These are all nothing more than arguments from authority. There are too many more creative people on the other side of the issue to even bother trying to list them.

The number of artists who release their creations into CC0 or public domain is not even a drop in the bucket. Good for them, that’s a valid and maybe noble choice to relinquish their copyright–but it is a personal choice, not a law, nor should it be.

I’ve also written GPL code for years. That’s my choice. I don’t even regret it, despite knowing that it’s being exploited. I’m not going to pretend that entitles me to the code that other people write. I’m not going to try to mandate that laws force everything to be GPL. It also doesn’t mean that my code can be freely scraped and abused by AI companies.

“If you really want to keep control of your art, keep it in your house, don’t share it with anyone, don’t share it with the world.”

Because that’s really conducive to living in a capitalist society where the only way to make art is to have money, and the only way to have money is to sell your time, isn’t it?

Sounds like a pretty shitty deal to me for artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, designers, etc.

Copyright exists, at least in theory, to prevent us from living in such a world.

I reject all of that. It’s a false dichotomy to tell artists that they have to either “keep their art in their house” or share it openly with an entire world of rich assholes like Altman, Musk, Zuck, Huang, and others who seek to exploit it for their own gain.

Personally I think you’re the one who needs to get his head out of his ass and stop worshiping the words of other people as if they were gospel. I don’t dwell on the every word of my favorite musicians. You’re so busy looking up to people that you’re not looking at the world around you as it is, right now, in 2026.

Look at the rampant, flagrant and shameless exploitation of the creative class by the pompous, rich, powerful, tech-bro elites who feel endless entitlement to everything that they can see. Are we just gonna pretend like this comment isn’t attached to an article about how the richest company in the world purchased a massive trove of copyrighted works to train their AI? Are we gonna pretend like Anthropic, Google, X, and OpenAI haven’t all done the exact same thing?

Sorry. I can’t subscribe to that.

I care much more about art and artists than I care about tech or “open culture” on the internet.

At any rate, today’s my birthday and I’m trying not to waste my time getting all worked up… Your opinion is valid and we probably aren’t going to change each other’s minds on this, so it’s hardly worth continuing this conversation. I don’t dislike you, I just disagree. Have a good one.

The basic trade-off inherent in copyright is a simple one. On the one hand, increasing
copyright yields benefits by stimulating the creation of new works but, on the other hand, it reduces access to existing works (the welfare ‘deadweight’ loss). Choosing the optimal term, that is the length of protection, presents these two countervailing forces particularly starkly.

Unfortunately this “research” is merely the subjective opinion of a “open data activist” who, to my knowledge, has not created anything, and is based on a flawed and entitled premise that the world is owed “access” to the creations of artists. I invite you to use your own brain, and reach your own conclusions:

• If I write a song from my own mind, what entitles you or anyone else to access of that song?
• If you paint a painting and hang it up on the wall of your bedroom, does that entitle me to have access to it in any way?

The answers to these questions are obvious.

There is no need to optimize copyright laws to balance the the rights of creators with the accessibility of media, because copyright exists simply to protect creators to own and control their own creations, which other people are in no way entitled to. “Access” isn’t a factor, or at least it shouldn’t be within the lifetime of the original creator.

“The AI + open data combo is incredibly powerful—but it must be democratic, ethical, and human-centered.” - Rufus Pollock, CKAN Monthly Live #33, July 6th 2025

It “must be” democratic? ethical? human-centered?

Guess what? It’s none of those things… And the only way to even begin to force it to be any of those things is creating robust copyright laws that protect creators from exploitation of the technology-controlling elite oligarchs who have monopolized money, power, and the means of production (if you can even call generously generative AI “production”, instead of mere theft.)

So again, I’ll ask you, “what have you made in your life that leads you to think copyright should be limited to 15 years?”

The answer for someone like Rufus Pollock seems to be “I’ve created nothing, I just want access to other people’s things”, probably only so that he and other highly privileged tech bros can further engineer a society where they can use people’s data for their own benefit.

We don’t need some 20 year old joke of a research paper from Cambridge to judge what we are seeing with our own eyes right here and now. If you need a concrete example of where forced “open data” (as in, “we’ve pirated every song ever and hosted them on Anna’s Archive so big tech can use them to train a model to rip off musicians who are already working 2-3 jobs to make ends meet”) has failed, it has been the abuse and exploitation of copyrighted works on the part of generative AI companies in a system that has only served to make the rich richer and the poor, including the creative class, poorer.

