I am not approaching this from a law-school perspective at all. I'm aware that I'm arguing against a massive amount of current legal doctrine and a social shift that would be monumental. I just know the idea of someone "owning" an idea is rotten in general, when we are all diffusion machines ourselves, who are riffing off everything everyone else is saying etc. I learn when other people post good shit, and that informs the things I tell to others. The student becomes the commercially-employed professional becomes the textbook author. It seems absurd to single out this one particular act of diffusion as being unique because it was done by a machine - is an art student not affected by a coca-cola ad or whatever? That's a commercial property too.

The deep-down reason people are concerned is because it reduces the cost of doing it to zero. And that taps into this whole other set of problems where the computer thingy says we can't eat because nobody has a job anymore, or is limited by the cost to automate with a reasonable solution, etc. Plus a whole host of others besides.

I have no idea how you reward significant creative or R&D effort in a relatively post-IP society, where the cost of defining any idea is just some prompt. Pretending like any sort of IP ownership can be enforced in this thing is crazy though. We are seeing the cost of replicating intellectual property driven down to the actual economic-minimum cost basis.

It's absolutely not capitalism's job to ride out the population through whatever weird economic shit comes next, when the idea of IP law generally gets mushy and melts away. Right? There is a lot of managerial or creative work that can be completely displaced by this. Why even have a farmer watching the farm once the cropwatch 5000 is built? And physical labor obviously it's just a matter of cost.

You can't have everyone's salary be constrained by the actual cost to replace, because that's going to get a ton lower. And that's good, it lets us all move up an abstraction layer, and also have more time for leisure etc. It's just not going to be evenly distributed, at all. But we could be talking about a post-scarcity utopia before terribly long, if we want to. Why not just let the robots make the phones and the food and we just hike mountains and do art or whatever? How does an economy work in a situation where most of the actual work is automated and most people don't actually work?

It's super time for a livable, non-phased basic income. It's going to need a while to phase in (probably at least 10 if not 20-30 years) but like, the numbers on the cost aren't going to be any more appealing in another 15 years of watching AI displace everyone.

In general I kind of like the idea of "unregistered vs registered copyright" where you have some default rights of the work itself, and if you register it you receive more significant protections etc. If you're Intel, argue the value you added to create x86 etc and how you've supported it for 20 years, etc. The idea would be to combine and replace patents and copyright and IP in general, you have sort of a "right of creation" or sweat-of-the-brow intellectual ownership and right to exploit the work. The more effort and work, the larger the argument that some competitor ripping you off is intellectually unfair - sort of an actual-damages model.

But I'm also strongly against derivative works being illegal once the idea has been released into the public... but neither do I want to encourage trade-secrets-ism. I think that issue is probably overblown though, reverse engineering/etc can clear up a lot of trade secrets pretty quick. And I think some common-law norms of unfair exploitation of IP would develop (and could flux over time) such that we don't need to go after slash fiction because it violates your cinematic universe, but a large competitor ripping it off might be unfair.

The original creator will always have a period of exclusivity for at least the time to replicate, even in a true zero-IP-rights scenario. Making a chip takes 6-12 months anyway, for example. Recreating some breakthrough drug (hopefully in a better way) and getting it through trials takes time. And nobody is confused by knockoff works from small-time non-commerical operators etc. There are still a lot of factors in favor of actual innovation here, it's not nothing either, and I'm proposing a sweat-of-the-brow system to equalize the instances where that fails or is unduly exploited.