Opinion: The Copyright Office is making a mistake on AI-generated art
adderaline @ ondoyant @beehaw.org Posts 0Comments 129Joined 2 yr. ago
adderaline @ ondoyant @beehaw.org
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copyleft. make contributions voluntary, credit mandatory, and commercialization impossible. gift your creations to the collective knowledge of humanity, and if people like it, they will in turn give you support. cut out corporate middle men, and cultivate an audience that will reward you generously for what you give to them.
i'm a radical, so i'd say don't use copyright, use copyleft. make everything free. use open source software. let people listen to your music if they want to, and donate to you if they choose. make it so that the best products on every market are freely available to all people to modify and alter as they wish, and make it so the modifications must also be freely available. allow anybody anywhere to produce any medication they have the means to safely synthesize. make our culture free to use and free to participate in. the open source economy is a great model to look at, and its how we're talking to each other right now. every piece of information can be that way, if we choose it. information scarcity is already a lie, copyright just artificially imposes antiquated notions of scarcity onto a limitless resource. its a gift economy! we freely contribute, and receive support in turn.
Those two sentences are contradictory. There is no such thing as lawful, violent speech, nor unlawful, non-violent speech. No violent speech is protected; no non-violent speech is prohibited.
i've given several examples where that isn't as clear cut, but whatever. speech is a behavior, and can modulate how we act. if you tell people that a group of people is evil, and never say what to do about it, you still increase the likelihood that somebody will act on the belief that that group of people is evil. there are material consequences for speech between causing violence and not causing violence.
We don’t have an authority to tell us exactly where that line is. We do have the consensus of society in general, who we can consult - formally or informally - on whether that line has been crossed.
the barrier of lawfulness, violence, and all that are socially defined, yes, but if you concede that much, then there will be communities that define racism, bigotry, and other forms of inflammatory speech as violent, and decide that those things ought not to be in their social spaces. unless you're appealing to the group consensus of the largest possible group, there will be subcultures that disagree with each other on what does and doesn't constitute violent speech. if you're appealing to the legality of speech, you aren't appealing to group consensus, you're appealing to the government. so either we as autonomous communities ought to draw our own lines for what is and isn't violent speech ourselves (what i believe), or there is a precise legal definition we have to adhere to, given to us by the government. in reality, its both. there are firm lines of conduct that the government prohibits in theory (though i would dispute their efficacy), and there are communities that disagree on what the limit should be. i don't think that having codes of conduct in this way is necessarily authoritarian.
“Content moderation” replaces that societal consensus with authoritarian opinion. When you decide I don’t need to hear from Redneck Russell about how he hates Jews, I am harmed. I don’t get to challenge Russell’s opinions, or argue with him, or rally people against him. In silencing him, you’ve taken away my ability to engage him. He still gets to recruit his disciples into his own little spaces out of your control. If I try to engage him there, he merely silences me, censors me. His acolytes never hear a dissenting opinion against him, because he, and you, have decided I don’t need to engage him.
to be clear, i am here talking to you because i prefer the model that federated services use for moderating their communities, and believe that having tech companies be the sole arbiter of what is and isn't proper speech is a fundamentally flawed approach. that being said, the problem i have with your solution is one that's shared with a lot of community moderation on platforms. it relies on people being willing and able to confront and defuse bigotry on an individual level. i'm jewish. i don't want to hear what Redneck Russell has to say. i doubt that i could say anything to him to change his mind, and i don't want my internet experience to be saturated in Russells, for the basic reason that i want my time online to be relatively relaxing. people who are less attached to jewish identity are even less likely to engage with him, because it doesn't affect them personally, internet arguments are often unpleasant, and they also want their time online to be relatively relaxing. so how do things pan out if a community is only loosely engaged? well, if we aren't relying on moderators to curate our platforms, the hate motivated Russells of the world are empowered to say their bullshit, they receive relatively little resistance, and the relative permissiveness attracts more Russells. the people who want a nice place to hang out online go elsewhere, the concentration of Russells rises, and we're left with a platform that is actively hostile towards jewish people. oops!
if you are part of a focused, highly engaged community, maybe your solution works, but most online spaces are not focused and highly engaged. i agree generally that echo chambers are problematic, but i think on the whole that federation does more to mitigate that than large, algorithmically segregated platforms. i don't really agree that banning or blocking don't or won't play a role in ensuring that social spaces are friendly and enjoyable to be in, especially for marginalized people groups. if you let people say the n word on your platform, and don't do anything about the people who do, don't expect many people of color to want to be where you are. its just not fun to hang out with bigots if you're the one they're targeting, and that will affect the culture of your platform.
