by martin-t | 2026-02-12 02:15:50+00:00
I think the discussion should move away from freedoms/rights to consent.

Compare with rights in the physical world:

- If I own a property, whether it's a house or plot of land, I can consent or not consent to other people being there. Walking across a field of grass doesn't damage or depreciate is in any measurable way but nobody is allowed to do that unless I allow it.

- If I own a bike I never use and never intend to use, nobody is allowed to take it for theirs, not even borrow it, without my consent.

It should be the same with my work which is not physical. If I publish code online, my consent should be required for using it in any way - especially if i give specific instructions such as a license file.

Without that, those who are best able to capitalize on an opportunity (typically those who are already in positions of power and have enough wealth) gain the most from it, not those who contributed to the opportunity through their labor.

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And it shouldn't be about innovation either. If i record my cat doing something funny, I can a) keep the video to myself, or b) upload it to youtube where it has a tiny but real chance to hit millions of views for meaningless internet points, ad money and presumably preferential treatment of my future videos from the algorithm, or c) I can upload it to my website where almost nobody will see it. But the choice c) should not allow Youtube to take my video and host it on their platform. Because I don't consent to that. In fact, I should be able to say for example "you can only rehost this video if you include a link to my website and don't make money from it".

And I should definitely be allowed to say "you can't use this video to make a statistical model of all videos on the internet which can then reproduce non-verbatim patterns from them". And by "you can't", I mean "I don't consent to it and society/law agrees with punishing you if you do".

There's nothing innovative about funny cat videos (for all we know, the exact situation has been recorded thousands of times and posted on youtube already and only one of those videos reaches more than a few views by random chance). Innovation shouldn't be relevant, consent should.

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> All of that is perfectly consistent with the ideal of rewarding people for the full transitive value of their work

Not sure if I understand but I think I agree in a theoretical sense but disagree in a practical one. Theoretically, IP law isn't a requirement for reaching this ideal, maybe there is a different rule system which can achieve that. Practically, IP law is a flawed mess but we shouldn't throw it away until we find a better alternative. (I've seen a discussion here where a person basically argued for destroying copyright but only several posts later revealed he was doing it because he had an alternative in mind. Ironically his alternative didn't require copyright to be abolished, it was perfectly compatible AFAICT but also was opt-in so it was effectively powerless and couldn't work towards his stated goals.)

> I apologize if my tone tended towards quibbling

It's fine, I used the example because it was one of the things which caused cracks in my acceptance/ignorance of how the world works and made me think more deeply about it. It's good to be able to refine it even further.

> I don't really see how any of that relates to copyright or AI though.

I think the point I was trying to make is that without rules limiting people's behavior, what happens is that those who already have vastly more than other people tend to be able to use that wealth to gain more even faster than the rest.

Being in high decision making ("leadership") positions allows one to capture a disproportional cut of the income. Ownership doesn't even require any work to generate more wealth for the owner. And now, similarly, huge companies are using their position to repurpose past labor with 100% of the wealth thusly generated going to them instead of those who performed that labor.