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President Trump: It's Not Doable for AI Companies to Pay for All Copyrighted Input
(torrentfreak.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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You need to work on your reading comprehension, because at no point have I presented an idea of how I think things should be. And if you aren't careful, I'm going to have to dig out my copy of A Philosophy of Intellectual Property and start quoting Drahos at length. Your ad hominem regarding my argument being cynical is a non-sequitur because I haven't made an argument as to how things should be. At the moment we're simply having an argument about what is or what isn't; you aren't remotely prepared to get into a conversation about how things should or shouldn't yet.
My position isn't cynical; it's practical.
And practically speaking, the spaces that operate without traditional copyright—like the Linux kernel, the wider free and open-source software (FOSS) ecosystem, and the federated social web (Fediverse)—are orders of magnitude more generative, collaborative, and democratic than the closed, monopolized alternatives. These ecosystems thrive not because of artificial scarcity or gatekeeping, but because they actively reject it. Linux runs the internet. FOSS powers most of the global infrastructure. The Fediverse offers decentralized platforms with real user agency, free from surveillance capitalism. These are not accidents—they’re direct outcomes of choosing openness over enclosure: of rejecting things like copyright. So if you really want to argue about what works, look at the communities where copyright holds no power, like the one were on now.
My comprehension’s hardly perfect, but it’s good enough to spot when someone jumps from describing history into prescribing it. You've kept asserting what copyright “really is” while smuggling in how you think it should work. Neither you, your book, nor Drahos is a final authority, so judging me from your ivory tower is such pure ego.
Your stance is cynical because it’s dismissive. you wave away all progress as meaningless re-branding.
And your Linux example actually shoots your own point. The kernel is released under the GPL, which only has teeth because each contributor owns copyright and licenses it under copyleft terms. If a company violated that license, in say... An embrace, extend, and extinguish mentality... Like oh... Microsoft maybe? Well it gets sued, precisely because copyright law backs the claim. Kill copyright tomorrow and any corporation could EEE all of FOSS.
You’re confusing recognizing the function of a system with prescribing how it should be. Pointing out that copyright law has historically served monopolists and gatekeepers is not smuggling in a policy position. It’s describing the power structure as it has played out, repeatedly, across centuries. That you interpret that as prescriptive says more about your own projection than anything I’ve said. I’m not judging you from an ivory tower. I’m just not playing along with the fantasy that this system was ever about authors.
Calling my stance cynical because I won’t pretend progress has been meaningful is lazy. Progress matters when it changes who holds power. Most copyright reforms haven't. If authors had actually gained leverage from the Statute of Anne or the US copy-paste version, we wouldn't live in a world where Disney locks up culture for a century while artists beg for rent.
Your FOSS example doesn’t contradict anything. It proves the point. The GPL uses copyright as a judo move. It flips a hostile system against itself to create openness where the default is enclosure. That’s not a sign that copyright is good. It’s a sign that people had to engineer an escape route inside a broken structure. Just because the court system enforces GPL violations doesn’t make copyright noble. It means there’s no better legal tool right now. The GPL is a hack, not a justification.
And still, despite all of that, FOSS works. Not because of copyright, but because people deliberately built something that rejects the logic of scarcity and control. Linux, the Fediverse, Creative Commons, public domain archives, these thrive because people choose collaboration, transparency, and shared ownership. They build and share because they can, not because a license tells them to. These systems are functional, open, and resilient, and they exist in spite of the legal framework, not because of it.
Copyright needs to die and its apologists have stockholm syndrome.
I'm not confusing anything, I'm providing a different perspective of the same historical record. Copyright has objectively empowered authors, and the public, even if it did not do so to what you (or I) deem adequate levels. Royalties, revision rights, and public domain releases are objective.
Calling out your stance as cynical is a observation of your continued insistence to ignore any and all silver linings to a system that has offered objective societial benefits and author protections. I don't hold the perspective that it is the system that could have been the most successful in that, simply that it has demonstrated objective good. Neither of us are in a position to fairly and fully evaluate that against the bad.
As for Linux and the GPL, It could not contridict you more as I've literally an example of a massive conglomerate corporation caught exploiting FOSS and open systems in order to capture them. This objectively happened (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish). Without the protection of copyleft this would still be perfectly possible, and in the absence of copyright likely standardized as practice. So the GPL is not people engineering a hack into a system to break it, it's people using the system as intended and designed to protect authored work.
As for copyright now, and historically, I make no apologies for the abuse or it's current bastardized state but as far as copyright dying, I see that as defeatist and cynical. It needs work, remade for the modern age even, but it has provided value to authors and necessary protections to FOSS.