Content moderation should not take the form of banning or blocking speech outright, and should not be conducted unilaterally. Moderation should be community driven and transparent. Anyone should be able to see what was hidden, so they can determine for themselves if the censorship was reasonable and appropriate. The content should remain readily available, perhaps “hidden” behind an unexpanded tab rather than deleted entirely.
i think it really isn't so simple. some people are more invested in a community than others, lots of people are just... not interested in auditing their moderators. generally i think its a good idea to have it be transparent, certainly better than what any major social media platforms do, but at a certain point it does just come down to trust. for example, i agree broadly with the code of conduct for Beehaw, that's why i have an account there. i'm generally uninterested in trying to verbally spar with bigots, i don't want to engage deeply with the moderation of the platform, i have no interest in litigating what is and isn't proper conduct on the site, that's not what i use the internet for. lots of people who are the target of bigotry and hatred just... don't really want to constantly be on guard for that shit. they want a space where they can exist without being confronted with cruelty. i wouldn't want to be on the kind of platform you're describing, sorry.
Streaming (as a legal business model) is not violating copyright, but streaming changed the business model for a lot of artists negatively.
my point is that people seem to think copyright law is somehow protecting artists from corporate exploitation, when it categorically is not doing that. you're right, streaming as a business model is legal, and it does mean that lots of artists don't profit as much from their work. that's the part i object to, the part where copyright law did not in any way prevent record companies from eating into artist compensation.
It should be fairly obvious that the big record companies come out of this change of business model a lot better because they have a continuous stream of revenue across their played/consumed portfolio, but smaller labels face the same difficulty as the artists.
here's the thing, though. the revenue is being generated on the basis of their ownership of that portfolio, and the only way that works is if there is an enforcement mechanism for that ownership. that enforcement mechanism is copyright law. that state of things as they currently exists allows people who did not make music to make the vast majority of the money from the music that gets made. that is wrong.
But remove copyright law and no-one is getting paid for anything.
they already aren't getting paid though. copyright law just isn't ensuring people get paid. like, have you paid attention to the WGA strike at all? companies use copyright law to legally strip the rights artists have over their art far more often than artists use it to prevent their art from being used by corporations.
The problem you are complaining about is how labels are milking artists, in lack of a better analogy. A cow gets fed and cared for just enough to make sure milk production keeps going and the cow stays healthy. A farmer doesn’t cry when a cow gets old and slaughtered, he’ll get a new cow to replace her. That’s just how the business works.
look. i really don't care how business works. if it's depriving people of the fruits of their own labor, we should make it work a different way. in any case, making a comparison to a system of agriculture which routinely tortures living beings, forcibly impregnates them, steals the milk meant for their babies, then kills them when they are no longer useful is not the slam dunk you think it is. i'm not particularly fond of that business model either.
Obviously not a perfect analogy, but the discrepancy between what the label earns and the artist is nothing new and anyone who was around before streaming should know this.
right. i'm fully aware this isn't a streaming only problem, but its one that streaming has exacerbated. that doesn't make it more okay. functionally, the fact that we have a mechanism by which the legal ownership of artistic works can be transferred to corporate entities concentrates the wealth generated by working artists into the hands of rich executives. i don't know how i'm meant to ignore the way in which ownership of music is the primary mechanism by which record companies separate the wealth that music produces from the artists that make all the music, no matter how much its actually supposed to make doing that more difficult.
Apply that argument to someone who has been censored/silenced, and you might begin to understand why I oppose it.
ugh. i know you think that's clever, but its just confusing. what would they be judged by anything other than the content of their arguments? that's why people get banned, its because of what they're saying! i don't hold the position that people should be banned or moderated for something other than for their behavior, that wouldn't make sense. in any case, i'm not conflating speech with violence, i'm not misconceiving anything. i disagree with the premise that speech and violence are discrete from one another. they operate on a continuum. there is speech that is more violent than other speech, and we should have tools for dealing with the things that can lead to but are not in and of themselves violence. content moderation is one of those tools.
read the rest of it. or don't, whatever. the majority of the post did conform to your specifications. i object to your framing, i just don't think its settled ground that these things would be handled appropriately by a court of law, or that they are being handled in the way you have previously described. but i would also just generally recommend reading what somebody says before deciding what their argument is? even if just for curiosity's sake. that's a weird way of engaging with somebody.
in any case, i think i'm basically done with you. the world isn't made of neat little blocks you can arrange to your liking. the barrier between criminal and non-criminal speech is socially constructed, and the conduct of individuals doesn't go from perfectly fine to absolutely unacceptable in an instant. its more nuanced than that, and the way we interact with each other should reflect that nuance. like it or not, we have to be the ones to determine what is and is not a threat, it cannot be deferred to an authority unquestioningly.
right... did you read the rest of it? because i did make a relevant argument like right below that.
