Leads to a class system where those who actually create for society are parasitically leeched on by a class whose wealth only exists because of another government enforced monopoly.
What class are you talking about here, and what monopoly?
Other than authors, the people I can think of that make money off novels are book printers and occasionally media studios? But those also depend on copyright, and other than copyright nothing makes them a monopoly.
That has the causality backwards. Patronage does not lead to unequal wealth, it's the unequal wealth that leads to patronage being the only way to fund art. Getting rid of copyright would not give the wealthy more money via government enforced monopoly.
Also they're using the term "patronage" more loosely when they say to attract an audience. There's no horrible class inequality when a bunch of people are paying $1-100 a month.
If someone's unable to find anyone willing to pay them in advance for their work or purchase a subscription, is their work really creating much value to society?
In fact, if _just taking_ someone else's material possessions (rather than intellectual work) was legal, why would anyone build anything they can't physically protect themselves?
A lot of the people bashing on copyright seem to have no concept of the second order effects abolishing copyright would have and no intention to game it out.
Copyright has issues. For example it protects corporations instead of individual creators and workers. But not having it means rich people who own brands and have access to massive advertising can just take someone's work and make money from it while contributing nothing of value by themselves.
I wonder how many people see themselves as just temporarily embarrassed millionaires so they sympathize with the upper class where they feel like they should belong.
Or they just have no mental model of how incentives work. All this talk about abolishing copyright coming from people whose job literally consists of creating intellectual property. I have never seen one of them try to think it through and come up with the new equilibrium a world without copyright would settle into.
> a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion, advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)
How is advertising a book you've written and are selling different than advertising your writing or skills to potential patrons and clients with regard to being negative-sum?
b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?
Who said anything about the relative wealth or patrons and authors? People seem totally willing to subscribe to people whose creative output they value. Sometimes such patronage is barely enough to live, sometimes it's an impressive total sum.
re a) For starters, the difference is you already have a product which people can judge vs you claim you're gonna produce something great. Anybody can lie, some people can lie very well. Even ruling out malice (which many people underestimate), people just end up not keeping their promises. Would you pay GRRM for the finished Winds of winter? Would you fall for him asking for money to write it a few years ago?
re b) An employer ("user") is generally richer than the person they're employing ("using"). The reason they can employ people and people are willing to be employed is because they have access to tools such as trademarks, patents, other employees or advertising budgets the employee ("person used") does not. It's a relationship where power is fundamentally imbalanced.
That's why I'm not an anti-copyright extremist. I've seen enough examples where the best implementation does not in fact win, but merely the one that put the most money into shoving it into people's eyeballs. Or the most money into scaling up production from a small business' idea.
The rich will still abuse it, but copyright gives smaller creators some channel to fight back with. It's another means to prevent the rich from getting richer without compensating those who helped get them there. It's basically what powers places like YCombinator; Why would someone pay for your pitch instead of hearing it and going to shop for the lowest bidder to implement it?
>Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can artificially collect rent through a government-enforced monopoly.
copyright isn't on ideas, it's on implementation. And experience also tells me there's dozens of ways to skin a sheep. Especially in an industry like tech. You try to rest on your laurels protecting your idea, and someone else will just improve on the idea with a new one.
There can be a few BS copyrighted ideas, but for the most part you are only copyrighting a very small part of how something works. Not the very idea of making a rounded square phone.
> I've seen enough examples where the best implementation does not in fact win, but merely the one that put the most money into shoving it into people's eyeballs.
I thought that was the default?
Are there honestly _any_ examples of the best implementation winning against a solid advertising budget?
Copyright certainly needs improvement but in the direction of protecting individual creators from mass exploitation, not abolishing it to remove one more restriction from what the rich can monetize to get more rich.
Ever since I learned that my open source work was stolen and is being resold to me (laundered through statistical algorithms) without any credit or compensation, I stopped writing open source.
Any copy-left code is basically free to be used in closed source software, as long as it's not a verbatim copy? Count me out.
LLMs are used to subvert the spirit of GPL, if not the letter.
That's where I'm at as an author of several popular open source libraries.
That's it, they're in maintenance mode and I'm not releasing anything again in the future.
My model used to be to build products and spin off components into generic open source libraries others could use, and some caught on. Now I'm just keeping them for myself or attempting to monetize them somehow.
Coming to about the same conclusion here. Companies are using my AGPLv3 project without following the license already and enforcing the license seems bleak with not much gain for me.
Now they can just copyright-wash it through AI models.
May the best implementation win.
Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can artificially collect rent through a government-enforced monopoly.
Accelerate.