Copyright reform is necessary for national security
77 comments
·February 1, 2025Kim_Bruning
absolutelastone
I think our IP laws are optimized to maximize benefits for the legal system.
JumpCrisscross
> our IP laws are optimized to maximize benefits for the legal system
Versus the content owners?!?
TheAceOfHearts
I hope to see copyright duration go down to a reasonable length within my lifetime. There's tons of creative derivative work which builds upon existing content which cannot be sold due to copyright.
The way I think about IP is that if you grew up with something, by the time you're an adult it should be possible to remix it in any way you like, because it's part of your culture. Nobody should get to lock down an idea for their lifetime.
jazzyjackson
14 years as originally intended would be fine. All the classic movies up to 2010, and I still have to pay a subscription to watch, and lots of them are unavailable because the studios want to haggle over licenses for 50 year old properties? It's the kind of thing that might drive a man to pirate.
If your book hasn't made you rich in the first 14 years after publishing, I'm sorry, audience just isn't that into you.
(I am aware movie deals can languish for many years before finally landing a deal, and with 14 years studios could just wait you out and there's no incentive to write a script anymore, but copyright should be 14 years after publishing right? And movie scripts are not generally published before they get made into a movie, if ever.)
jasinjames
Not sure if this influences your thinking at all, but whatever duration copyright applies for starts once it was made, whether it was published or not.
> Copyright in a work created on or after January 1, 1978, subsists from its creation ... [1]
And "creation" basically means "written down" [2]. IANAL.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302 [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_o...
EvanAnderson
The option for a single renewal for 14 more years doesn't strike me as onerous. It makes a concession for the "audience hasn't made you rich in the first 14 years" and is still light years ahead of the current de facto infinite duration.
It won't ever change, though. No chance ever. Other than to be actually made infinite. The nature of "intellectual property" and money being speech in US politics locks that in.
foobarbecue
Well, at some point our government will collapse entirely, and then all the laws can change. I'm starting to think that might not be far off.
JumpCrisscross
Maybe a middle ground is mandatory, standardised licensing after 14 years and then public domain after 28. (Where do the multiples of 7 come from?)
8note
if you do suddenly become popular, you can write a second book, and get involved in TV or movie adaptations of it.
GRRM isnt included on ASOIAF content because hes the copyright holder, but because his influence makes people want to see the shows
wisty
You could argue that 14 years is a little short, especially for books which can get adaptations that pay more than the book. OTOH preventing adaptations stifles things. Imagine if Tolkein had managed to lock down his orcs and elves like Disney locked down the mouse.
I think 20 or 30 years is fairer. But IIRC it's not about fair, the Constitution says that it should only be to encourage innovation, and long copyright inhibits innovation.
bsder
The original author (not an assignee) should get N years free and should be able to renew every N years for some fee that escalates upwards with a single retroactive period if you haven't paid. If you hit a second period that you haven't paid, copyright dropped. If you aren't the original author, you get to renew once for N years--no more.
This is a nice compromise in that it disincentivizes simply squatting on properties--you have to pay money to maintain later copyright so you have a strong push to make money on it.
abetusk
An exceptional post from people who have an ideological stake in knowledge preservation/dissemination and are at the center of it.
From the post:
"""
Our first recommendation is straightforward: shorten the copyright term. In the US, copyright is granted for 70 years after the author’s death. This is absurd. We can bring this in line with patents, which are granted for 20 years after filing. This should be more than enough time for authors of books, papers, music, art, and other creative works, to get fully compensated for their efforts (including longer-term projects such as movie adaptations).
"""
can16358p
I honestly don't understand why this is not the case already. Actually copyright should be even less-enforceable.
Information/access to data/works should be totally free and there should be other ways to support the creators.
For example I could easily download MP3s of music and MP4s of series/movies but I don't: simply because of two reasons:
- I want to support the artist (to an extent as possible) - Using Spotify/Apple Music/Netflix is much more convenient with a totally acceptable monthly fee.
I know the article is not about entertainment but a library, same rules should apply.
And if one wants to train an LLM, let them: at its essence it's just a person who has read all the books (and access to information should be free), just the person is a machine instead of a biological human being.
martin-t
> And if one wants to train an LLM, let them: at its essence it's just a person
If I gzip a couple hundred thousand books and distribute them freely, can I also claim it's just a person who has read those books and avoid a massive lawsuit?
Please, stop anthropomorphising machine learning models.
JumpCrisscross
> copyright should be even less-enforceable
It should also be de-criminalized.
jprete
None of those services could exist today if copyright didn't exist, because streaming services wouldn't be able to compete with free downloads. I think Patreon and Kickstarter are how creative work is funded in that world.
Kim_Bruning
Piracy isn’t a legal problem—it’s a service problem [1].
Netflix, Spotify, and Valve (Steam) didn’t succeed because of copyright enforcement. They won because they made paying for content easier, faster, and better than piracy.
Piracy isn’t hard, but these services solved the friction: instant access, high quality, fair pricing, and features that free alternatives couldn’t match. That’s why they still thrive today.
[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-pir...