But not having copyright law doesn’t fix that, it makes it worse. Without copyright law if you make music, a big label can grab your music and sell copies without paying you anything. Sure you can try to sell it yourself and try to educate customers that they should buy it from you. But the big label can easily out-advertise you and get into the top spots on streaming services, online and physical stores etc. and get 99% of the sales.
this is... really not a good example of copyright stopping this sort of stuff. seriously, look into streaming platforms, they are essentially pulling this exact stunt, down to the part about grabbing artists' music and not paying them anything, and its been extremely profitable for the record companies, who have been found to deliberately manipulate streaming numbers to ensure they get the top spots. most independent artists make very little off of streaming, but are compelled to participate because its captured so much of the market for music. i really can't exaggerate here, the situation you're describing as what would happen without copyright law is happening right now, and is being facilitated directly by copyright law as it currently exists.
If a musician doesn’t have the right to their own work, it’s because someone offered to pay them for the rights and they accepted.
Is that in their favor? I think so, considering the alternative is to not get paid and not have rights to their work.
i mean, if you aren't at least peripherally aware of the ways in which people can be coerced into accepting contracts i don't know what to tell you. record companies are pretty notorious for exploiting musicians, and musicians have been complaining about it for many decades. same thing with writers, and vfx artists, and game designers, and on and on and on.
If you want a clinical trial that proves a particular drug can actually help patients, you will need to find a company to pay for it. The government almost never pays for clinical trials (I think the COVID vaccine might have been an exception). Clinical trials are far more expensive than basic science, and patents are the carrot to get the private sector to pay for them.
i'm aware of how it works, but it's now how it has to work. i would prefer they did do all that publicly, and there is nothing that prevents them from doing so. the cost in human lives that comes with entrusting life-saving medications to profit-motivated executives is immense, especially for drugs that treat illnesses that are endemic to poorer nations. in any case, US tax dollars funded every new pharmaceutical in the last decade, and i don't really care who foots the bill for what part of drug development when exactly zero new drugs would exist without public scientific progress serving as the foundation for these new technologies.
that's the thing, we don't live in a world where death threats and threats of violence are being dealt with in the way you seem to think they are, and community tools like bans are sometimes the only recourse people have that isn't ruinously expensive, glacially slow, and uncertain to work.
but sure, lets say we aren't talking about explicit death threats or threats of violence. instead, they just... post the account information of queer tiktok creators, and spend most of their time calling queer people groomers and pedophiles. its not directly a threat of violence, but every time they post something, the accounts they post get harrassed by tons of anonymous followers, one of them figures out where they live, and then start bombarding a real human person with death threats. everybody doing the death threats is anonymous, there's no way for the legal system to touch them. what do we do? nothing? or somebody's whole online presence is talking about the great replacement, how the anglo-saxon race is being exterminated, and somewhere down the line we start seeing mass shooters pop up saying nearly the exact same thing in their manifestos. stochastic terrorism. using speech to motivate anonymous observers to take violent action, without calling for violence explicitly. should nothing be done about that? is that not concerning to you?
i think you have a very simplistic definition of what fascism is, and what can or cannot be defined as a threat of violence. there is nuance to what should and should not be considered hate speech, and if you're defending the institution of slavery, implying queer people are groomers, really doing any sort of bigotry, it can meaningfully cause harm to people even if it isn't in and of itself a threat of violence. what do we do then? either nothing or put them in jail? because i think that having more than one way of mediating and enacting punishment for misbehavior is a good thing. i think that being able to respond proportionately to assholes without waiting for them to reach the threshold of illegality is a more healthy way of maintaining a community than putting a firm barrier between "dissent" and "actual crime".
oh that's why you'll ignore it, huh?
right, but how often does that actually work out in people's favor, and how often does that benefit corporate interests with massive influence? how many musicians don't have the right to their own work because record companies dominate the music industry? how many artists working for large corporations are denied residuals because a condition of their work is that everything they produce is owned by their employer? writers? animators?
that's not even considering the ways in which corporations patent technologies that are the result of publicly funded research efforts. a great deal of pharmaceuticals would not be possible without massive public research grants, but the companies privatize the results of that research using the framework of intellectual property.
in theory, you're right, it does protect you against corporations using your shit without permission, but in practice it just stops you from using your shit without their permission. there are far better ways of ensuring corporations cannot exploit you than to make your creativity and invention a commodity to be bought and sold.
