I wonder if the whole #AI thing will finally convince artists that modern #copyright regime was never meant to protect *them*.
It was meant to protect the middlemen. The Amazons, the Spotifies, the Sonys, the Disneys. The film studios, the publishing houses.
Now the middlemen figured out they own basically all of art, and that they can just train a computer on that, to replace artists with a piece of software.
And then stop paying artists even the pittance they were being paid so far.
🧵
@rysiek I think you're missing the point.
Artists need to get paid. (Otherwise they starve in a garret.) The only way to get paid is through middlemen. (Ask anybody into, say, being their own ebook publisher how that's working out.)
Talking about copyright reform is kinda pointless, because it's one of many tools used to control where the profit accrues. What's needed is a reliable means of paying the artist into which a middleman cannot intrude.
@rysiek What's needed isn't copyright reform but using the coercive power of the state to remove middlemen from the process.
Since middlemen do provide useful services to the art-consuming public, this isn't trivial, but it's not that hard, either.
For electronic media, it's fairly obvious that you could use the library system and pay artists based on public engagement. (And write laws forbidding contracts which bar this practice.) Tangible media and performance tricker, but doable.
@graydon if you read that whole thread of mine, you might conclude I am not, in fact, missing the point, and I am, in fact, arguing that artists need to be paid.
The problem with the current copyright regime is that on one hand it ends up stripping artists of rights to their art, on the other it locks art in corporate vaults. And as a cherry on top, artists don't get properly paid either.
Reforming copyright will need to be part of any systemic solution.
@rysiek The one thing copyright does is say it's yours the instant you create it.
All the other stuff is power relationships and as such I don't think the notion of copyright is the main problem.
Any fix starts with "if your art is broadly enjoyed, you get paid enough for your art that it's rational to keep doing it"; any such fix is going to be resisted because of incumbents but also because the art broadly enjoyed won't be the "right" art.
Any fix has to start by addressing power.
@graydon I never said the notion of copyright is the problem. I said the modern/current copyright regime is the problem.
And again, we vehemently agree on the fact that any fix has to start addressing power. Part of the problem is that a lot of that power is enshrined in and protected by the current copyright law.
There are many buttons to push, and there are no simple answers, but we must agree that there is a problem and that we need to start fixing it.
@rysiek The distinction seems to be that you're defining the copyright regime—that exercise of power—as the problem, and I'm defining the problem as "you should be able to make a living from your (vaguely popular) art as a matter of expectation, rather than (great) good luck."
I don't think those things are equivalent.
@graydon I see what your saying. I agree with your broader statement of the problem.
But fixing it will require serious copyright reform. In that sense, current copyright regime is "a problem" (not "the problem") that needs to be solved.
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
Graydon