Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Last week, a US federal judge handed Americaâs creative workers a huge labor win: Judge Beryl A Howell of the DC Circuit Court upheld a US Copyright Office ruling that works created by âAIsâ are not eligible for copyright protection.
This is huge.
Some background: under US lawâââand under a mountain of international treaties, from the Berne Convention to the TRIPS âcopyright is automatically granted to creative works of human authorship âat the moment of fixation in some tangible medium.â
That is: as soon as a human being makes something creative, and records it in some medium (a hard-drive, magnetic tape, paper, film, canvas, etc), that creative thing is immediately copyrighted (the duration of that copyright varies, both by territory and by whether the creator was working on their own or for a corporation).
Continue reading "Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Copyright won't solve creators' Generative AI problem (09 Feb 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: 2023's public domain is a banger (20 Dec 2022)"
Chokepoint Capitalism is my next book, co-written with the brilliant copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin. Itâs a book about how the markets for creative labor were rigged, and how artists, fans, tinkerers, regulators and lawmakers can unrig them.
That second part is key: this isnât just a book complaining about how tough things are for artistsâââitâs a book about how we can make things better.
Thereâs an obvious reason that our bookâs focus on shovel-ready projects to put more money in artistsâ pockets is important: youâd have to be a monster to prefer a world that underpays the writers, musicians, actors, and film and TV creators whose work heartens and delights you.
But thereâs another reason that this focus on fixing creative labor markets is so important: because copyright, the primary tool weâve given creators to give them power over their labor, has actually made things worse.
Continue reading "What is Chokepoint Capitalism?"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: 17 Aug 2022: Chokepoint Capitalism Kickstarter is live"
The world of crypto is full of scams, grifts, and absolutely foreseeable flops. The underlying ideology of cryptoâââthe much-vaunted âsystem designââââstarts from the principle that systems are most stable when they appeal to each participantâs self-interest, rather than their solidarity, generosity or empathy. This is an extension of the âgreed is goodâ / âthereâs no such thing as societyâ ideology of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution. Itâs an ideology grounded in empirically false propositions about how people actually behave in markets.
In a recent interview, Yanis Varoufakis describes his experience running an economy in God-mode when he was chief economist of Valve, overseeing game economies with âaccess to the full data set in real time,â lured by the prospect of âplaying âgod; i.e. being able to do with these digital economies things that no economist can do in the ârealâ world, e.g. alter rules, prices, and quantities to see what happens.â