H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office

Unfortunately, the Democrats haven’t demonstrated themselves to be much better (at least, I’m not aware of them opposing copyright).

You can see a lot of difference in the way congresspeople talk based on whether it’s televised or not as well, especially in committees.

I’m just a little surprised that voice votes haven’t been replaced by some kind of digital process. A voice vote doesn’t save time compare to a modern method of tallying votes. Why avoid making records when records are so “cheap” these days?

You'll also find: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." Art II, Sec 1. That establishes the Separation concept, though neither "separation of powers" nor "checks and balances" are explicitly stated in the US Constitution. They are part of the political discussion in which the Constitution was framed, however.

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The “downside” is you may attribute similar works that weren’t inspirations, but coincidental. But I think that’s an upside: when someone discovers something novel and great but their work fails because of bad luck or non-novel details, then the discovery is finally recognized in another work, I think they should still be attributed.

It will be very possible once they become the owners of the intellectual property being infringed. Think about how it was "impossible" to implement DRM on music and movies in the early days of youtube. Now, Google owns the content and platform, and suddenly their "rolling cypher" which involves no encryption at all is supposedly enforcable DRM.

The Silicon Valley tech bros play the same game every time. They violate the law, say it's just too darn difficult to obey the law without stifling progress, and then they get away with it until they kill all the competition. At which point, the law is once again applicable to anyone that might try to challenge them.

Remember how Amazon destroyed all the other retailers when they had a decade of no sales tax while brick & mortar had to obey it. "Calculating sales tax for 50 different states?! That's impossible!!!" What a load of shit...

Now, knowing that they're going to do this playbook again, how do you think it's going to play out? We've already seen it. Anthropic steals your copyrighted code, puts together their claude code project, the code for that project leaks, but now THEY own it! They sent DMCA takedowns on that AI generated code. AI generated code enjoys no copyright protection, it cannot be DMCAed under the law, there's no copyright on it. But Anthropic claims there is, and Github will obey the takedown, and nobody has the money to step up and stop them.

See where this is going? Once they achieve market dominance, they will claim that all the code generated by claude belongs to Anthropic, your prompts belong to you, but THEIR machine generated THEIR code and you only purchase a license to it with your tokens. A limited license. It might be revokable, it might expire, maybe you need to pay an annual fee to keep using THEIR code Claude generated for you. And if you actually just write code on your own, without Claude? Well, prepare to be sued like a network printer is sued by the RIAA because that's going to happen too. They will have their robot scour your code for "fair use" training and discover that it's just too similar to something their machine generated a year earlier. Sorry open source programmer, here's your legalese nasty gram. It appears you owe Anthropic some money.

If I no longer need your book to learn its contents, that's direct competition, making that facet of the work entirely untransformed.

The unitary-executive crowd worships a golden calf, namely the first three words of Article 2: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."

One could argue that the "executive Power" is whatever the Congress says it is. Suppose that a future Congress were to decide that the president is to be, basically, the butler for the federal government — think Mr. Carson on Downton Abbey, in charge of the household staff but still very much a servant himself — with of course the other specifically-enumerated presidential powers (read: duties) in the remainder of Article 2. It's hard to say in advance that such a hypothetical congressional action would be categorically inconsistent with the Framers' intentions.

On that point, Congress cannot "set things up as it sees fit." The constitution goes to great lengths to create a complex, three-branch system of government with specific powers allocated to each branch. Anytime Congress creates something new, it has to fit it into the three-branch model in a way that is consistent with the principles of that model. It's like a "pure" microkernel in computer science: there is a framework that dictates what goes in kernel space versus user space. Except with the constitution, the structural principles are legally binding. You can't delegate executive functions to mere employees of the legislative branch, just like in a pure microkernel you can't put the GUI into the kernel.

In this case, the DMCA creates civil and criminal liability. Creating exceptions for that is the exercise of a quintessential executive power--enforcement discretion. That power must be allocated to an executive-branch agency.

If you concede that it looks like an executive agency then it actually seems quite proper that the executive control it.

I won't use an argument in favor of AI training here because AI can probably still be trained by fair-use information extraction from copyrighted works.

Without copyright, we can return to a patronage based system. Both rich and poor consumers gladly offer proportional patronage for authors they truly believe in.

Humanity will progress just fine via its scientific works which don't really require a copyright. Arxiv proves it.

The cost imposed by GPL not working will be negligible compared to the benefit of free use.

That’s ok, GPL’s entire purpose and only restriction is to prevent other copyrights.

> without copyright, all of the profit made on creative works (of a perhaps smaller pie) would get be kept by distributors like Amazon or Netflix

This is already true in most cases: companies own everything their employees create for them. And without copyright, studios would still pay artists, because that’s the only way art is created (which even rich people want, although you probably and I think their taste mostly sucks, so does everyone else’s…)

Assuming copyright gets dismantled is a good-faith way, Netflix/Amazon remaining as gatekeepers sounds unlikely, IMO. Free software clients like Popcorn Time provide a better experience and would be able to exist without threats from copyright trolls.

It's also much more robust regarding cultural preservation (as users and organizations can keep DRM-free local copies) and censorship (being torrent-based makes it much harder to delete a movie from existence).

It is not clear to me what their political agenda is. Overall it might be good for AI if the goal is to scrape freely and use it for AI training.

Someone using a physical property can possibly deprive others of its use. This applies to the physical mediums of songs, movies, or books, but not the songs, movies, or text of the books themselves.

Intellectual property isn't real, it's a concept that exists to support copyright, which exists for this exact purpose stated in the Constitution:

"[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

I'm ok with accepting a temporary limitation on my freedom to support those who make songs, movies, or books, but life of the author + 70 years, plus the ability to assign the right to corporations which don't die, is not reasonably "limited" these days. It should be something like 5 years today.

No one is entitled to be a songwriter, movie director, or author; society needs people doing other things too.

Especially since that agreement didn't involve you.

There's no $deity-given right to control what happens to stuff you wrote / designed etc, once it's been published. Copyright is, sorry was, a legal construct meant to promote people creating artwork.

Once it overshot that intent bigtime, there's no justification for keeping it around. At least not in its current form.

I want copyright to be completely abolished and patronage to re-become normal and common. Most of my favorite artists already distribute most of their work for free and rely on the latter.

Does this sound profound to you? When you see yourself type it out, does it seem like you've really came up with a zinger?

What entitles them to come in and police my hard drive platters with "you can't write that sequence of bits to storage, that's our sequence of bits"? It's sort of a weird idea, sounds kind of medieval. Like King Cnut has granted them license to "the birds in the forest, and the timber, and the water that runs through the meadows".

Also, the argument that you made elsewhere about "damages" is nonsense because there is no damage from someone viewing what they were never going to pay for anyway, and there also is no deprivation.

Don't threaten me with a good time

Might be a win? The copyright system is one of the major suspects for why US industry ended up crippled and replaced by Asian labour refusing to respect US IP laws to their significant advantage. To say nothing of the corrosive influence on culture of locking down music and stories. The biggest IP success in the last 50 years seems to have been Open Source because they built a framework inside the copyright system to achieve the opposite outcome and build a thriving industry despite the lawyers trying to encourage them in alternative directions.

The people defending the copyright system should have to keep making their case until they come up with something persuasive for how they're helping.