As an artist, I think it is a net negative for us. Disregarding the copyright issue, I think it’s also consolidating power into large corporations, going to kill learning fundamental skills (rip next generation of artists), and turn the profession into a low skill minimum wage job. Artists that spent years learning and perfecting their skills will be worth nothing and I think it’s a pretty depressing future for us. Anways thoughts?
Agreed. The copyright system under capitalism is ass, but the Free Software community – I repeat, the Free Software community, not the “Open Source” community – has leveraged it to great effect. The bourgeois world has gone through the hassle of completely rewriting entire compiler toolchains (e.g. LLVM) – something that takes absurdly high levels of technical sophistication and work time to do – solely to avoid the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), its sponsor (the Free Software Foundation (FSF)), and its strong copyleft license (the GPL). Strong copyleft licenses like the GPL and Affero GPL, that require all derivative works to have the same license, scare the absolute shit out of Big Tech and are verboten in their organizations.
Another example besides tech is the Creative Commons. In particular, their licenses that have share-alike stipulations require re-use down the entire chain. And if “you can’t make money off my shit” is important, their licenses can also have Non-Commercial stipulations. I wonder just how much Creative Commons work has been used in training the various stable diffusion AI models.
Copyright, under these specific conditions, benefits the proletariat. It provides a battle-tested protection, however imperfect, against direct exploitation. A protection strong enough that the bourgeoisie strives to avoid it. They, and the petite bourgeoisie, flee from it, instead preferring timid “open source” licenses that permit capitalists to take the work of the proletariat and keep it for themselves.
Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, is tragically and terminally liberal. However, I believe his essays in Free Software, Free Society are absolutely worth reading for anybody that writes or uses code (read: basically everybody). Especially “Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism”.