JumpCrisscross
> They won because they made paying for content easier, faster, and better than piracy
PopcornTime would eat their lunch if it were allowed to work [1].
jprete
If it were legal to download movies and music, Netflix and Spotify would absolutely not exist.
Steam is an unusual case, because games are running software and can't be trivially reproduced in their unencoded form. The publishers can include copy protection, network connection requirements, or even run essential parts of game logic on their own servers. So free downloads became a much worse experience over time.
null
foobarbecue
I tried to repost this on Facebook. It was very upset
mettamage
This site is blocked in the Netherlands. Does anyone have an archive.is or archive.ph of it?
artninja1988
ranger_danger
This site is blocked by Cloudflare from many VPN providers. Is there an alternative?
mettamage
Thanks!
RyanShook
I’m afraid LLMs are making copyrights obsolete and unenforceable. If an author uses DeepSeek to write a book, piece of music, application, or patent did they break copyright? Is the new work protected if this is disclosed?
fsckboy
that does not make copyrights unenforceable
EnergyAmy
The sheer volume of uncopyrightable work will soon kill the system. Let us dance on its corpse
ranger_danger
If I looked at a painting before making my own similar one, did I break copyright?
martin-t
I am writing a master's thesis and notice somebody has written one containing a chapter than I also need to write. I copy paste the chapter but replace every word with a synonym. Did I break copyright? Did I commit plagiarism?
ben_w
While this pattern shows the inconsistency between how humans and AI are treated, there have been many examples over history where the ability to do at an increased scale something that was already familiar, results in the law being changed.
Shining a torch at a plane is usually fine, shining a laser at them usually is a crime.
martin-t
None of the people who claim LLMs are intelligent and "persons" argue for giving them legal personhood and human rights. Telling.
null
jarsin
As per your second question the copyright office came out this week with the following guidance:
The new guidelines say that AI prompts currently don’t offer enough control to “make users of an AI system the authors of the output.”(AI systems themselves can’t hold copyrights.) That stands true whether the prompt is extremely simple or involves long strings of text and multiple iterations. “No matter how many times a prompt is revised and resubmitted, the final output reflects the user’s acceptance of the AI system’s interpretation, rather than authorship of the expression it contains,”
They are suppose to come out with guidance regarding the first question in a month or so.
farts_mckensy
This has no chance of passing. Reform is out of the question. This is just navel gazing. Get it through your skulls that reform is impossible at this point, and accept the implications of that.
qrwafn
It is interesting that since January 20th all pro-copyright posts are downvoted. Is this the user alignment that the AI broligarchs speak of?
artninja1988
On the contrary. It's only been since the proliferation of genai that I've seen so many copyright maximalist takes on Hackernews, reminiscent of the you wouldn't steal a car propaganda run by big corpos.
hnad8125
Both is true. There have been more pro-copyright posts but these are getting downvoted recently. Last year they were popular.
martin-t
I haven't noticed a particular date but yes, my posts describing a fair system of compensation get downvoted incredibly fast.
At least I sometimes also get replies but many of them use fallacious arguments to the point of feeling like trolling. No idea if the same people commenting are also downvoting but I am starting to think that votes should not be anonymous.
thw1238129
[flagged]
martin-t
I was hoping the article would propose the opposite: if you train LLMs on copyrighted data, you owe the author a part of your income from it. How big should be determined by courts but probably proportional to the amount of data.
There's absolutely no reason rich people owning ML companies should be getting richer by stealing ordinary people's work.
But practicality trumps morality. The west needs to beat China and China doesn't give a fuck about copyright or individual people's (intellectual) property.
The ML algos demand to be fed so we gotta sink to their level.
pavpanchekha
Realistically, the copyrighted works that are most valuable to training machine learning models, at least if we go by The Pile as typical of training data [1] is:
- Web pages; hard to argue that royalties are due since these are publicly available for free
- Scientific papers; these do cost money but the copyright is typically owned by scientific publishers
- Github, Stack Exchange, HN (yes); these are freely available, sometimes by license, so hard to argue for royalties
- Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg; these are also free by license
So the actual consequence of what you're proposing (or at least the realistically-enactable version of it) is the big AI firms paying scientific publishers a lot of money. Is this actually good? Is Elsevier, a basically pure rent-seeker, really more worthy than AI labs, which maybe you don't like but at least do something valuable?
kevingadd
Scientific papers are available on web pages so they're publicly available for free too right? I can download an ISO or installer of almost anything if I go to the right website, so all software is already free?
If you're going to ignore the existence of copyright and licenses we should extend it to everything that's ever been posted on the internet, not just "web pages". Why shouldn't all books and films count as free too?
I'm actually open to the idea of just abolishing copyright but it's kind of silly to act like it's only about Elsevier. Lots of creatives depend on copyright in order to earn a living, similarly to how patents fund a lot of important research despite how noxious the patent system has become.
If we fixate on examples like Elsevier or Martin Shkreli in order to argue for completely abolishing the copyright or patent systems we risk destroying the framework that enables valuable creative works or new technologies to be developed in the first place. This is part of why people are so upset by AI companies arguing that they should just be able to ignore the whole framework in order to enrich themselves; once you allow the for-profit AI companies to do it, other groups are going to line up to also demand a free ride.
