> - Even if you get the system to work, what about future artists and writers? Are we just creating an entrenched historical group of creatives getting royalties forever?
The boat has long since sailed on this… ands it’s globally entrenched as a norm of international trade that we are all “ok with this” regime of 75 years or century plus copyright terms …
And arguably the entire copyright vs AI/ML training datasets debate is founded on the notion that the artists individual copyright will last long enough that it’s going to outlive the average artist. If we look at one of the old copyright regimes, for comparison… in a world where copyright is a short default/implicit/automatic term (14 or 28 years) and the copyright owner can elect to register and pay for extensions (for a more modern twist, preferably combined with increasing incentive to prevent perpetual renewal abuses by Disney, et al)… now imagine how much data from up to 28 years ago there is, the catalogue of art and photographs and text and books and academic writings… all public domain because the authors didn’t consider them of sufficient value… all free for the ML model training… this gets even larger with a 14 year term…
Suffice to say that we are seeing systemic impacts already, culturally we’re seeing more and more money put behind less and less content controlled by fewer and fewer people due to a slow death spiral off copyright stranglehold across multiple industries, written, visual, audio and video arts are all dominated by large corporations holding IP … yes individuals continue to create, but other than rare breakthrough chance successes and internet age viral success (which are often just completely arbitrarily/random and have no real quality) these companies decide what will be popular culture…
My prediction is that the AI/ML models will be allowed but heavily scrutinised, under the simple legal doctrine that the user is the one committing the infringement since the primary purpose of these models is not infringement but unique creation, but suspicion will linger by artists and it will become a normal part of contracts in the art word…effectively an artist equivalent of the way police in many places view spray cans… just as the primary purpose of spray paint is not to create illegal graffiti, which is the justification many places used to overturn poorly justified civic bans on possession of spray paint.
I’d like to see any more draconian spread of derivative work rights (style rights etc) to be accompanied by drastic reductions in the automatic copyright term, as the ability to churn out lots of automatic content drastically lowers the value of long long terms, and the counter argument that it makes the existing rights more valuable is fucking insane as we do not need to pass copyright down to the great-great-great-great-grandchildren… the terms are already too long.