Raw LLM Responses

Re: Copyright "If there was no copyright to good ideas, regular people like you or me would never be able to rise on our own merit. All the best stories could just be legally stolen by huge corporations, and the entire cultural art and storytelling scene would be dominated by faceless, soulless corporations, Big Fat Liar style", says Lavender, without a hint of irony. To my mind, the more significant issue is that under the current copyright system, large corporations have a gravitational effect on the ownership of art and IPs. Giving up a part or whole control of something is a common condition of one's work getting published in a variety of contexts, so one's music (for example) would traditionally be owned by the label, which is then acquired by a bigger fish, which in turn gets bought out by Warner Bros. or whatever. And through that process, large corporations own a massive amount of art and IPs, meaning that the public can't directly iterate on those things in ways that can compensate creative individuals financially for the time and energy they spend on that iteration. This means that, culturally, we don't get organic development of touchstone stories that emerge from our own era. A traditional mythological tradition, like Arthurian legend, undergoes a lot of changes over time because it isn't concerned about ownership of the story or whose pockets get lined in the process of its dissemination. However unintentionally, the utility of a retelling is to reframe that story in a way that is reflective of the author's contemporaneous context. In the Arthurian example, we get an excellent example of a modern reframing of many of its themes in Star Wars, which is immediately copyrighted due to the conditions of capitalism. This is entirely reasonable on the fact of things, but it also means that unofficial Star Wars iteration can only take place non-commercially. Even though Star Wars belongs to everyone in a cultural sense, copyright acts as a social rule that determines who is allowed to profit from it. And as things stand, that's Disney. I'd like to think that most of us would agree that Disney shouldn't be the exclusive owner of such a culturally significant story or the works of art that comprise it. This isn't to suggest that there is no such thing as a good copyright system. But the way this issue is framed in the video is uncritical of the concept of copyright itself and what it means to legally own an idea or work. The copyright system protects the works of classic rock bands who drew many of their ideas from uncredited blues musicians, who themselves inherited a modified version of West African musical tradition that conceived of music as a communal tradition rather than an expression of individual auteurship. How can we tell who those songs should belong to in cultural and moral senses? There isn't really a good, clear answer, but only the record labels and rock bands had the privilege of profiting from them and that doesn't seem fair to me. My overall point here is that there's a principled argument disfavouring copyright, or copyright as the system currently stands. These techbros and their troglodyte henchmen are disingenuously using that position as a way to justify the corporate theft of art from small scale creators. But on a broader scale, the current conditions of the copyright system accomplishes the same thing over a longer time period; corporations and their rulers just want to accelerate that now because AI is so consumptive of resources, and because there's severe competition over who will develop the most dominant AI.