Anthropic judge rejects $1.5B AI copyright settlement

Weird framing, I don't think this is what they were suggesting

It seems like a pretty logical conclusion that if you removed copyright, then book manufacturers would just copy author's books and sell them without paying the author. Or ebook services would just distribute their books for free.

Author's could potentially get a couple months of sales by working with manufacturers themselves and being the first to sell their books. But as soon as untrusted parties can get their hands on the book, someone will start selling their own copies of it.

Personally I strongly detest ip law, but I see it as problematic for its implementation rather than its intent. So much so that I would rather it be abolished than hold its current form. I feel this from the perspective of a creator and a consumer because I so often see works that are unfairly removed or have their profits stolen as a result of the guilty until proven innocent style enforcement. This makes me fearful of publishing works that build upon previous work (which many creative fields naturally do). The most blatant abuse I've seen recently was the Gamer's Nexus documentary being taken down by Bloomberg. However, IP is arguably more problematic in industries like medicine where patents are renewed ad infinitum by evergreening to milk a protected monopoly.

Realized I didn't address your concern, I have still seen many creatives able to profit without strong protections. The gaming industry often has controversy with its drm but even drm free releases are continuously able to make large sales volumes and drm has been shown in that EU study from 2015ish to not actually protect sales.

Piracy is not nearly at the same scale as what would happen if copyright was scrapped. Piracy requires you to go to shady websites to get illegal copies of games/movies/tv series. That is enough of a disincentive for most people that just buying copies of the games is easier.

But if it were legal to distribute copies, these websites wouldn't need to operate in the shadows, switching domain names constantly to evade law enforcement. Instead, these websites could become as easy-to-use as Steam, but instead of paying the creators of the games they could just take 100% of the revenues for themself.

There would be an explosion in what we would call "piracy" today, but what would just be called downloading games if copyright were scrapped, because the barrier to entry for doing so could be made so much lower.

I am not a fan of intellectual property and copyright enforcement (at least the weaponisation of them). But scrapping IP and copyright entirely would be disastrous. I prefer the idea of reducing the amount of time someone can hold IP/copyright for, or additional punishment for patent trolls, or other measures to alleviate the concerns of IP/copyright without destroying R&D and digital work.