In practice it's less "abolishing intellectual property" and more "transmuting everyone else's IP into their own IP so they can be the ultimate IP landlords".
But how ML is at least currently developing, other megacorporations and universities are only a year or so behind OpenAI etc, and publishing their weights and models. Of course disregarding training set IP because otherwise keeping up would be impossible.
If the media and advertising megacorporations manage to get a ban on training on IP material, Micr.. OpenAI would be a huge benefactor, as they could afford some weird licensing deal on everybody's data and the actual open efforts would be extinguished.
Luckily US hegemony is fading and many other powers DGAF anymore what a US judge says. Or a WTO judge, because USA kind of destroyed WTO themselves already.
Intellectual property in the form of patents and copyrights is often harmful for consumers. In music, academia and mechanical engineering it's clearly been harmful in slowing the spread of innovation. It sucks to wait 20 years for a new excellent new dishwasher tray shape.
Everything political is rooted in morality, and while it is easy to point out political challenges on the topic, intellectual property is ethically an unambiguously good concept.
While I don’t think all IP should be abolished, I think in general there is too much of it, protected for too long, and society would be better off getting rid of patents and dramatically downsizing copyright to at most a few decades of protection.
(And yes I have thought a lot on this matter. The evidence behind patents being overall beneficial is weak, and there is no effective societal argument for the current copyright terms.)
It was also created at a time when copying work was almost as hard and expensive as creating it.
"The Most Powerful Idea in the World" basically makes the case that intellectual property is what enabled the Industrial Revolution. I won't try to summarize or defend the entire thing here, but I think it makes a very compelling case that the notion of "owning ideas as property" was the thing that made Britain unique (among other factors of course) and led to runaway technological explosion. It points out how in earlier times, inventors were literally killed for coming up with better methods that threatened some established system. So there is a big difference between art and technology there, and while I think debating the merits of copyright as it pertains to art is valid (and 100% agree it's overdone in our current system), I'm not convinced the current issues are serious enough to undermine the entire concept of intellectual property.
And without any form of copyright it would have gone "hey $RECORD_COMPANY here's this cool jingle I made" and they'd say "yeah we think so too, we'll use that and compensate you $0."
Way better.
Politics and economics don't have anything to do with morality. It's about power. The moral fairytailes are there to justify whatever the state of affairs are. When these change, new fairytales justifying them will be adopted.
If right to property is a God given right, why the hell I as a atheist should give a damn?
"God given" means "natural". [Natural rights does not require a god](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...)
And if your argument ("... god given ... atheist ... etc.) can be copy-pasted into a valid defence of arbitrary evil (I like to use Hitler for a concrete example, but avoid it in public because some subset of people erroneously thinks that is an automatic fallacy), then it is trivial in the sense that it doesn't add anything to the discussion, regardless of your opinion or pov.
You can argue it from political necessity.
Some kind of property rights are necessary for the operation of any social group. Even in a communist society you can't have the air force stealing land from the navy, or the transport department taking electricity from hospitals, or neighbours taking each others food allocations.
There needs to be some kind of organised transfer of property or you get chaos.
Ideally there would other ways than economical to facilitate production of intellectual goods. Ownership economies are exceptionally bad in non-scarce resources.
There are some alternative and less destructive ways to handle the economy already in place. Academic institutions generally don't claim or enforce IP (paywalls are more a corporate than academic thing). Many library systems pay authors (notably not the publishers) for each loan from public funds. Open source software is funded via services (and increasingly with ads, which is not necessarily great).
State enforced monopoly on ideas or lumps of matter isn't the only way of structuring the economy. Alternatives haven't been discussed in 30 or so years, so it's understandable that many have hard time even conceptualizing such.
Arguably "first come, first serve" policy on names per domain is a good one and serves to reduce confusion.
If we lived in an economic system where people don't starve or lose their house when they don't have a job then I wouldn't care. Until then, OpenAI and its ilk are looters.
I think the AI industry is motivating this for themselves with the idea that this does (at least partially) lead us to that world.
It maybe wrong how it is now, but it exists for a reason.
Same with patents.
Even now they can fight in court until smaller opponents go bankrupt but without any IP they wouldn't even have to fight.
Remember when Amazon copied successful products on their marketplace? That would be the norm and you could even blame or sue them.
Right now, AI is taking people's original works and rehashing them in a way that directly competes with the original work. Some AI firms (e.g. perplexity) just have their LLMs paraphrase the work lightly.
This is a problem because it drives original work out of business. Even setting aside matters of originality, artistic value, and AI being vapid slop:
Gen-AI is and will remain a derivative work that is reliant on original human-made work
ChatGPT is not going to do investigative journalism. If we let AI push all journalists into bankruptcy, the news just becomes an endless sewer of PR statements recycled into AI slop.
If you don't want Google's woke "diverse nazis" to push real news into bankruptcy, copyright is needed to stop them.
> Right now, AI is taking people's original works and rehashing them in a way that directly competes with the original work.
Good. Taking people's original works and rehashing them in direct competition fosters, not harms, cultural flourishing.
