US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

I wonder when general internet sentiment moved from pro-piracy to IP maximalism. Fascinating shift.

AI has made people lose their minds and principles. It's fascinating to observe.

In the meantime, I will continue to dislike copyright regardless of the parties involved.

Apples and oranges - and also I don't know if anyone is really supporting IP maximalism.

IP maximalism is requiring DRM tech in every computer and media-capable device that won't play anything without checking into a central server and also making it illegal to reverse or break that DRM. IP maximalism is extending the current bonkers time interval of copyright (over 100 years) to forever. If AI concerns manage to get this down to a reasonable, modern timeframe it'll be awesome.

Record companies in the 90s tied the noose around their own necks, which is just as well because they're very useless now except for supporting geriatric bands. They should have started selling mp3s for 99 cents in 1997 and maybe they would have made a couple of dollars before their slide into irrelevance.

The specific thing people don't want, which a few weirdos keep pushing, is AI-generated stuff passed off as new creative material. It's fine for fun and games, but no one wants a streaming service of AI-generated music, even if you can't tell it's AI generated. And the minute you think you have that cracked - that an AI can create music/art as good as a human and that humans can't tell, the humans will start making bad music/art in rebellion, and it'll be the cool new thing, and the armies of 10Kw GPUs will be wasting their energy on stuff an 1Mhz 8-bit machine could do in the 80s.

No hard data to back this up, but anecdotally I'd place the AI/copyright sentiment shift around mid-late 2022. DALL-E 2 experimentation (e.g: [0]) in early-mid 2022 seemed to just about sneak by unaffected, receiving similar positive/curious reception to previous trends (TalkToTransformer, ArtBreeder, GPT-3/AI Dungeon, etc.), but then Stable Diffusion bore the full brunt of "machine learning is theft" arguments.

[0]: https://x.com/xkcd/status/1552279517477183488

Personally, I'd support an alternative to copyright for letting creators earn living expenses while working or in reward for good works. But it's a terrible thing to offer them the copyright system and then ignore it to use the works they hoped could earn money. And to further use those works to make something that will replace a lot of creative positions they've relied on because copyright only pays off after the work's been done.

Maybe the government should set up a fund to pay all the copyright holders whose works were used to train the AI models. And if it's a pain to track down the rights holders, I'll play a tiny violin.

Hmm, "when it got good" then. I think what you're saying makes sense to me.

That is fairly easy to answer: When the infringement shifted from small people taking from Walt Disney to Silicon Valley taking from everyone, including open source authors and small YouTube channels.

I find the shift of some right wing politicians and companies from "TPB and megaupload are criminals and its owners must be extradited from foreign countries!" to "Information wants to be free!" much more illuminating.

Not having massively overfunded corporations exploit artists is not IP minimalism. Private persons stealing something is seen as tiny evil. But big corporation exploiting everyone else is entirely different thing.

There's now an entire generation now that believes "Intellectual Property" is a real thing.

Instead of the understanding that copyrights and patents are temporary state-granted monopolies meant to benefit society they are instead framed as real perpetual property rights. This framing fuels support for draconian laws and obscures the real purpose of these laws: to promote innovation and knowledge sharing and not to create eternal corporate fiefdoms.

Right around the same time struggling artists thought paying $40 for global distribution via Spotify and not getting paid anything for their 100 streams a month was being "ripped off". And I think that is related to influencer culture. Everyone thinks they deserve to be famous and needs someone to blame for their below average art not making them rich.

I considered adding a reminder above that email used to be a copyright violation. Implied license not yet established; every copy between disk and memory a violation; let alone forwarding; the occasional email footer "LegalisticCo grants you a licence to use this email under the following terms ...". Oh well. And then almost all sharing of images.

Very recently, because historically the majority of people engaging in it aren't looking to profit from piracy.

The general public has been lectured for decades about how piracy is morally wrong, but as soon as startups and corporations are in it for profit, everybody looks away?

It's not that complicated: little guy taking stuff from big corp (then) vs. big corp taking stuff from little guy (now). Similar to the recent debates over permissive open source licenses and corporate exploitation.

As for the zeitgeist, I'm not sure anything has materially changed. Recently, creators have been very upset over Silicon Valley AI companies ingesting their output. Is this really reflective of "general internet sentiment"? Would those same people have supported abolition of copyright in the past? I doubt it.

It didn't, you're falsely conflating two quite different things to give cover to a different set of large corporations.

I think most people have lost their minds over the hypocrisy. For decades people have been raked over the coals for piracy, but now suddenly piracy is okay if your name is Facebook and you're building an AI model.

Either force AI companies to compensate the artists they're being "inspired" by, or let people torrent a copywashed Toy Story 5.

IP minimalism is IP minimalism, regardless of who owns the IP.