by governments (or just rich people) to spy on everyone, profile them, shape their ideas through targeted manipulation[0] and eliminate undesirable ones through social (destroying reputation), psychological (driving to suicide) or physical (killbots) means is way scarier than being turned into a paperclip.
[0]: Not just or fake videos or comments. Do you have someone on the internet you consider a friend but have never met in person? In the future, rich people or governments will be able to plant ideas in people and influence their thinking by generating fake friends.
eikenberry · 2h ago
Killing off copyrights, if it does, would be a big win for AI.
chisleu · 2h ago
Meh, AI doesn't have to kill copyrights. The two oppressive systems will find a way to unite into something worse than either of them alone.
kgwxd · 1h ago
Don't need it anymore. President decides who owns what now, supreme court will confirm it sometime next week.
Spooky23 · 1h ago
Exactly, what happened to the libertarian spirit of HN?
Copyright in its current form is ridiculous, but I support some (much-pared-back) version of copyright that limits rights further, expands fair use, repeals the DMCA, and reduces the copyright term to something on the order of 15-20 years (perhaps with a renewal option as with patents).
I've released a lot of software under the GPL, and the GPL in its current form couldn't exist without copyright.
What copyright should do is protect individual creators, not corporations. And it should protect them even if their work is mixed through complex statistical algorithms such as LLMs.
LLMs wouldn't be possible without _trillions_ of hours of work by people writing books, code, music, etc. they are trained on. The _millions_ of hours of work spent on the training algorithm itself, the chat interface, the scraping scripts, etc. is barely a drop in the bucket.
There is 0 reason the people who spent mere millions of hours of work should get all the reward without giving anything to the rest of the world who put in trillions of hours.
Your point remains, but the problem of the division of responsibility and financial credit doesn't go away with that alone. Do you know if the openAI lawsuits have laid this out?
The reality of course is more complicated. Without copyright there's no GPL. Which I guess is fine if you're in the OSS camp more than the FSF camp. MIT and BSD licenses basically (functionally) give up copyright.
Copyright is also what allows for hybrids like the BSL which protect "little guys" from large cloud providers like AWS etc.
Copyright allows VC startups to at least start out life as Open Source (before pivoting later.)
Of course thus is all in the context of software copyright. Other copyrights (music, books etc) are equally nuanced.
And there are other forms of IP protections as well (patents, trademarks) which are distinct from the copyright concept.
So no, I don't think most people here are against copyright (patents are a different story.)
It would be nice of FOSS was the baseline, but I don't see that ever happening, especially in a world without an enforcement mechanism.
Sure having source code would be nice, but then again half the software nowadays is using electron and written in javascript anyway. Also plenty of examples of hardware manufacturers using software/firmware copyright as excuse and making legal threats to people who have made their own software to control hardware they bought even though they didn't have access to original source code.
There are probably more examples of people reverse engineering an reimplementing or decompiling large nontrivial software than there examples of companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library (as opposed to avoiding the GPL licensed code or violating the GPL by not releasing the source code).
Does not mean that GPL is ineffective. IT forces them to reimplement the functionality, thus giving copyleft more time to compete with them. Imagine if they were to free to take all public code and just use it. They would always be ahead and open source products wouldn't stand a chance competing.
Not to mention I feel like GPL being so strong is why big companies pretend to love open source but permissive licenses so much - to drown out the GPL competition they hate so much and to attract more developers to permissive rather than copyleft open source projects.
2. I generally don't like the BSL.
3. No comment. I think OSS projects that exist incidentally versus being the company's main product have always been more reliable (and less susceptible to the company pivoting to closed-only offerings).
4. Copyright has perhaps been the most evil in the music industry; books, less so. I'd rather not even talk about movies or TV right now. Nonetheless, I'd tolerate an extremely limited duration copyright, if no copyright at all isn't an option.
5. Trademarks are mostly fine, because they're primarily supposed to serve customers, not the companies. I'd like to get rid of patents now, however.
Not having sensible people steering copyright in a direction toward winding down its scope is being paired with a court that's likely to make it far more draconian, and create some massive problems that will be a problem for software development.
If I was to guess, I would imagine most on here believe in some copyright, and not total anarchy.
We don't like gatekeeping ideas because many people have the same ideas.
I'm still waiting for an update on the final removal timeline.
If you hide behind corporations and have millions of dollars, sure, but not for us normies it isn't.
And it's not like copyright outside the US is a wild west; most national and international copyright regimes in the developed world are based on the US's system (often because the US has strong-armed other countries to comply).
May the best implementation win.
Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can artificially collect rent through a government-enforced monopoly.
Accelerate.
A fair amount of humanity finds value in reading the original author's work anyways. That's your value to have. Not the better distribution nor the better, augmented story.
I understand my view is unorthodox and extreme. Not trying to be incendiary or argumentative. Just presenting my side. I respect your side, too.
If someone's unable to find anyone willing to pay them in advance for their work or purchase a subscription, is their work really creating much value to society?
a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion, advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)
or
b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?
Any copy-left code is basically free to be used in closed source software, as long as it's not a verbatim copy? Count me out.
LLMs are used to subvert the spirit of GPL, if not the letter.
That's it, they're in maintenance mode and I'm not releasing anything again in the future.
My model used to be to build products and spin off components into generic open source libraries others could use, and some caught on. Now I'm just keeping them for myself or attempting to monetize them somehow.
AI is way better at mass oppression, however, and copyright is a threat to it, so it (copyright) will be dismantled.
[0]: Not just or fake videos or comments. Do you have someone on the internet you consider a friend but have never met in person? In the future, rich people or governments will be able to plant ideas in people and influence their thinking by generating fake friends.