This is an odd time to be fighting against intellectual property. Generative AI (artificial intelligence) has been scraping all the digitalised material that humans have ever created, almost entirely without any licence or permission and creating ever-expanding torrents of slop. Copyright has emerged as the only effective tool for halting the descent into derivative banality and reasserting human dignity.
From an interesting critique of author/activist Cory Doctorow and his new book Enshittification, which I confess to not having read. But the author of the article makes a good point that there are downsides to Doctorow's crusade against Intellectual Property. Yes, concepts of IP and copyright have been abused by corporations, which essentially means that a number of interests have to be balanced. But consider what happens when copyright laws are absent, or when everyone just ignores them. If nobody owns anything, it turns out that Google owns everything. In practical terms, at least.
This has happened numerous times in our era. Technological innovation breaks down barriers. Everyone celebrates. Only gradually does everyone learn that the real beneficiaries are an elite group who already own most of everything. Chesterton's Fence remains undefeated.
1 comment:
I can't say I've ever been interested in Cory Doctorow or his opinions about anything that I can find much to say. I've looked at wikipedia to see what it has to say about him and can appreciate some of his surmises about what's wrong with modern society. Nevertheless he looks to me like a peripatetic blowhard. Once he's made his mind up about a subject there's nothing left to be said. I have no idea what he means by his crusade against intellectual property. I'm probably not nearly sophisticated enough to determine what his actual feelings are about IP or copyright laws. I thought everyone believed in them.
You're right that both concepts have been abused by corporations, particularly those involved in LLM training. I'm certainly against having what little I've accomplished or participated in being scraped to feed the ravenous beast of what is currently accepted as 'artificial intelligence'. Although it most definitely is artificial it is anything but intelligence. It's Chesterton who was intelligent enough to see the end result of these machinations. His fence story describes it well.
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