I think it is serious. In which case, I gotta say, it really seems like you didn't spend much time thinking about this. "A 1 year grave period for everyone to pull stuff off they don't want to be a part of" - How does that work when the Internet is already full of unauthorized reproductions, most of which people aren't even aware of? Even ignoring practical considerations, when literally everyone is basically stuck using the Internet for everything, this seems a bit unfair to anyone who isn't onboard, akin to The Onion's Google Opt-out Village. But there are so many practical issues with this, it would be easier to list the number of problems this doesn't have. You accidentally leak something to the Internet and it becomes commons? What happens when other people leak things to the Internet? How about revenge porn?
Not minor stuff that can easily be papered over, this literally reintroduces the problem of needing to care about the provenance of data again, in a way that can't be automated, which makes the whole thing entirely moot. All just to make training data for AI models easier to distribute?
I'm all for intellectual property reform, maybe even fairly radical. But this just seems like it wasn't thought out.
If this was satire, well, I took the bait. Oddly convincing despite being hard to believe.
Personally, I'd prefer a fixed term. I know enough independent authors making a living from selling their books that I'm willing to allow the fixed term to be large, like 50 years from date of completion of the work. (With a good definition of "completion" so someone can't cheat by editing a couple lines per year to keep something copyrighted indefinitely). The simpler the rule is, the easier it is to understand, and the harder it is to cheat it. The more complicated you make a rule, the more loopholes get found.
That's a fair amount of computational and labor overhead mind you, as you'll need to verify and prune the quality of your mountain of synthetic data, but certainly possible.
Though this assumes the legal system is a rational actor playing by the set of rules it claims to. In fact, I highly suspect you could get very unlucky and get an unfavorable ruling against you, because you stepped on a big pile of money's toes in the process of doing this.
Are LLMs what we need to make all data public domain? This way it could be used for that purpose
Decentralized unstoppable storage, combined with decentralized unstoppable training, sorta like SETI for AI training. The seed of this tech already exists with IPFS and others like it.
We know (some? all?) of the big labs have skirted copyright laws at one point or another. Truly open models would just build on what is publicly available.
The first broadly useful fully open source models will do this.
We already have open data / open code / open weights for some domain-specific cases, such as audio models trained on large open datasets, eg. Tacotron / LJSpeech from waaay back in the day, though that is certainly not SOTA anymore.
Distillation could possibly be considered an early case of this as raw AI outputs are themselves not copyrightable unless humans enrich, filter, or transform them. Granted, that does not handle the cases where the outputs are sufficiently similar to copyrighted original works.
That said, I don't necessarily disagree with you. Talkie[1] presents an interesting case for it being at least possible to do this entirely on public domain material.
But even that used Claude somewhere in the course of its training pipeline (it's listed as a contributor on their GitHub), so again, how granular you want to get with that is still a question.