I see some articles REEEEEEing because AI trains on copyrighted data, so certain artists feel they aren’t going to get compensated for their work, and there’s a lot of question about if AI creations even can be protected by copyright

Yet there seem to be very few questioning the assumption that we should have a thing such as “intellectual property” in the first place. It’s kind of a fiction, it’s not like physical goods where I either have a thing in my hand or it’s in your hand. We can take a copy of a picture and share it freely with very little cost.

Personally I find “intellectual property” to be anti-capitalist and it seems to stand in the way of innovation and growth (and that isn’t even getting in to how it’s been “weaponized” like with big companies acting as “patent trolls” who buy up patents and make it difficult for small businesses to create and sell anything without infringing on an obscure patent of these large corporations)

Intellectual Property: sounds good in theory, creates too many problems in practice

  • splinterA
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    7 months ago

    I half agree, I think making ideas open certainly benefits everyone more than keeping them closed off, for example, but where is the incentive to innovate if everyone gets the fruits of your work for free?

    It’s counter intuitive, but without intellectual rights, you would actually stifle innovation, since you take away the main incentive to innovate. R&D is incredibly expensive and time consuming, why bother if it will never give you an edge?

    Communist regimes are a good example to look at, since everything is technically owned by the state or state run enterprises. The capitalist world absolutely dominated them in innovation, even when the Soviet Union was at its peak.

    Tetris is the most popular game that has ever existed. Its inventor is a russian guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris - he never made anything out of his invention, while countless people around the world got rich.