I just finished reading Cory Doctorow's book, "Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age."
One of his points is that copyright protection has typically served incumbents and currently serves dominant incumbents, more than it serves creators or consumers of art/news/fiction/etc.
The movie industry ended up in California because prior to that, a single company was the gatekeeper for movie-making: Edison, Inc. If Edison didn't sign off on your movie and get a licensing fee, he would sue. So the studios - Fox, Universal - fled to California where the courts were less interested in enforcing the patents of a New Jersey company. But once they had wrested control from Edison, believing it was just unacceptable that a single company should control all movies, they came to believe that the right number was six companies that should control all movies.
He says that at every turn, people said THIS will ruin THAT. Recorded music would destroy music as we know it. Then radio would destroy music as we know it. Then the internet and so forth.
As a person who makes his living from his copyrighted works, he is sympathetic to the idea that creators need to make money to create, but our system is skewed to reward publishers and, increasingly, intermediaries.
But he also points out that one thing he is sure of is that copying has always gotten easier and will continue to get easier. In fact, as he says, copying something will never be harder than it is right now, today.
That being the case, we need to think of compensation models and incentive structures that work in a world of costless copying. Trying to stop copying is simply not going to be a solution and the proposed solutions, digital locks (i.e. things like DRM) are typically now uses against creators and consumers and benefit the intermediaries more than anyone (have a collection of Kindle books? Now try to export it to read that on a Nook).
So I'm not sure what to make of all this. It's a threat to creators using the current model, but what model can we envision that promotes creators and avoids increasing concentration of power. AI, given the scale of investment required, will likely concentrate power even more than search did.
And that gets me back to another thought. We have come to think of search as natural, normal, native to the internet. But is it? Should it be? Maybe the answer is that creators need to just opt out of search, block crawlers and find other ways to find audience.
If I'm a merchant of a unique item, I love it when Google or ChatGPT steals my content since ChatGPT doesn't sell dinosaur-shaped lawn chairs, but I do. If people learn about them due to text or images on Google, eventually they have to pay me, not Google, to get those lawn chairs. Steal away Google!
But if I am a writer or cartoonist, I want people on my site not some Google/Bing/Arc Browser.
So I can do the deal with the devil and let them crawl my site and repurpose my content on their site and hope that the leavings are enough for me, or I can tell them to stick it and find users some other way. But I don't have to let them in. I just have to let them in if I want to make a lot of money off the ads that surround and drown out my content. I'm not sure the right to that traffic is protected in the Constitution.
If you don't want your neighbors to use your tools, don't give them a key to the shed. Granted, my neighbors all have the key code to my house and storage area and I to theirs and that brings great benefits to us all. But it is a choice.
Lately, much of the material I read and listen to is either a Substack or a podcast that I learned about on X or on another podcast. And some of them I pay actual cash money for each month. No search engine or AI standing between us.
