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?

Because the concept of owning an idea is really gross. Copyright means I can’t write about whatever I want in my own home even if I never distribute it or no one ever sees it. I’m breaking the law by privately writing Harry Potter fanfic in my journal or whatever. Copyright is supposed to be about encouraging intangibles, and the reality is that it only massively stifles it

Copyright doesn’t protect ideas. It protects expression of those ideas.

Consider how many books exist on how to care for trees. Each one of them has similar ideas, but the way those ideas are expressed differ. Copyright protects the content of the book; it doesn’t protect the ideas of how to care for trees.

Disney has a copyright over Moana. I would argue Moana is an idea in the sense that most people think of as ideas. Moana isn't tangle, it's not a physical good. It's not a plate on my table. It only exists in our heads. If I made a Moana comic book, with an entirely original storyline and original art and it was all drawn in my own style and not using 3D assets similar to their movies, that is violating copyright. Moana is an idea and there are a million ways to express the established character Moana, and Moana itself is an idea built on a million things that Disney doesn't have any rights to - history, culture, tropes, etc.

I understand what you're saying but the way you're framing it isn't what I really have a problem with. I still don't agree with the idea that I can't make my own physical copies of Harry Potters books, identical word for word. I think people can choose to buy the physical books from the original publisher because they want to support them or like the idea that it's the "true" physical copy. And I'm going to push back on that a million times less than the concept of things like Moana comic books. But still, it's infringing copyright for me to make Moana comic books in my own home, in private, and never showing them to anyone. And that's ridiculous.

In the world you’re proposing, you would also not be able to make word-for-word copies of Harry Potter books, because Harry Potter wouldn’t exist.

why not? people write fiction all the time and put it on the internet for free. in fact, i'd say there's significantly more unpaid fiction writing in the world than paid.

Yes, and most of it is awful, whereas Joanne Rowling is talented.

It’s very unlikely that she would (or even could) have devoted herself to writing fiction in her free time as a passion project without hope of monetary reward and without any way to live from her writing for the ten years it took to finish the Potter series.

And even if she had somehow managed, you’d never hear about it, because without publishers to act as gatekeepers it’d have been lost in the mountains of fanfic and whatever other slop amateur writers upload to the internet.

Most is awful, but I'd still say there's just as much good unpaid fiction as paid fiction. Lots of paid fiction is also really, really bad.

Ok, what are some examples of high-quality literary fiction published for free?

i could give examples of both paid and unpaid and have them shot down as "this is crap writing". instead i will simply point out that there is very popular unpaid fiction on the internet, and its popularity is indicative of its quality, even if it doesn't match the standards of a literature PhD for "good writing". so basically go look for the most popular unpaid fiction online and there's your answer. i mean all of this conversationally and kindly, if my tone feels patronizing at all.

I specified "literary fiction" intentionally, because I suspected it would be the hardest kind for you to find, and that good genre fiction (sci-fi, mystery, romance, etc.) would be somewhat more likely (though still unlikely) to be available for free. But you seem to have ignored that stipulation and steered us back to just talking about fiction in general, and also using popularity as a benchmark for quality...

> its popularity is indicative of its quality, even if it doesn't match the standards of a literature PhD for "good writing"

This is a false dichotomy. Literature PhDs are not the only people out there who enjoy high-quality literature more than light entertainment, and anyway, you seem to be admitting that there's a type of fiction that doesn't exist unpaid, so isn't this just proving my point correct?

All that said, even if I accept for the sake of argument that the existence of popular free genre fiction would be enough to prove your point (because, in fairness to you, we were originally talking about Harry Potter, which is as genre as it gets)... I went looking, and there are at most a few sporadic examples. A few minutes of research suggest that some books by Cory Doctorow are among the most popular ones. Also, The Martian by Andy Weir used to be freely available, but isn't anymore as far as I can find.

Sorry, but Cory Doctorow and (formerly) Andy Weir represent a pretty small body of work compared to the entire canon of paid novels, so I'm going to have to call BS on your claim unless you provide some examples of your own.