Comment by thomastjeffery
6 days ago
Software is a particularly egregious case, but the problem is more general. Copyright itself is just a bad move all around.
Copyright demands that everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor. Therefore, we should not expect people to earn wages for labor; and we should instead expect people to earn royalties from their "works" (the countable commodity). Absurd.
Copyright grants "artists" (in the broadest sense of the word) a monopoly over their "work", again the imagined product of their labor. In practice, this actually means a monopoly on the labor itself, because all art is derivative work, and the derivation of work is the specific thing that copyright monopolizes. Twice absurd.
LLMs, in the best case, are calling that bluff. The problem is that they are calling it poorly, and the bluff itself is incoherent to begin with. Even worse is that LLMs can be monopolized as copyrighted "works", which is a clear abuse of the system.
We should get rid of copyright and patents. Dismantle all the moats and publishing houses (including social media). Liberate derivative work. Value labor directly.
"Copyright demands that everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor."
Isn't it?
If you spend ten years writing the Great American Novel, and I spend ten years writing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over again, have I created as much value as you have?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value#Critique...
If I would have spent ten years writing the Great American Novel, but spent all my time working elsewhere so I could afford to live, then yes.
Why in the hell would anyone spend ten years writing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over again? Because they have no intrinsic meaning to provide, or because their life has no meaning to reflect?
We may as well set aside this argument anyway, because it actually isn't relevant. If I accept your premise that the product of work is the only value in labor, then why are there specific categories of product that I can value, and others that I cannot? That's the situation copyright has put us in: if I create the right kind of work, but it's derivative, then that's a violation of someone's copyright. If I create derivative work, but it's the wrong kind, then I can't copyright it. The only kind of work that I can profit from freely is "original", which is a false premise to begin with.
So what is the alternative? Speculation. In a society without copyright, labor must be funded somehow. Rather than promise a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, we would simply fund artists who we believe will create valuable products. We already do this to a moderately significant extent: everyone knows about Patreon and OnlyFans. Most successful creators rely on ad revenue instead of royalties. The problem with this model is that it must compete with copyright holders, who get to monopolize entire swaths of derivative work, and leverage the guarantee of their already-performed work as much easier to sell than speculative investment. Get rid of copyright, and the market simply becomes fair.
Of course no sane person would spend ten years writing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over again". That wasn't the point.
The labor theory of value says that the value of something is determined by the amount of labor that went into creating it. I'd say it's not really so much a theory as a definition of the word "value" -- and I suggest that it's not a particularly useful definition.
If I go to the widget store to buy a widget, the price I'm willing to pay depends on what it's worth to me. The amount of work that went into producing this widget or that widget doesn't affect my decision.
Another article you might (or might not) want to read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_the_labour_theor...
"Get rid of copyright, and the market simply becomes fair."
I think the word "simply" is doing a whole lot of work there.
1 reply →
> Everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor.
Is it not? If I spend 10 years writing the greatest novel of all time, and you, a publishing company, make copies and sell 10 million copies, I feel entitled to some recompense.
My labor has value to me, but only the product of that labor has value to anyone else.
The goal is the product, but what is being exchanged is production, ie labor for a certificate of your own past production, aka money.
You feel entitled to recompense from the publisher, because they are profiting from your labor. The problem I brought up is still there, just in the hands of the publisher, and not the writer. Now the publisher gets to profit from work they did not do, and you are lucky to get a good cut.
Your labor has value to everyone else, even if that value is speculative. If we don't have a mechanism to commoditize the ends of labor, then we can just speculate instead. Speculating the value of labor is more uncertain than valuing copyrighted works, which means that the business of labor speculation cannot compete with the business of copyright valuation. At the same time, copyright is a lie: the "product of a work" is a totally arbitrary imagined boundary that can't always be meaningfully drawn in the first place; meaning that entire categories of work are impossible to copyright at all. Removing that lie would put everyone on a level playing field, where all labor is valuable, and all valuation is fair.
> We should get rid of copyright and patents... Value labor directly.
Ireland's UBI for artists seems like the only real solution that gets to the heart of the problem