And frankly, if this means the end of copyright: good riddance.
Anthropic (predictably) issued many DMCA takedown requests after the claude code leak.
Copyright for me, but not for thee.
Copyright needs to exist, but we need to go back to its roots.
Everyone forgets that it exists to promote progress. Nothing else. The ability to profit from it exists only to serve those ends.
Anything which does not serve to promote the progress of the arts and sciences should not be protected, and "limited times" never meant "until Walt Disney says so."
If we truly wanted to protect and promote the arts, we would've stuck to the original "14~28 years since publication".
Killing copyright would essentially do the same - and if you think clickbait is bad now, removal of copyright would destroy the economic incentive to investing any effort into content.
The current practice of patents is very different. Most patents are not filed by inventors, but by the employers of inventors, and most of those companies do not file patents for the possible revenue that could be generated by licensing, but only to prevent competition in their market. They have absolutely no intention to license fairly and without discrimination those patents. Therefore the publication of those patents provides absolutely no benefit for the society.
There exists today one class of patents whose purpose is to obtain revenue from licensing, which are the patents that are necessary for implementing various standards, like standards for communication protocols, for video and audio compression and the like.
These patents are the only kind that can provide substantial revenues today, because everybody is forced to use them.
Wherever a patent is not strictly necessary for compatibility with some standard, everybody will choose alternative solutions, even if they are inferior, instead of paying unreasonable licensing fees. There are a lot of useful patents that covered techniques that remained unused until a quarter of century passed and the patents expired, after which those techniques became ubiquitous.
As patents are implemented today, especially in USA and in the countries whom USA has blackmailed successfully into updating their patent laws to match the American way, e.g. by allowing patents for software, they are one of the greatest impediments of technical progress, unlike what was hoped when the patent system was created.
It is likely that this degradation of the purpose of the patent system is closely linked to the shift in patent ownership from individual inventors to big companies that employ inventors.
It’s one thing to reject the specifics of IP laws as currently implementated; it’s another thing to celebrate the dismantling of the entire foundation of open source by for-profit corporate interests who sought to do it for decades.
In other words, it's tyranny. It's intolerable and we can't allow it to continue this way.
As a result of this change, [copyright] is no longer easy to enforce, no longer uncontroversial, and no longer beneficial"
from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.en...
Second, when it comes to action, he only argues that copyright should have reduced power, which we can all agree with; he does not appear to argue for the death of copyright. Death of copyright would seem counter-productive, unless it also implied the death of corporate ability to withhold the source from the users and many other things.
You will note that the very text you linked to is copyrighted. There’s a reason for that.
Chesterson's fence. The existence of copyleft is the result of being forced to live within the domain of copyright, not the other way around.
> Getting rid of IP protections also rids us of GPL, which gave us a few things including the most popular OS in the world.
Linux became popular because of the persistent effort of Linus & the Linux community into making the kernel better, not because of copyleft.
> It’s one thing to reject the specifics of IP laws as currently implementated; it’s another thing to celebrate the dismantling of the entire foundation of open source by for-profit corporate interests who sought to do it for decades.
There are similar corporate interests who profit off of hoarding decades-old works so they can charge fees to what should've been in the public domain, under the original durations that should've stayed (28/14 years).
What has resulted from the endless extensions of the original terms has been the societal lobotomization of human creativity, with an untold number of works now being forever lost simply because they were derived from what should've been in the public domain.
When having lived in such a society, and recognizing existing copyright laws as the reason why it is creatively in such a state, the celebration of its destruction should not be treated as illogical.
Not at all. It was born thanks to Linus, but it exploded in popularity and gained its contributorship precisely thanks to the promise of GPL that volunteer work will remain for public benefit.
Without the ability to say that, a corporate entity could have taken volunteer work so far, built a closed-source solution on top of it, and ran with it commercially, with no repercussions and with great results.
In fact, we have just that example at hand: Apple. There’s a reason Linux distros are much more popular than BSD, nearly rivaling commercial systems on desktop and far surpassing them in the server world.
> The existence of copyleft is the result of being forced to live within the domain of copyright
Sure, and by that logic the existence of copyright is the result of being forced to live within the current socioeconomic reality.
The existence of copyright hinges on existence of property in general and intellectual property in particular. To eschew that is to propose a stark foundational change to society.
Sure, if we imagine a world where there’s no corporations hiding the source from users, everything belongs to everyone, no one is recognized for their work or has any control over it, etc., we can say that copyright is non-essential. There will be many questions to that reality, of course (for example, what would drive innovation in that world, if not the motivation for recognition and profit), but it has a right to be considered as a thought experiment. It could even be more desirable than the reality we live in!
However, we don’t live in that reality, and what people tend to mean when they propose getting rid of copyright is a half measure—a reality which has nothing in common with the above, which is all the same as now, except with copyright protections removed, which used to be a hindrance to pirates but now with the advent of LLMs is a massive issue for corporate interests building their new empires on top of our original work.
You yourself then proceed to argue that terms should be limited—as if I would disagree with that!
This is why we see evidence of emotional structures: https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function
This is why we see generalized introspection (limited in the models studied before people point it out, which they love to): https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection
Because the most compact way to recreate the breadth of written human experience is shockingly to have analogs to the systems that made it in the first place.
I would be much more convinced about AGI 2027 if someone in 2026 demonstrates one (1) robot which is plausibly as intelligent as a cockroach. I genuinely don't think any of us will live to see that happen.
If there is no copyright, then you can copy things freely.
All that we need after that to realize the GPL ideal is to legally mandate that people have a right to access and modify source code of software/hardware they use, i.e. the government needs to mandate that Apple releases the iOS kernel and source code and that iPhones can be unlocked and custom kernels flashed, that John Deere must provide the tractor's source code, that my fridge releases its GPL-violating linux patches, etc etc.
You have the right to free speech, the right to a lawyer, and the right to source code. Simply amend the bill of rights.