They raised the same arguments you have.
you're wrong? you're just wrong. the Nazi's called for death. i am not. they spoke their desire to see the extermination of millions of people, and then they did it. saying that bigots shouldn't be able to speak hate on a public platform and saying that people should die are NOT even remotely similar, and are extremely easy to distinguish from one another. we are not, at all times, at risk of becoming fascists because we don't want people to try organizing pogroms in the modern era.
you're flattening speech down into this binary choice, where we can either allow everybody to say anything or we cede our right to speech entirely. that has always, and will always be a falsehood. there has never been, at any point in human history, the kind of free speech you seem to think is an intrinsic right. it simply is not how the world has ever worked. if you make threats at people in a public place, you can be made to leave. if you attend a party and scream racist slurs at a guest, you can be made to leave. if you join a club and can't stop yourself from ranting about jews, you can be made to leave. it is not wrong or authoritarian to expel anti-social weirdos from the places where you socialize.
no community of people is obligated to tolerate bigotry, hatred, and threats, and communities that do tolerate such things are usually shitty places only assholes like to hang out in. it is not some great miscarriage of justice that we are implementing ways of removing assholes from our digital spaces, in the same way we have done so in meatspace since before we had agriculture, and it is not a sign that we're sliding into fascism. what is a sign that we're sliding into fascism is platforms empowering extremists to speak their desire to do harm to others into being, allowing them to say their bullshit without meaningful consequence.
the Holocaust started with words. it started with speeches and books and pamphlets, and it culminated in the extermination of millions of human beings. words are powerful, and we must treat them as such. that being said, i am generally opposed to corporate middlemen monopolizing the social spaces we inhabit, that's why we're having this conversation here instead of elsewhere. i just think this whole idea, that we ought not ban people from platforms for being bigots, ought not have codes of conduct for our social spaces, is fundamentally at odds with any sort of functional, friendly, welcoming community, and i don't want to have to sort through racist screeds every time i go on the internet.
the reality is, if you want to cultivate a space that accommodates bigotry and hatred, expect to find only bigots and racists to hang with, because all the nice people are not going to want to visit your Nazi bar.
this isn't about "offense" or whatever. its specifically about people calling for other people to be removed from society. when is stopping the spread of that specific conduct ever a bad thing. i broadly agree that decentralized platforms are a good thing overall, but we can't ignore the many ways in which poor moderation make spaces hostile to people, right? or the very real problems that unmoderated, anonymous spaces have with bigotry, CSAM, and other bullshit. i don't fuckin' like 4chan, places like that suck balls. not every aspect of our social lives should be governed by some blanket approval for saying whatever the fuck you like whenever the fuck you want, no actual real life social situation plays by those rules. if a person consistently talks about killing jews, or other bigoted bullshit, i don't want to occupy the same social space as that person, and i want there to be mechanisms in place to stop people like that from bothering people.
i really don't understand this perspective. we aren't talking about the ability for anybody to silence anyone for any reason, we're talking specifically about rhetoric calling for the death of human beings. is that not a well defined category of speech we should at least keep an eye on? should we let people actively call for the death of other people, when we know historically that that specific kind of rhetoric can lead to people being put in camps?
like, if somebody's sole contribution to an platform is doxxing anybody they don't like, they should be stopped. if they shout death threats in a public forum, they shouldn't be in that forum. we don't need to give platforms unchecked power over our lives to put reasonable limitations on conduct for public platforms.
The thing is averages don’t mean shit when you’re talking about individual people, because individual experiences always deviate from the average, especially if you talk about average wealth where a few millionaires and billionaires skew the data for a lot of poor people.
i'm sorry, but "averages don't mean shit when you're talking about individual people" is such a cop out. statistical measures are literally THE MOST reliable way of determining truth that we have, and its basically the only way to prove something is real with high certainty. do you seriously think that professional sociologists don't take outliers into account when talking about average wealth? that's like, literally grade school statistics, the kind of analysis being done for measures of social well-being are built to account for confounding variables, and a discrepancy still exists when you control for pretty much every other factor.
