this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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Oh, man, I do miss being a techno-utopian. It was the nineties, I had just acquired a 28.8k modem in high school, my teachers were warning me about the risks of algorithmically selected, personalized information and I was all "free the information, man" and "people will figure it out" and "the advantages of free information access outweigh the negatives of the technology used to get there".
And then I was so wrong. It's not even funny how wrong I was. Like, sitting on the smoldering corpse of democracy and going "well, that happened" wrong.
But hey, I'm sure we'll mess it up even further so you can get there as well.
For the record, I don't mean to defend the status quo with that. I agree that copyright and intellectual property are broken and should be fundamentally reformulated. Just... not with a libertarian, fully unregulated framework in mind.
Hi fellow traveler. I think you and I took a similar path to get here except I started with a 33.6k modem in high school and the catch phrase I remember is “Information wants to be free.” What’s your thought on copyright reform? Somewhere along the lines of 25 years and non-renewable? How you feeling about the concept of software/algorithm patents? Talking about stuff like this is reminding me of /. :)
Well, if this was travel and not a fall down a very long, very dark hole, then one of the stops was learning when to say "I don't know".
I don't have all the answers for copyright. I don't think my problem is primarily with terms. I'm probably closer to thinking perhaps the system should acknowledge where we landed consuetudinarily. Just let people share all materials, acknowledge a right of the original author to be the sole profit holder in for-profit exploitation. That's effectively how most of the Internet works anyway. Even then there's obviously tons of stuff we'd have to sort out. What happens with ownership transfer? What about terms? What about derivative work? Components of larger works? I don't know.
We're talking about reworking some of the biggest markets and industries on the planet from the ground up. It's not a shower thought, it's something a whole bunch of very smart people with different backgrounds should and would have to get together for years to put together. Probably on a global scale.
It's an absurd question to have a locked down opinion about. The gap between beign able to tell "yeah, duh, something's not working" and being able to fix it is enormous here. Figuring out that much is probably as far as my trip is gonna take me at this point. And I know even less about patent law.