Meta says it won't sign Europe AI agreement

Copyright is not a god given right. It's an economic incentive created by government to make desired behavior (writing an publishing books) profitable.

Yes it is. In every sense of the phrase, except the literal.

A lot of cultures have not historically considered artists’ rights to be a thing and have had it essentially imposed on them as a requirement to participate in global trade.

Even in Europe copyright was protected only for the last 250 years, and over the last 100 years it’s been constantly updated to take into consideration new technologies.

The only real mistake the EU made was not regulating Facebook when it mattered. That site caused pain and damage to entire generations. Now it's too late. All they can do is try to stop Meta and the rest of the lunatics from stealing every book, song and photo ever created, just to train models that could leave half the population without a job.

Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft and Google don't care about people. They care about control: controlling influence, knowledge and universal income. That's the endgame.

Just like in the US, the EU has brilliant people working on regulations. The difference is, they're not always working for the same interests.

The world is asking for US big tech companies to be regulated more now than ever.

Yes, 100%. And that’s why throwing copyright selectively in the bin now when there’s an ongoing massive transfer of wealth from creators to mega corps, is so surprising. It’s almost as if governments were only protecting economic interests of creators when the creators were powerful (eg movie studios), going after individuals for piracy and DRM circumvention. Now that the mega corps are the ones pirating at a scale they get a free pass through a loophole designed for individuals (fair use).

Anyway, the show must go on so were unlikely to see any reversal of this. It’s a big experiment and not necessarily anything that will benefit even the model providers themselves in the medium term. It’s clear that the ”free for all” policy on grabbing whatever data you can get is already having chilling effects. From artists and authors not publishing their works publicly, to locking down of open web with anti-scraping. Were basically entering an era of adversarial data management, with incentives to exploit others for data while protecting the data you have from others accessing it.

You've put into words what I've been internally struggling to voice. Information (on the web) is a gas, it expands once it escapes.

In limited, closed systems, it may not escape, but all it takes is one bad (or hacked) actor and the privacy of it is gone.

In a way, we used to be "protected" because it was "too big" to process, store, or access "everything".

Now, especially with an economic incentive to vacuum literally all digital information, and many works being "digital first" (even a word processor vs a typewriter, or a PDF that is sent to a printer instead of lithograph metal plates)... is this the information Armageddon?

Governments always protect the interests of their powerful friends and donors over the people they allegedly represent.

They've just mastered the art of lying to gullible idiots or complicit psycophants.

It's not new to anyone who pays and kind of attention.

Why? Copyright is 1) presented as being there to protect the interests of the general public, not creators, 2) Statute of Anne, the birth of modern copyright law, protected printers - that is "big businesss" over creators anyway, so even that has largely always been a fiction.

But it is also increasingly dubious that the public gets a good deal out of copyright law anyway.

> From artists and authors not publishing their works publicly

The vast majority of creators have never been able to get remotely close to make a living from their creative work, and instead often when factoring in time lose money hand over fist trying to get their works noticed.

To be fair, "copy"right has only been needed for as long as it's been possible to copy things. In the grand scheme of human history, that technology is relatively new.

copyright is the backbone of modern media empires. It both allows small creators and massive corporations to seek rent on works, but since the works are under copyright for a century its quite nice to corporations

actually in much of the EU if not all of it Copyright is an intrinsic right of the creator.

I generally let it slide because these copyright discussions tend to be about America, and as such it can be assumed American law and what it inherits from British law is what pertains.

>Copyright is 1) presented as being there to protect the interests of the general public, not creators,

yes, in the U.S in the EU creators have moral rights to their works and the law is to protect their interests.

There are actually moral rights and rights of exploitation, in EU you can transfer the latter but not the former.

>But it is also increasingly dubious that the public gets a good deal out of copyright law anyway.

In the EU's view of copyright the public doesn't need to get a good deal, the creators of copyrighted works do.

> There are actually moral rights and rights of exploitation, in EU you can transfer the latter but not the former.

And when we talk about copyright we generally talk about the rights of exploitation, where the rationale used today is about the advancement of arts and sciences - a public benefit. There's a reason the name is English is copy-right, where the other Germanic languages focuses more on the work - in the Anglosphere the notion of moral rights as separate from rights of exploitation is well outside the mainstream.

