Eternal copyright is destroying culture
The recent furore over Netflix/Penguin ruining the works of Roald Dahl is just the latest in a long line of similar problems and responses. Modern woke sensibilities, largely performative complaints and signaling, are ruining culture. I’m perfectly fine with “Netflix delenda est” as a response (and this is desirable for other reasons as well), but it’s not a sufficiently comprehensive response. If it weren’t for de facto pervasive, strong, eternal copyright, this wouldn’t be happening.
Corporate ownership of intellectual property, effective government enforcement of those intellectual property claims, and an essentially eternal term for that intellectual property, essentially removes culture from the commons.
Copyright is substantially corporate owned — the most valuable copyrights are the foundations of huge businesses themselves, or are owned by huge corporations. Disney, Microsoft, Apple, etc are fundamentally built on copyright to media and software.
Government is effective at enforcing copyright, through a variety of laws. This is a combination of effective civil lawsuits, laws like DMCA, and other aspects of law. While there are limited “Fair Use” exceptions to copyright law, technical controls increasingly restrict even legal Fair Use.
Copyright today is essentially eternal: the term of copyright today is life of the author plus 70 years, or years from first publication or 120 years from creation.
This combination of factors allows large corporations, already captured by “woke” ideology, to control culture.
The moral defense against this is a combination of technical evasion of copyright controls, and a voluntary recognition of the original constitutional 14 year copyright term (and possibly a 14 year renewal, although how to structure this is unclear.) The regulatory capture of the copyright apparatus by hostile government-corporate entities removes any moral requirement to respect copyright law in excess of this level; copyright was extended repeatedly at the behest of corporate interests (Disney in the case of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998). There’s no hope of regulatory or legislative change, and the courts are unlikely to act, so the only solution is through technology. I would certainly jury nullify in favor of anyone infringing on copyrights outside this 14/28 year window.
Interestingly, AI (especially of the LLM form, or GANs or anything trained on large volumes of publicly accessible but copyrighted data) presents a new challenge to copyright. Some argue that copyright rights are being violated by training a model on copyrighted data; others argue that they’re using this copyrighted data in the same way a normal human reader would use it and thus not infringing. I don’t take a particular position on which is consistent with existing US copyright law; I do think these models are sufficiently powerful that they will exist whether or not they are compliant with this copyright law, and if copyright law stands in the way of their creation, they’ll be created in circumvention of this law. In this case, the enemy of my enemy would be by friend, and I for one welcome our new AI overlords, anyway.