alt Hacker NewsIn a world where copyright doesn't exist - let's say I spend two years writing a novel/or a book on the history of computers.
What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published?
How am I ever going to justify that two year investment?
Replies
Don’t worry, either way, in two years everyone will just ask chatgpt to write the book they want to read.
I think the thinking is that in current system as solo creator you are somewhat protected by copyright but your work still gets mainly bought by your audience even if it can be pirated.
On the other hand copyright has been absolutely abused by big corporations to give them immense powers. Many creators were forced to sign away their rights and don't even make money on their work. You jailbreak your phone or your TV because of it. Generally it blocks so much of the competition. And with LLMs seems to have decided that copyright doesn't matter anyway.
> What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published?
What's stopping people from doing that now? The moment you sell something of any interest, you can be sure to find a copy of it free on the internet somewhere.
It already happens. Instead of a book look at TikTok for example. Come up with a cool product, if it sells at all, it will be immediately counterfeited.
The issue is that copyright is only protecting massive corporations.
Did copyright helped against AI? Nope.
If copyright was eliminated, say you are a great up-and-coming filmmaker, you could go make your own marvel movie. You might break into the industry because of that. You make some one off superhero movie is far less likely to hit with an audience.
Copyright doesn’t help small individuals, it only helps corporations protect themselves against us.
As others have pointed out, piracy is already easy for anything remotely popular, yet people still buy books. We could assume that it's not because they fear breaking the law, but because they want to support the author and have an "authentic" copy.
There are also other models than creating a work without any income, then recouping that cost by a state-granted monopoly. You can release preview chapters and then solicit donations from interested readers. You can build on your reputation and then promise to finish the book later for some up-front payment. These might not work for everyone, but they are in wide use today. One could argue that removing options for those authors that depend on copyright today is still a reasonable price to pay for removing all the abuses of copyright.