Of course, talking about “the Left” is a very broad brush. So, as an example, I’ll give Jacobin.com . If you search for “copyright”, you will find that they have published a number of wonky articles critical of copyright pre AI-hype, just as one would expect. In recent years the tone changes. In the context of AI, you find an article just regurgitating lines by capital owners. Reporting on the legal troubles of the Internet Archive, the issue gets a both sides treatment.
In contrast, the Internet Archive - or libraries in general, as well as other organizations devoted to free information - have not pivoted to the right. But these are not left-leaning, as such.
How the rise of AI has affected the financial interests of traditional capitalists is obvious. What’s not obvious is why left-leaning spaces support these interests.
What gives?
(I’m sure many will feel that I completely misunderstand this. If you want to CMV you could explain what the endgame is supposed to be. How will it help the general public to grant more privileges to owners of intellectual property?)
Copyright exists to protect creators. However, copyright laws are abused by large corporations.
I am not a regular reader of Jacobin, especially not stories about copyright, but if I had to guess, their main concern is the stifling of culture caused by corporate-driven copyright legislation and attacks on the public domain, moating companies from competition and having to find new material (how many Spiderman movies have come out since 2000?)
Worse, (perhaps according to Jacobin) OpenAI, a large corporation with lots of money, is freely using copyrighted material to train its models, thus profiting on someone else’s work.
I think that these takes square quite nicely
It’s certainly been odd to watch the general perceptions on copyright shift as AI has come around. From what I can tell, it stems from a general David vs Goliath mentality. Years ago when filesharing started to come around, it was seen as the common people against the large corporations. The MPAA would try to tell us that downloading a movie is “stealing” and we all told them to fuck off. Now, culture has changed, a lot more people consider themselves to be creators, or social media lets people feel closer to creators. Now, its the big tech companies up against individual artists. Rather than seeing it in terms of copyright itself, people just see big bad company against little guys.
As a leftist, this puzzles me. Copyright has always only protected those who have the means to sue people. And it is a fundamental commodification of things that are not commodities by nature. So the left should be and has been critical of copyright.
Panic over people losing their jobs, no viable alternatives and frankly, misunderstandings of AI technology has sparked a leftist anti-AI wave that has utilized pro-copyright rhetoric.
Maybe we’ll see better ideas that combat the problems cause by AI in the future. Meanwhile, we’ll have to put up with the asenine pro-copyright propaganda BS that we know from the online piracy discussions from 20 years ago.
I believe “the Left” doesn’t really have that much of a problem with copyright, it’s just that the current implementation is absurd regarding length and because of the way stuff like the DMCA and the general society is structured, it is very much rules for thee but not for me with the companies. Copyright (in its current form) mainly protects the revenue of companies while imposing large restrictions on the consumer and by an extent derivative works. However with AI, not only are the models trained and content to which large corporations have control over but also stuff like blogs, copy left code, indie books etc, so this would be one of the cases where copyright could (and should IMO) protect the authors, but realistically this will be a fight entirely between the big players, be it copyright holders or AI companies, that have the funds to fight the legal battles. I think that this has shown a lot of people that, at least in a capitalist society, there should be some form of copyright, but definitely in a reformed way that actually protects creators instead of corporations and doesn’t last indefinitely. Copyright is also very much a problem for left leaning ideology under capitalism ideally there would be no copyright but creators would still get paid, which isn’t really compatible with capitalism.
I never were truly anti-copyright, I just don’t like that the current system favors big corporations over the people.
Just leave poor people alone and public domain should start at the death of the author(s).
Just leave poor people alone and public domain should start at the death of the author(s).
I generally agree, but it gets complicated with works that have many contributors, like a film. Does the costume designer own the rights to a movie more than a writer? A director? A stunt coordinator? Who among them gets to decide how that work can be used? A consensus among hundreds of people is very unlikely.
FOSS projects deal with this issue a lot when a project wants to change licensing for example, but they need every contributor’s approval, some of whom may be very difficult to reach.