But sure, let’s follow your logic. Black people on average are poorer and have worse jobs, so we need to discriminate in their favour. Well, statistically there is also a lot of evidence that black people on average commit more crimes than white people. So should I be scared of a black person I cross on the street? Following your logic, yes. Following mine, no.
i'm not following a "logic", i'm presenting what the research has shown to be factual, or at least highly likely. we do know that black people on average commit more crimes. if you want to use that as an excuse to discriminate against black people, you can do that, but an evidence based look into why crime happens and what factors go into why somebody commits crimes does not support that position. because yes, criminologists and sociologists have actually examined the "why" of the statistical connection between criminal behavior and blackness, and didn't just stop at "oh, black people are statistically over-represented in prison populations, that's weird."
we know that poverty is like, THE determining factor in criminality. people who are in desperate straits are far more likely to commit crimes, black or not. because black people are more likely than white people to be in poverty, they are also statistically more likely to commit crime. of course, being convicted of a crime then makes it harder to get work, and puts significant financial burden on the family of the incarcerated, driving the incarcerated person and their loved ones further into poverty, and increasing their likelihood to commit crime in the future as their circumstances worsen. that doesn't account for everything, though. we also know that black people are significantly more likely to be convicted and sentenced when they do interact with the justice system, and white people can often avoid jail time that is inevitable for comparable crimes committed by a black person.
in fact, the systemic factors which drive the impoverishment of black people are the largely the same factors which drive criminal behavior in black people, and which punish black people more harshly if they do end up committing crimes. systemic racism. poverty. urban decay. the prison industrial complex. discriminatory laws. there is metric shit-tons of literature out there for you to read on this stuff, as you obviously have not done, considering that you wrote "black people are poorer than white people" and "black people commit more crimes than white people" right next to each other, and failed to even consider how those two statements might be related before defaulting to a 50 year old racist talking point.
i get that you've bought into the whole "actually its the LEFT who are the racist ones" talking point, and maybe even the "christian white men are the most oppressed group in this country" talking point, but there are thousands of empirical studies showing that people of color, and especially black people, are faced with specific challenges when it comes to acquiring a decent quality of life, and that these challenges cannot be explained away as anything other than an ongoing social process by which black people are deprived of resources by virtue of their identity.
Ah yes, selective discrimination based on race and gender is anti-racist and anti-sexist. So glad we advanced as a society enough for this to make sense in some people’s heads…
i mean, you seem to have already made up your mind on this. there is a significant body of evidence backing up the systemic disadvantages faced by people who aren't straight white men. the fact that you are unwilling or unable to seek out that data on your own, and instead insist that any measures to counter observable race and sex based discrimination are themselves race and sex based discrimination tells me all i need to know. what would you propose we do about the observable discrepancies in hiring? nothing? if its nothing, you suck.
We live in a time where there are black people that experienced extreme wealth in their lives and white people that know nothing other than extreme poverty (this one has always existed), and to take nothing of that into consideration other than just the skin color is idiotic.
statistically, white people are on average richer than nonwhite people, and men are on average richer than women. the fact that white people can be poor and black people can be rich means exactly fuckall on the scale of a population. and who says nothing of that is taken into consideration? you're making that claim based on... what? intuition? prior biases? i'm sorry, but the idea that a corporation is going to spend money on hiring somebody just because they're a person of color, a woman, or both is just mind blowingly ill informed. that has never been how race-based hiring works.
But hey, thank you for admitting that it isn’t actually about improving productivity and output at companies, but just to tick percentage boxes so that your virtue signaling intake is filled for the day.
there is quite a bit of research to suggest that diverse hiring practices positively impact productivity, but even if it didn't, we should still make policy decisions to reduce the impact of systemic discrimination, because that improves the lives of people who are systemically disadvantaged. but whatever, yeah, people only make these kinds of policy decisions to signal virtue, its not like there are any problems with how our society is organized, or people who need help.
to be clear, race-based hiring is a concession constructed by the ruling class. it is an acknowledgement that systemic discrimination exists without a commitment to guarantee the well being of all people. all people should have the opportunity to thrive, and i would advocate for much more far reaching policy for all kinds of disadvantaged groups. but there are specific systemic forces discriminating against minorities that ought to be addressed, and they will not go away unless we take steps to make them go away.
i can see how you might read that as me not understanding or otherwise being ignorant to how business functions, but its more that from the foundation upwards the way that we conceive of ownership and property is objectionable to me. the specific ways and methods by which capital is used to deprive people of resources and exploit their labor for profit are secondary to the problem of them doing the deprivation of resources and exploitation. i don't believe there is some sort of mechanistic solution that will give us good or fair capitalism, so all my solutions to the problem involve to the greatest extent possible providing all resources we can to everybody who needs them, and doing away with institutions that prevent us from doing that.
then we're definitely not on the same page lol.
according to Larry Lessig, i would be an extremist. i can admit that. i am. i am proudly pro-piracy. i would download a car, and i want everybody to have unfettered access to the sum total of human knowledge. i have negative respect for the intellectual property of corporations. i think generally looking to legal frameworks as a tool to prevent the exploitation of artists is kind of just a half step. we should be imagining a world where our ability to create, share, modify, and collaborate is unrestricted. that, to my mind, implies a world that does not have corporations owning our art, music, and technology.