oj2828Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/us/politics/supreme-court-cox-music-copyright.html
A tiny victory. Copyright should not be more than a decade. This intellectual property system is one of the worst things to happen in modern society is what I would have said a few years ago, now I got bigger problems but I'm still mad.
The reason copyright doesn't get fixed or removed is largely because the general public is worried more about other things and the big rightsholders continue their monthly payments—err, lobbying.
Though AI might change that. In the end, large corporations get what they want.
The general public also get sold on the rosy idea that copyright (and patents to a certain extent), protect the little guy, that thanks to this mechanism their work will not be stolen by opportunistic freeloaders. It also resonates with the "one day I will strike rich" mentality.
What they usually "forget" to tell you is that your IP is absolutely worthless if you don't have the resources to defend it in court, which in turns actually advantages freeloaders who either have relatively low costs to sue (patent trolls are basically an example of this) or enough money that they don't feel the pain if they lose.
The current system basically incentivizes suing over IP NOT creating it.
I'm not sure I agree that any single fixed term makes sense. Rather, I think it'd be better if the exponential cost to society (in terms of works that don't happen, and works that don't happen based on those works that didn't happen and so on compounding) was just part of the yearly renewal price. Do maybe everyone gets 7 years flat to start with, then it costs $100*1.3^(year). So after another 25 years it'd be around $70.5k renewal. At 50 years it'd be $50 million. At 75 years it'd be $35 billion. Fixed amount and exponential can of course be shifted around here but the idea would be to encourage creators to use works hard and if they couldn't make it work not sit on them but release them. Once in awhile something would be such a big hit it'd be worth keeping a long time, and that's ok, but society gets its due too. And most works would be allowed to lapse as they stopped being worth it.
Another alternative/additional approach would be to split up the nature of copyright, vs an all or nothing total monopoly. Let there be 7-10 years of total copyright, then another 7-14 years where no exclusivity of where it's sold or DRM is allowed, then 7/14/21 years where royalties can still be had but licensing is mandatory at FRAND rates, then finally some period of "creditright" where the creator has no control or licensing, but if they wish can still require any derivative works to give them a spot in the credits.
I think there is a lot of unexplored territory for IP, and wish the conversations were less binary.
How about something like IP as a tax? IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.
I want to be super clear that I'm not proposing some finalized plan or numbers here, it'd need some real work spent hashing it all out. Mainly though I hope people will consider more the huge space of untapped approaches to balancing various benefits and costs towards a better societal outcome. And that maybe that helps a little in getting us out of some of the present seemingly intractable boxes we so often seem stuck in?
Your tax idea could certainly be another useful tool. My main immediate thought/caution would be:
>IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.
As we have endless examples of, "profit" and even "revenue" can be subject to a lot of manipulation/fudging given the right incentives. I also think that part of the cost I describe is objective: whether it takes off right away or takes off after a decade, as long as it's under full copyright it's imposing a cost on society the whole time. Also other stuff like risk of it getting lost/destroyed. So I do think there needs to be some counter to that in the system, sitting on something, even if it makes no money, shouldn't be free.
But the graduated approach might help with this too, and again they could be mixed and matched. It could be 1001.3^n to keep full copyright, but only 501.2^n to maintain "licenseright", 25*1.15^n for "FRANDright", and free for the remaining period of "creditright". Or whatever, play around with numbers and consider different outcomes. But feels like there's room for improvement over the present state of affairs.
I agree with you that 10 years is more than enough time for corporations to turn a healthy profit on something (not that they can't continue to make money off of works after something has entered the public domain) but this wasn't a small victory. If every ISP were at risk for endless billions in damages because of what their users did it would mean that ISPs would be forced to give in to the RIAA/MPAs demands to permanently terminate the accounts of internet users over completely unproven (and often inaccurate) accusations of piracy. It's worth noting that cox was actually doing this in a limited number of circumstances, and the media industry still wasn't satisfied.
The media industry insisted that they needed the power to get people's accounts terminated even though it would have left many people, including fully innocent ones, cut off from the internet entirely. This was a big deal and I'm honestly surprised to see the supreme court do the right thing.
At this stage I just want a coherent system. There is no way "individuals can have their accounts terminated for one song" and "AI companies can download a complete copy of everything, including pirated works, and roll it into models which can reproduce it exactly and sell it back to you" should be able to co-exist.
It’s interesting to see how as soon as intellectual property theft starts to be critical for powerful interests the legal system magically gets more lenient about copyright enforcement.
The balance between public good and protecting IP ownership of the creatives (which is, paradoxically, also part of the public good) has to be struck and enforced consistently.
AI training
AI training might be copyright infringement. But there’s no cases or laws to establish that.
I don’t think this case or anything else has been affected by AI training on copyrighted material, if it is deemed infringing.
It's been demonstrated that some companies, even F10 ones, have been using pirated content to train their AI.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
They all seem to be using pirated books. Probably slightly better than just web stuff as it is presumably edited.
The authors case was thrown out on narrow reasoning. But companies now live by different rules so I suspect they won’t be held to account. Even Disney/nintendo are unlikely to stop this…
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/judge-tosses-authors-ai-tr...
It's interesting to see how people look for powerful interests to explain simple and correct supreme court decisions.
It's really surprising to see a 9-0 ruling written by Clarence Thomas which puts basic human rights (internet access) above civil liability.
If it isn't on the net, it can't go through prism