cryptoleft

Hot take:

I know the 😎 edgy techno-left 😎 position on copyright is "intellectual property is still property" but it's pretty lame for the techno-left to accept the narrative of capitalists abolishing the only type of property that can be produced by something everyone inherently owns, and no other property.

https://chainleft.art

Dad, data scientist, blockchain native artist.

Power consolidation=evil.

I think in the digital age copyright is more trouble than it’s worth. If you substitute paying royalties with direct support, there’s no capitalist middleman and the artist would actually make more money. 

It’s hard to convince people to pay for something they get for free, sure, but that’s true under capitalism as well. So why not push towards a solidarity and mutualist economy now, rather than wasting time making lawyers rich

writing stuff about tech + decentralization

And two more important points I want to add:

1. Until end users start selling the outputs with the word Ghibli, I don’t think copyright will even protect the use. Maybe OpenAI will have to pay to license the works it fed into the model. I support that because fuck big tech. Bleed them dry. But not because it’s meaningful in preventing this kind of use.

2. Fuck OpenAI. With that said, would you feel any different if it were open source models. Would you feel differently if some executive at Disney or wherever agrees to license Miyazaki’s work to Midjourney. What if it’s trained off of Ghibli fan art submitted consensually? Where exactly is the line? That’s the problem with IP. It is mess of a concept that we constantly have to adjust to virtue signal.

It’s a fair distinction and I agree that it’s lame, unreasonable, etc. I’m just not sure where to go from there. I don’t want property laws, especially ones that are so easy to abuse.

In this case Miyazaki, or some fiction author having their work scraped blows, but what about if some person had some big corp buy their work for a nickle fifty years ago, and it’s still being traded back and forth between companies who didn’t create the work, and they’re suing because of it. I don’t want that to be able to exist, and it all goes hand in hand.

My focus, in this age of AI, is finding ways to verify authenticity and identity, finding ways to support directly, finding ways to screw corporations until they go broke, and not buying into hype cycles. 

I can’t say that’s what you should do or that I think you’re wrong. I’m just trying to explain that there is an intellectually consistent argument for leftists to take here. And hopefully I haven’t contradicted myself in my attempt.

Yeah this is a good breakdown. My problem is using people's intellectual property without permission to create new property that is commoditized and that requires permission for use.

So yes, IP as a concept is a mess but there's a clear point in the process of when the object/property/concept leaves "experiential" and becomes a "commodity" outside the permission of the owner of the means (the intellect).