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

Lifetime for human copyright, 20 years for corporate copyright. That’s the golden zone.

Zero (0) years for corporate copyright, zero (0) years for human copyright is the golden zone in my book.

Why?

It took me a while to be convinced that copyright is strictly a bad idea, but these two articles were very convincing to me.

https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html

https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-po...

The first article is saying that "Copyright is bad because of corporations", and I can kind of get behind that, especially the very long term copyrights that have lost the intent, but the second article says that artists will be happier without copyright if we just solve capitalism first. I don't know about you, but that reads to me like "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe".

If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing.

The problem of "how do artists earn enough money to eat?" is legitimate, but I don't think it's a good idea to solve it by making things that inherently don't work like real property to work like it, just so that we can shove them into the same framework. And this is exactly what copyright does - it takes information, which can be copied essentially for free by its very fundamental nature, and tries to make it scarce through legal means solely so that it can be sold as if it were a real good.

There are two reasons why it's a problem. The first reason is that any such abstraction is leaky, and those leaks are ripe for abuse. For example, in case of copyright on information, we made it behave like physical property for the consumers, but not for the producers (who still only need to expend resources to create a single work from scratch, and then duplicate it for free while still selling each copy for $$$). This means that selling information is much more lucrative than selling physical things, which is a big reason why our economy is so distorted towards the former now - just look at what the most profitable corporations on the market do.

The second reason is that it artificially entrenches capitalism by enmeshing large parts of the economy into those mechanics, even if they aren't naturally a good fit. This then gets used as an argument to prop up the whole arrangement - "we can't change this, it would break too much!".