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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
During yesterday’s “Winning the AI Race” summit, President Trump weighed in on the debate surrounding AI and copyright, noting that it is “not doable” for AI companies to pay for all copyrighted content used in model training. This stance, shared amidst ongoing AI copyright lawsuits, aims to keep the U.S. competitive in the global AI landscape, especially against countries like China.
You carry with you an extraordinarily propagandized view of what copyright is.
I carry with me a studied and rooted view of what copyright is. If you want to argue for what it should be that’s fine, but you gain no ground by mudding the swap and doing your opponents work for you. It may get you up votes on an internet forum, but it won’t solicit the social change I and presumably you wish to see.
I mean you claim that then you get the basic details wrong. Copyrights origins are historically rooted in the protection of the corporate control over the means of distribution. Not in the protection of artists whatsoever. Copyright is not, and has not ever been, about protecting artists or creators. Its origin and use has always been about controlling the means of production and distribution. This goes all the way back to the Guild of Stationers in England.
I’m not muddling any ground when I say that copyright isn’t about and never has been about protecting artists.
That’s an extremely one sided view of history.
In fact, I’ll clarify further. Specifically the statute of Anne. Here, in case you’re unfamiliar, is the act which laid the bedrock for copyright. It’s not the licensing requirements from the the late 1600s that you’re likely confusing it with which while somewhat monitarily motivated were primarily driven by political motivations, specifically to stop the reprint of phamplets critical of the state.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
So you just want to move the line on where the origins of copyright start?
I’m not confusing anything you dunce. You simply have a perspective of what copyright is that is fundamentally false, and one which the industries which benefit from copyright spent decades, centuries even, propagandizing as what copyright is about even thought thats not what it was ever about.
Don’t waste my time if you are only coming to the table with this ley, mediocre understanding of the matter.
Oh please get a grip. You’re lumping the censorship in with the actual foundation for copyright law and calling it the same thing. It is not. The licencing of all press you’re clinging to was about the state policing presses, period. The Statute of Anne flipped the script and legally vested the right in authors. The U.S. legislative implementation copied that model basically word-for-word. Pretending three centuries of author-centred statutes don’t exist just because publishers later bought those rights is just wrong and lazy. If you want to rage about modern corpos and be bitter whatever but stop rewriting history to suit your cynical opinion.
You’re clinging to the Statute of Anne like it’s some kind of moral turning point, as if suddenly in 1709 the crown and capital had a change of heart and decided to champion the little guy. They didn’t. Copyright didn’t begin with the Statute of Anne—it evolved out of earlier systems explicitly designed to control the press and consolidate publishing monopolies. That’s not opinion. That’s history.
And even after the Statute of Anne, authors didn’t magically start benefiting. The rhetoric may have shifted, but the power stayed right where it had always been: with printers, publishers, and eventually media conglomerates. The U.S. didn’t “flip the script”—it copied the same structure and handed the same economic levers to production companies. The only thing that changed was the branding.
So yeah, I’ll call it what it is. A system born in censorship, refined into monopoly, and still operating that way under the pretense of author rights. Waving three centuries of “author-centered” statutes around like they mean something in practice is historical cosplay at best, and gaslighting at worst.
You can keep defending the fantasy. I’ll stick to the facts.
You make it sound as if no amount of progress short of your idea of perfect would be good enough for you. That’s a very cynical perspective that does not coincide with history. I’m also not even sure how you could argue it’s been refined into a monopoly when the works fall long term in the public domain. Frankenstein, Dracula, and Sherlock Holmes would therefore all belong to a monopoly despite being freely usable in whole or derivative, including print? I see your desire for the balance to change and to call out abuse where it was but I genuinely do not understand your cynical position when there is measurable and concrete evidence that both the public and the individual benefit from copyright even in its flawed implementation vs the alternative of trade secrets or ghoulish rights management.