Kim_Bruning
> We risk destroying the framework that enables valuable creative works or new technologies to be developed in the first place
I think we are starting to see not just historical empirical data but also strategic intelligence that this assumption might be somewhat inaccurate. - which is what Anna's archive is pointing out here in the context of AI development and copyright restrictions.
martin-t
I am surprised by how quickly I get downvoted to hell any time I try to propose that people should be compensated for their work fairly. And I get replies like the above, full of fallacies, which basically feel like trolling. So first, thank you for a sane reply.
Now, it boils down to the typical issue of a current system being bad and clearly not serving its stated purpose so the choice is whether to abolish it or whether to reform it (and how).
And just like any other time people have to agree on something, the simplest-to-describe solution (abolishing) will get a huge following because the more fair solutions (reform so it actually protects and rewards creators) are way, way more complex.
I fundamentally think if you build on other people's work, they deserve 1) credit 2) compensation according to what percentage of your work is based on theirs.
We could for example compare the performance of the same model depending on which parts of the training data you omit. If you omit all copyrighted work and the result is useless, we know the copyrighted work is responsible a large part of the value.
martin-t
I have trouble believing this argument is in good faith.
1) (minor nitpick) I don't see how HN is in the same category as GitHub or Stack Overflow.
2) "sometimes by license" or "free by license" imply you don't understand how copyright works. Code that is not accompanied by a license is proprietary. Period. [0] And if it has a license, then you have to follow it. If the license says that derivative works have to give credit and use the same license, then LLMs using that code for training and anything generated by those models is derivative and has to respect the license.
3) Arguably i didn't say this in the OP but the idea that the publisher owns copyright is absolutely nuts and only possible through extensive lobbying and basically extortion. It should be illegal. Copyright should always belong to the person doing the actual work. Fuck rent-seekers.
4) If western ML companies thought they can produce models of the same quality without for example stealing and laundering the entirety of Github, they would have. They don't so clearly GH is a very important input and its builders should either be compensated or the models and ML companies should only use the subset that they can without breaking the license.
Please don't get offended but I've seen this argument multiple times by proponents of A"I" and their entire argument hinged on the idea that the current ML models are so large that nobody can understand them and therefore a form of "intelligence" which they are clearly not (unless proven otherwise, at which point, they should get their own personhood but the fact no big ML company is arguing for that makes it obvious nobody really considers them intelligent).
[0]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can...
chromanoid
Maybe enforcing open sourcing the models is the best route to go. At some point everything worthwhile ever created will be processed. Models can be seen as the processed, collective cultural output of humanity. It seems fair to me to force publishing the models in the vein of some kind of copyleft clause.
martin-t
Even if they are small enough to be run be individuals, this still doesn't solve the issue of profiting from someone's work for free.
Many of us publish our open source work under GPL or AGPL with the intention that you can profit from it but you have to give back what you built on it under the same license. LLMs allow anyone to launder copyleft code and profit without giving anything back.
If people who downvote bothered to reply, they'd probably say that by being "absorbed" into LLM weights, the code served that purpose and is available for everyone to use. That forgets 2 critical points:
- LLMs give no attribution. I deserve to be credited for my fractional contribution to the collective output of humanity.
- LLMs are not intelligences, they don't suddenly make intellectual work redundant. Using them still requires work to integrate their output and therefore companies build (for-profit) products on top of my work without compensating me, without crediting me and without giving anyone the freedom to modify the code.
chromanoid
I am not sure if profits are easy to gather if all professional users can rent hardware instead of renting the service. In the end the users would actually profit from the model, not the provider (who competes with other providers of the same open source model). And here I am not sure if we can see AI as some kind of cybernetic enhancement that allows to execute ideas on the shoulders of humanity instead of just a scammy way to resell already present content.
sam_lowry_
Publishing weights? Meh.
Publishing code and data would lead to abolishing copyright.
chromanoid
Copyright is just not prepared for AI. Training with copyrighted material could become "officialy legal" under copyleft terms, at least when the amount of training material exceeds a certain threshold.
marssaxman
Well, that sounds good - what are we waiting for?
This wouldn't be the first time IP laws hurt Western innovation and security. When WW1 started - despite the airplane being invented in Dayton, Ohio - the US had fallen so far behind they had to use French aircraft. Why? The Wright brothers' patent wars had effectively frozen US aviation development.
Today it's not just one industry - Western IP laws are slowing progress across multiple tech frontiers. While companies navigate complex IP restrictions (In EU and US), China's development is following a sharp exponential curve. You can already see it clearly in robotics, electric vehicles, and now these last weeks with AI.
While in the west you deal with predatory licensing (try talking with Siemens, Oracle, or Autodesk), and everyone keeps working on barriers and moats; other nations that allow a more collaborative approach (voluntary or not) are on an accelerating trajectory.
IP law is clearly no longer suitable for purpose - we need a system that encourages collaboration more directly. A complete free for all isn't ideal either - and I certainly don't advocate that- but even that appears to be better than what we have now.