Pollock isn’t entitled to “access” to the things I create, nor is Altman entitled to train his over-valued company’s for-profit product off of them. Fuck that.

The increasingly broke creative proletariat are being ripped the fuck off by the disgustingly wealthy techno-oligarch bourgeoisie, all because generative AI training seems to barely be a gray area in existing copyright laws–showing once and for all that giving these people even a single inch of “access” to our work will end in nothing but rampant exploitation.

Sorry. I’m not sure what happened here. I thought I copied the link last night, and it seems to work for me when I click it now. Maybe a mod fixed it.

Exactly. This is why you can’t tie property ownership to life and death, because then you’re simply creating a business incentive to seeing that people with valuable property die.

So to solve that, instead of tying the property to a specific person’s lifetime, you tie it to a generic estimation of human lifetime (say 80-110 years, optimistically), and that brings us right back to where we are.

The more I think about how to fix copyright, the more I wonder whether we really need copyright.

Are you think about this from the standpoint of a creator? Have you written anything? Have you composed or recorded a song? Have you drawn or painted a picture? Taken an artistic photo? Even written some source code?

Or are you simply looking at copyright from the perspective of a consumer, who sees it as little more than an inconvenience to your access to free media? (I understand the populism of this, because consumers always outnumber creators, and we all like having the power to pirate media in an economy where so much is becoming unaffordable to us.)

I mean, think about it, the original idea behind copyright is to protect the small guy who creates media and wants to sell it from companies that might want to sell it themselves. Well, it’s not working whatsoever. The small guy gets pennies on the dollar, while the big companies rake in the profits.

The original idea of copyright was that if you write a story (for example), you exclusively own it, and thus do not have to compete for the ability to print and sell it. This was meant to be a real solution to a real problem at the dawn of industrialization; how can the person who writes a story compete with a person who owns a printing press?

Sure, we can argue that the publisher still often wins today, because artists are so BROKE and desperate for cash that they will too often agree to a contract with bad terms. (See Spotify, for just one of many examples.) But without copyright, the writer loses and the printing company wins 100% of the time. The author would have zero ability to capitalize of their work, and the entity with the largest printing press would be unbeatable in the free market.

If AI is going to be treated like a printing press, artists should be protected from it like they were protected from the printing press. That demands stronger copyright laws, not weaker ones.

So honestly, let’s just abolish copyright altogether and work on more of a donation base (that actually gets to the artists, since they control it) which is already being used with video a lot, and to ensure that artists can afford the necessities, add universal basic inco… OK shit I’m at it again.

As an artist myself, I’m tired of hearing non-artists propose solutions in which artists can only “afford the necessities” while billionaire tech bros hoard 99.9% of the wealth for themselves. Whether it’s some kind of social safety net or UBI, what you’re proposing amounts to little more than an allowance or table scraps from society, for the people who do what I think is the important work of creating large parts of human culture. Promising creative people a meager future in which they scrape by on only the bare minimum needed to survive is not the glamorous sales pitch that some people seem to think it is…

Why is the prescription a society where creative people are the only ones who can’t capitalize on their creations?

If we are to abolish intellectual property, we might as well abolish all property (including land, patents and money as well) because then at least everybody is in the same boat. But if we do so, we’d better be careful to make sure that we aren’t simply giving the federal government (and the shitheads who run it) even more power and control over everything. A society like that would need a MUCH stronger Bill of Rights, and one that is actually enforced.

I actually don’t understand your reasoning here… What have you made in your life that leads you to think that copyright should be limited at all? Have you never written a story? Composed or recorded a song? Drawn a picture or taken a photograph? Written some computer code?

I’ve done all of these things, and I don’t see any logic in the idea that I shouldn’t have exclusive legal rights over a work that I’ve created throughout my lifetime, at the very least. I write a song and I only get 15 years to perform and sell it? I paint an illustration and I only get 15 years to prevent other people from drop-shipping t-shirts and posters of it on Amazon?

Copyright exists, in theory, to protect the original creators of works. Whether it does a good job of that or not is a secondary point. It seems that you’re essentially arguing that artists should have less rights, power and value simply to justify piracy. No offense, but this strikes me as the argument of a consumer trying to justify piracy, with zero consideration of protecting writers, artists, musicians, and other creators of “intellectual property”.

Indeed, one solution to corporations getting away with breaking the law is to make the law more lax for everyone. But another (much more preferable) solution is to simply enforce the laws equally and take action to protect creators.

Oh, fuck off…