An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

I was really hoping that the conversation around AI art would at least be partially centered on the perhaps now dated "2008 pirate party" idea that intellectual property, the royalty system, the draconian copyright laws that we have today are deeply silly, rooted in a fiction, and used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.

Unfortunately, it's just the opposite. It seems most people have fully assimilated the idea that information itself must be entirely subsumed into an oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus. That Disney Corp can prevent you from viewing some collection of pixels, because THEY own it, and they know better than you do about the culture and communication that you are and are not allowed to experience.

It's just baffling. If they could, Disney would scan your brain to charge you a nickel every time you thought of Mickey Mouse.

> to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.

How is copyright stifling innovation?

You could not rip something off more blatantly than Gravity, which had the lawsuit dismissed entirely.

Taurus vs Stairway to Heaven, the list goes on and on and on.

You can often get away with nearly murder ripping off other people's stuff.

Copyright makes the legality of arXiv and SciHub questionable at best. It locks publicly funded research behind paywalls. It makes being able to search the law (including case law) of the US incredibly expensive. It puts a burden on platforms to be beholden to DMCA takedowns, lest the content owner go to their hosting or DNS provider, has happened to itch.io. It adds licensing fees onto public musical performances (ASCAP).

Additionally plenty of people making videos for YouTube have had their videos demonetized and their channels even removed because of the Content ID copyright detection scheme and their three strikes rule. In some cases to a ridiculous extent - some companies will claim ownership of music that isn't theirs and either get the video taken down or take a share of the revenue.

I watched a video where someone wrote a song and registered it via CDBaby, which YouTube sources for Content ID. Then someone claimed ownership of the song, so YouTube assigned the third party 50% of the ad revenue of the video.