The sad thing is that there is a legitimate problem with copyright now. It presents no alternative to inefficiently begging to individual authors.
If you want a mountain of content (say, to launch a print-on-demand kiosk with 5M titles, or a streaming service offering every movie released since 1885), there’s no bulk option.
If you want to offer something the original author doesn’t want to sell anymore (say, a software archive specializing in old versions), the author has a veto and no reason not to act in bad faith.
If you want to adapt or distribute old content, the rights may be difficult or impossible to trace, leaving you waiting for the lawsuit.
We need a mandatory-license framework to solve those problems. But the only thing that has come close to addressing the problem was the Ocean Boiling Bullshit Generators pulling the classic techbro “ask for forgiveness instead of permission” play.
I… uh, don’t agree that people should have the right to violate an author’s wishes, at least while the author is alive. Go ahead and pirate it, but no company should be allowed to just grab somebody else’s work and repackage it because they followed some set of rules that the creator had no say in.
Piracy needs to be less stigmatized as a personal solution for situations where things are not available legally. Or just because you don’t want to financially support the creator. It should be entirely legal for the sake of archival purposes, personal or otherwise. And archives should be able to be made public where the content is not available legally otherwise with no legal risk to the archivist.
I think issues where rights are difficult or impossible to trace are some bullshit. There should be some easy mandatory way for that info to be recorded and publicly accessible.
And there does need to be some control against companies just grabbing up and hoarding rights for shit and then doing nothing with them.
But I can’t abide by the idea that a corporation could just scoop up everything and repackage it because they did the bare minimum to follow a set of rules that the creators of the media had no say in. Maybe there’s some sufficiently dense and well designed mountain of legalese contract that could somehow make it ironclad and fair to the creators and the public, but I have no doubt that such a system would be slanted in favor of the corporations and screwing over the creators and the public.
Like all those musicians launching lawsuits to stop Republicans from using their music at rallies. Now, the Republican campaigns make sure they follow the bare minimum of these hypothetical mandatory licensing terms and start packaging up these musicians’ music as “The Winning Album by Donald Trump, featuring Rage Against the Machine”.
The only reason AI has gotten away with it is that the tech is sufficiently complex to confuse law makers and judges, and by this point it’s propping up at least 40% of the US stock market. Seriously. Look it up, it’s fucking terrifying.
