AI weights are not open “source”

Fully agree that the existing copyright and intellectual property systems are dire need of deep reform. But to get people on board, you can't just propose burning it all down, you need to point to a viable alternative. Say, limiting copyrights to something sane like 15 or 30 years. Or making it easier to invalidate obvious or trivial patents.

Or do you really want to do away with notions of intellectual property altogether? You can make an argument for that, but there would lead to deep economic changes, and you need to anticipate what the end result would look like. You still need some way to encourage the creation of new content.

Pointing out that our copyright/IP system is broken is easy. And you're right, it's totally broken! Coming up with a fix is hard work.

> you can't make these machine things without literally feeding this copyrighted information into them, therefore they do contain a copy.

They don't necessarily do. Think about that. You can take some copyrighted material and transform the information contained in it (for instance a fictional book). You can then write a summary. The summary contains information that was present in the original but it has been transformed and hence it's not a copy. The ML model contains information that has been generalized by some degree. So it's just a grey area IMO.

Agreed, output weighs are target code, and no one would argue the contrary. Companies pretending to publish source code is nothing new.

Stallman defines source code as "the preferred way in which developers modify the program"

I wrote for wikipedia once that

"Stallman's definition thus contemplates JavaScript and HTML's source-target ambivalence, as well as contemplating possible future forms of software production, like visual programming languages, or datasets in Machine Learning."

So the datasets could be a form or source code, but the most appropriate source code would be the code that crawls or downloads the dataset and modifies it.

Clear as water

I don’t think we need to use the legal system to encourage creation of new content! That’s a natural thing people do. In fact there’s a lot of artistic remixing that is illegal or ambiguously legal under the current copyright regime that can be a powerful form of expression.

I really don’t think we need government policy to encourage artists to create art. (At least not of this sort - I am all for art grants.)

> I am firmly ready to burn this copyright system to the fucking ground.

Same, but the issue is not copyright, which is simply an effort to wield the state to control intellectual property in the same way the state is wielded to control physical property.

The compounding problem arises when property is capital, defined as the means to convert labor into new value. Capitalism is specifically a system in which one can wield control of capital (intellectual or otherwise) to extract profit from labor then trade that profit for more capital. As a result, capital accumulates infinitely, independent of the value produced by the labor which is provided to society.

Artists require capital to convert their labor into value just as any other worker would, so where should that capital come from if not from control of the value they produce? Society must solve this problem or we will not have art to begin with. Only looking at the demand side obfuscates such issues that arise on the supply side, and the only reason we're talking about them now is that digital technology has solved the scarcity problem on the supply side. It has not solved the scarcity problem on the demand side, however.

Finally, art, just like all technological progress, is always the product of entire societies and the history of all mankind that came before it. For this reason, all copyright and patents have no rational basis and are merely bandaids for the ill side effects of controlling capital to extract profit from labor to begin with.