Also, selling the rights to an IP can be a huge windfall for creators if it gets big enough and they’re okay with giving up control. This is especially common when the original creator wants to retire.
“Intellectual property” is a complicated concept, and I don’t know if a perfect system can exist. Though, it could easily be better for creators than it is now.
Copyright is regularly abused by large corporations in the pursuit of more money. Previously it was primarily used as a cudgel against individuals (against piracy, parody, and fair use). But now that their own rules are inconvenient to them they ignore its existence in pursuit of further profits.
Copyright to protect large companies? Fuck that.
Copyright to protect individuals from having their work appropriated? Yes please.
Copyright is already abused against individuals. Corporations already have these powers. What people want is the ability for these powers currently only available to the corporations to be available to the public. I’ve not seen anyone arguing for corporations to be granted more.
Trying to support individuals enforcing copyright against corps isn’t going to change the fact that corporations alrwady have these rights, it’s just trying to get corps to play by the same rules they apply to us.
Plus, any of the critically needed changes to copyright law would be fucking useless as long as we allow corporations to ignore what already exists for the sake of convenience.
Completely discarding concepts and arguments based only on the fact that they are associated with “the enemy” is dumb as hell. Likewise, “owners of intellectual property” != “only companies”. “Owners of intellectual property” covers anyone who takes photos, writes text, makes art, or makes original “content”.
Could it be “if it stops me getting at stuff, copyright bad. If it stops the rich getting richer, copyright good”?
The world overall has changed.
Copyright used to be one of the main threats to a free and open Internet that empowered people to communicate freely, to a digital society overall.
Now the “digital society” is very much something that’s been realized and isn’t going away any time soon, meanwhile there are other threats to the free and open Internet from all sides of the political spectrum, such as: age verification laws, attempts to censor “hate” and “misinformation”, bans on specific platforms (TikTok) etc. etc. etc. This has distracted people from copyright, everybody seems to have now accepted the fact that copyright will mainly be enforced by DRM and if the DRM is broken, there’s no effective way to stop the spread of information.
I believe that in the age of AI many leftists have evolved and many now believe that copyright is now necessary to protect human creativity, expression, and culture from Generative AI. A pragmatic shift rather than a ideological shift
I’m a leftist that wants to abolish copyright but I believe that genAI stans are closeted copyrightists. how else could you as a leftist look at massive corporations lobbying to further destroy labor rights via AI colonialism, using it for mass layoffs, colonizing culture in a way that hasn’t been seen since Europeans extracting resources and knowledge from Africa AND still claim that you support workers and marginalized people?
I think they spent so much time behind a terminal that they started to believe they too could one day own their own little fiefdom in Silicon Valley.
the “move fast and break things” mentality manifests itself in anarchist instances like db0 thinking they can liberate the workers if they just lick the boots of their tech overlords hard enough and mimick the way they speak.
I think the reason why tech oligarchs love genAI so much is because they want to create a new world shaped by copyright 2.0 similarly to how crypto shills peddle the web 3.0 gospel.
If AI was solely being used to advance scientific progress in exponential steps as it has for things like protein folding, I suspect these outlets would be all for it.
This isn’t the primary driver of capital investment in AI, though. AI is booming mostly because corporate executives see it as a way they can get the fruits of skilled labor without paying for it. I don’t have any more way of knowing these particular leftist organizations’ reasons than you do, but my assumption would be that their perspective is that AI in this context is literally the most powerful tool the bourgeoisie have ever had to exploit workers - one where the end goal is to not even need the workers anymore. You couldn’t design something more perfectly antithetical to leftist values than this application for generative AI, as it is created by using the owned products of others’ skilled labor to make it possible for the owner to remove the worker from the equation. Copyright and IP law is a weapon to combat that.
Edit - typos
deleted by creator
Flip-flopping in general happens when people are more rooted in politics than principles. That might be what’s going on here.