> In the EU's view of copyright the public doesn't need to get a good deal, the creators of copyrighted works do.

Most individual nations copyright law still does uphold the pretence of being for the public good, however. Without that pretence, there is no moral basis for restricting the rights of the public the way copyright law does.

But it has nevertheless been abundantly clear all the way back to the Statute of Anne that any talk of either public goods or rights of exploitation for the creator are excuses, and that these laws if anything mostly exist for the protection of business interests.

It is a "right" created by law, is the point. This is not a right that is universally recognised, nor one that has existed since time immemorial, but a modern construction of governments that governments can choose to change or abolish.

Copying was a thing for a very long time before the Statue of Anne. Just not mechanically. It coincided with the rise of mechanical copying.

>Most individual nations copyright law still does uphold the pretence of being for the public good, however. Without that pretence, there is no moral basis for restricting the rights of the public the way copyright law does.

I of course do not know all the individual EU country's rules, but my understanding was that the EU's view was what it was because derived at least from the previous understanding of its member nations. So the earlier French laws before ratification and implementation of the EU directive on author's rights in Law # 92-597 (1 July 1992) were also focused on the understanding of creators having creator's rights and that protecting these was the purpose of Copyright law, and that this pattern generally held throughout EU lands (at least any lands currently in the EU, I suppose pre-Brexit this was not the case)

You probably have some other examples but in my experience the European laws have for a long time held that copyright exists to protect the rights of creators and not of the public.

what is a right that has existed since time immemorial? Generally rights that have existed "forever" are codified rights and, in the codification, described as being eternal. Hence Jefferson's reference to inalienable rights, which probably came as some surprise to King George III.

on edit: If we had a soundtrack the Clash Know Your Rights would be playing in this comment.

at any rate rights that are described as being eternal or some other version of that such as inalienable, or in the case of copyright moral and intrinsic, are rights that if the government, that has heretofore described that as inviolate, where to casually violate them then the government would be declaring its own nullification to exist further by its previously stated rules.

Not to say this doesn't happen, I believe we can see it happening in some places in the world right now, but these are classes of laws that cannot "just" be changed at the government's whim, and in the EU copyright law is evidently one of those classes of law, strange as it seems.

Copyright predates mechanical copying. However, people used to have to petition a King or similar to be granted a monopoly on a work, and the monopoly was specific to that work.

Copyright originates in the Statute of Anne[0]; its creation was therefore within living memory when the United States declared their independence.

No rights have existed 'forever', and both the rights and the social problems they intend to resolve are often quite recent (assuming you're not the sort of person who's impressed by a building that's 100 years old).

George III was certainly not surprised by Jefferson's claim to rights, given that the rights he claimed were copied (largely verbatim) from the Bill of Rights 1689[1]. The poor treatment of the Thirteen Colonies was due to Lord North's poor governance, the rights and liberties that the Founding Fathers demanded were long-established in Britain, and their complaints against absolute monarchy were complaints against a system of government that had been abolished a century before.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689

>No rights have existed 'forever'

you should probably reread the text I responded to and then what I wrote, because you seem to think I believe there are rights that are not codified by humans in some way and are on a mission to correct my mistake.

>George III was certainly not surprised by Jefferson's claim to rights, given that the rights he claimed were copied (largely verbatim) from the Bill of Rights 1689

to repeat: Hence Jefferson's reference to inalienable rights, which probably came as some surprise to King George III.

inalienable modifies rights here, if George is surprised by any rights it is inalienable ones.

>Copyright originates in the Statute of Anne[0]; its creation was therefore within living memory when the United States declared their independence.

title of post is "Meta says it won't sign Europe AI agreement", I was under the impression that it had something to do with how the EU sees copyright and not how the U.S and British common law sees it.

Hence multiple comments referencing EU but I see I must give up and the U.S must have its way, evidently the Europe AI agreement is all about how copyright works in the U.S, prime arbiter of all law around the globe.

> Why? Copyright is 1) presented as being there to protect the interests of the general public, not creators

Doesn’t matter, both the ”public interest” and ”creator rights” arguments have the same impact: you’re either hurting creators directly, or you’re hurting the public benefit when you remove or reduce the economic incentives. The transfer of wealth and irreversible damage is there, whether you care about Lars Ulrichs gold toilet or our future kids who can’t enjoy culture and libraries to protect from adversarial and cynical tech moguls.

