> * fully-generated content is public domain and copyright can not be applied to it.
Simpler yet - and inevitable, on sufficiently long time scales - is to dispense entirely with the notion of intellectual property and treat _all_ content this way.
Okay, you're right. I mean, there was patronage for a long time, and then a good era of proper copyright protections. The modern system really does need a reform, I agree. But I don't think we should wholesale put everything in the public domain. I mean, AI scrapers already think that's the case, but…
I'm a full-time professional musician, and I don't know anybody (at least in bluegrass) who thinks that the system of IP is designed to protect us, or is in fact serving us in economic terms. It seems much more geared to protect spotify and apple than it does the musicians.
Last year, I cut Drowsy Maggie with David Grier (something about which I boast every chance I get :-) ), and part of our journey was listening to aging, nearly-forgotten versions to find melodic and harmonic ideas to harvest and revive. For this, we of course made heavy use of archive.org's Great 78 project - and at the very same time, the RIAA (who is supposed to represent us?!) was waging aggressive lawfare against the Great 78 project, to try to take it down.
It was just the height of absurdity.
Consider that since at least 2020, every grammy winner in both the bluegrass and americana categories (and almost no nominee) has been released DRM-free. And that many of the up-and-coming bluegrass and jam bands are now releasing all of their shows, directly off the board, licensed with creative commons-compatible licenses.
I don't understand this opinion.
The only leverage you have to stop Spotify from taking your music and publishing it without your permission is your copyright of the music.
In fact, every time I see a complaint about copyright it's always "we tried to do something at small scale for some noble purpose and couldn't because of pesky copyright laws," and it completely ignores the massive scale of abuse for profit purpose that would occur if copyright didn't exist.
Think of how AI scraped everyone's books without permission using the flimsy excuse that it's transformative work, except they wouldn't even need that excuse or the transformation. Amazon could just take everyone's books and sell it on Kindle, then kick out all authors because they only need to buy 1 book to resell it as if they were the owner of the book.
What prevents me from stealing your work and selling it? Including the source code you wrote?
This would remove the incentive to generate content, no? Copyright duration could be much shorter, but I think artists, writers, etc. would prefer the continuing protection of their work. (And I'm pro-copyright reform.)