Since people keep talking about #AI violating #copyright laws, it reminds me of the fact that all #Intellectual_Property laws are basically protectionist laws. If you are against big corporate executives making billions while forcing their employees to exist on subsistance wages, then maybe you ought to rethink your position on copyright.
First of all the concept of intellectual property is something fairly new in the history of humanity, and only came about after the printing press and other machines made it possible to easily duplicate items. Prior to that, if you wrote a poem or a song and someone else performed it, you were probably happy that someone else thought your work was good enough to perform.
But okay, now it is easy to duplicate things. The problem is that because of intellectual property laws, certain people get to work once and get paid many times over, I mean, let's think about this. If you are a famous actor or singer and your work is recorded, in theory you get paid over and over, every time your video or song is played in a public setting, and you also get paid if someone purchases that video or song for their own use. And after you die, your successors get paid for work they never did, until the copyright expires.
Now compare that to the guy on an assembly line who helps build an automobile. He arguably works just as hard, but he only gets paid once for each hour he works. He does not get paid each time the car he helped make is used (even if in commercial use, such as a taxi or a Uber), nor does he get a small percentage of gas taxes or license fees. He does the job once and gets paid once, at what are probably considered good wages (only if he belongs to a union), but still if he decides to retire, or gets injured and can't work, he doesn't get to collect over and over for work he has done in the past. Meanwhile the useless exceutives, who could not put together a car if their lives depended on it, make ungodly amounts of money and live the high life while trying to figure out how they can squeeze workers even further (or replace them with robots, or now AI).
Most workers only get paid once for work done once. Think about the perople who help build toll bridges or toll roads; do they get any residual paymets from the collected tolls? Of course not. So why do the creators of music, video, and occasionally computer software get paid over and over for work done once?
I honestly have mixed feelings about all this. Should we celebrate the fact that some people have figured out how to use the copyright laws to their advantage and escape the rat race? But this assumes that the royalties are actually goling to the performers, and not to some other fat ass exceutives that bought the rights from the performers, or forced the performers to sign contracts that force them to keep working when they should be the ones living the high life, and not the recording company or movie studio executives.
Personally I have never felt that copyright laws are fair or just. They basically try to create artificial scarcity, to compensate copyright holders for the fact that due to modern technology nothing really needs to be scarce or difficult to obtain. And because of the way contracts are drawn up, often it is not even the people who actually did the work that reap the benefits, but on the occasions where that happens, they are then paid over and over and over until the day they die (and beyond), while that is not the case for workers in any other field (we can argue about computer programmers but when was the last time you saw one of them living the high life because of royalties from a program they created? It may happen, but not very often).
Something just seems so wrong about all this, and I for one would much rather see the entire concept of copyright abolished then to just see more and more special interests redefining those laws in ways that ultimately funnel additional wealth to the rich. Now with AI we have a situation where big companies are arguing with other big companies over what constitutes fair use, and why do I get the feeling that somehow it will all get worked out in such a way that things will cost even more than they do now?
And even if we don't abolish copyright, maybe we ought to make it illegal for a copyright to be assigned to anyone which had no part of creating the work. If it seems a bit wrong for the person who actually did the work to get paid many times over for work done once, it seems a lot more wrong for some entity that had no hand in the creative process to own the rights and collect those recurring royalties. In particular, I can't see any justification for corporations owning the rights, since a corporation creates nothing artistic. One could argue that if the product of an AI can't hold a copyright (even though one could argue that at least it transforms other copyrighted work with which it's been trained), then a corporation should not be allowed to hold a copyright under any circumstance.
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