Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?

Why in the hell would anyone spend ten years writing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over again? Because they have no intrinsic meaning to provide, or because their life has no meaning to reflect?

We may as well set aside this argument anyway, because it actually isn't relevant. If I accept your premise that the product of work is the only value in labor, then why are there specific categories of product that I can value, and others that I cannot? That's the situation copyright has put us in: if I create the right kind of work, but it's derivative, then that's a violation of someone's copyright. If I create derivative work, but it's the wrong kind, then I can't copyright it. The only kind of work that I can profit from freely is "original", which is a false premise to begin with.

So what is the alternative? Speculation. In a society without copyright, labor must be funded somehow. Rather than promise a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, we would simply fund artists who we believe will create valuable products. We already do this to a moderately significant extent: everyone knows about Patreon and OnlyFans. Most successful creators rely on ad revenue instead of royalties. The problem with this model is that it must compete with copyright holders, who get to monopolize entire swaths of derivative work, and leverage the guarantee of their already-performed work as much easier to sell than speculative investment. Get rid of copyright, and the market simply becomes fair.

I'd be careful attributing anything to the "HN gestalt"; it's a very, VERY wide range of individuals, with widely-ranging views. And I've been surprised, at times, when I've posted something that I thought would be widely disagreed with and downvoted, and yet my comment ended up with 5 net positive votes. Because the "gestalt", which I would call the consensus, on any given thread depends entirely on who feels invested enough in that topic to click on the thread and vote on it.

So on one thread you might find a lot of people holding position A, then on the other thread the vast majority is expressing position not-A, in direct contradiction. "Oh," you might conclude, "the HN gestalt is self-contradictory"... but if you were to actually dig into the comments and put together a spreadsheet of names and what they were advocating, you might find that most individuals were being consistent; it's just that there were largely different people posting on the two threads. (And some A advocates were posting their A advocacy on the second thread, but being drowned out by the majority of voices on that thread; while the first thread had a few not-A advocates, but not very many).

As for copyright, I've long felt that "death of the author + X years" was a bad system, and was worse as the value of X kept on being bumped up. I think it should simply be "X years", period, so it's predictable. For a reasonably large value of X, such as 50 years: authors who write a masterpiece in their 20's should still get to profit from its sales until they're 70+ years old. (And most authors don't just write one book and stop, so unless that hypothetical author is a one-and-done writer, he/she would still have many other books to profit from when that first book lapsed into the public domain).

But I haven't given much thought yet to what it looks like once AI use is common. (And if you think AI use is common now, just wait until open models start taking off in popularity, and AI use no longer requires a subscription fee. Might take a while for hardware to come down in price, so it might be 10 years instead of 5, but there's going to be a definite shift in lots and lots of ways once many more people can just pay a one-time hardware price rather than an ongoing subscription or per-token API price). So I can't really offer much else to the conversation than that.

The powerful/corrupt will maintain their information asymmetry; software, tourism, self help etc will be devalued.