It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators. In the background, the wealthy and powerful disregard all of this and seem to do whatever they want, and the little guy looks at millions of dollars in legal costs to defend themselves in either case. Costs that are increasingly a rounding error to their opposition as they continue to grow by exploiting a broken system, and the “little guy” now includes whole industries.

I feel like adversarial interoperability more than free market capitalism should have been the death knell for most of the negatives highlighted in this post. Everyone is still so determined to make money from mere ideas however that we still use 1700s law designed to protect book publishers to enable the existence of “businesses” so warped in valuation that they are now trillion dollar entities yet always face the existential threat of copy+paste. What if the more profound truth is that tech is beneficial to humanity but inherently worthless to sell, and that our present woe’s shape is determined by the antiquated institutions built service this illusion of value? In an inevitable future age of generative AI as an accessible technology, as opposed to a business model with a moat, what even is our goal for such institutions? What sorts of creativity do we want motivate, and what meaningful regulatory constraints even are there to begin with? I hope we figure it out soon, because IP will be impossible to enforce post-deglobalization in any case.