> 2) Statute of Anne, the birth of modern copyright law, protected printers - that is "big businesss" over creators anyway, so even that has largely always been a fiction.

> The vast majority of creators have never been able to get remotely close to make a living from their creative work

Nobody is saying copyright is perfect. We’re saying it’s the system we have and it should apply equally.

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Defending the AI corps on basis of copyright being broken is like saying the tax system is broken, so therefore it’s morally right for the ultra-rich to relocate assets to the Caymans. Or saying that democracy is broken, so it’s morally sound to circumvent it (like Thiel says).

The Statue of Anne - the first recognisable copyright law in anything remotely the modern sense dates to 1709. Long after the invention of movable type. Mechanical in the sense of printing with a press using movable type, not anything highly automated.

Having to petition for monopoly rights on an individual basis is nothing like copyright, where the entire point is to avoid having to ask for exceptions by creating a right.

And the relevant rights to exploit the work are almost never described as moral, intrinsic, inalienable or similar, so this is largely moot.

> So the earlier French laws before ratification and implementation of the EU directive on author's rights in Law # 92-597 (1 July 1992) were also focused on the understanding of creators having creator's rights

French law, similar to e.g. Norwegian and German law, separated moral and proprietary rights.

Moral rights are not particularly relevant to this discussion, as they relate specifically to rights to e.g. be recognised as the author, and to protect the integrity of a work. They do not relate to actual copying and publication.

What we call copyright in English is largely proprietary/exploitation rights.

The historical foundation of the latter is firmly one of first granting righths on a case by case basis, often to printers rather than cretors, and then with the Statue of Anne that explicitly stated the goal of "encouragement of learning" right in the title of the act. This motivation was later e.g. made explicit in the US constitution.

Since you mention France, the National Assembly after the French Revolution took the stance that works by default were public property, and that copyright was an exception, in the same vein as per the Statute of Anne and US Constitution ("to promote the progress of science and useful arts").

Depository laws etc., which are near universal, are also firmly rooted in this view that copyright is a right grants that is provided on a quid pro quo basis: The work needs to be secured for the public for the future irrespective of continued commercial availability.

Except of course that the point is that copyright is generally not described this way.

See my more extensive overview in another response.

The history of copyright law is one where it is regularly described either in the debates around the passing of the laws, or in the laws themselves, as a utilitarian bargain between the public and creators.

E.g. since you mention Jefferson and mention "inalienable", notably copyright is in the US not an inaliable right at all, but a right that the US constitution grants Congress the power to enact "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". It says nothing about being an inalienable or eternal right of citizens.

And before you bring up France, or other European law, I suggest you read the other comment as well.

But to add more than I did in the other comment, e.g. in Norway, the first paragraph of the copyright low ("Lov om opphavsrett til åndsverk mv.") gives 3 motivations: 1 a) to grant rights to creators to give incentives for cultural production, 1 b) to limit those rights to ensure a balance between creators rights and public interests, 1 c) to provide rules to make it easy to arrange use of copyrighted works.

There's that argument about incentives and balancing public interests again.

This is the historical norm. It is not present in every copyright law, but they share the same historical nucleus.

Regulating FB earlier wouldn’t help much I think, it would grow just as fast with other, mostly US, markets and it would be just as powerful today.

Early copyright was a take on property rights, applied to supposed labour of the soul and subsequent ownership of its fruits.

Copyright stems from the 15-1600s, while utilitarianism is a mid-1800s kind of thing. The move from explicitly religious and natural rights motivations to language about "intellect" and hedonism is rather late, and I expect it to be tied to an atheist and utilitarian influence from socialist movements.

The first modern copyright law dates to 1709, and was most certainly not a "take on property rights". Neither were pre-Statute of Anne monopoly grants.

I can find nothing to suggest a "religious and natural rights" motivation, nor any language about "intellect and hedonism".

Statute of Anne - which specifically gives a utilitarian reason 150 years before your "mid-1800s" estimate also predates socialism by a similar amount of time, and dates to a time were there certainly wasn't any major atheist influence either, so this is utterly ahistorical nonsense.