Even in GPL and CC-BY-SA context you still retain copyright ownership over your work. I write GPL code for a modest living, and my real name copyright goes on everything I write. Likewise, your still asking to be credited in your CC-BY-SA music. Nothing wrong with that.

The point being is that we are making a conscious decision to license the things we create in a permissive way. Neither of us are anonymously dumping our work into the public domain because clearly we do care about ownership and copyright. That’s well within our rights as creators.

Generative AI is exploiting our work and not even doing the bare minimum of following the licenses that we shared them under.

How does one test for this?

Data is replicable, doesn’t matter if you call it “work” or “ideas”.

Your mistake is thinking that “data” and “copyright” or “ownship” are the same thing. They aren’t

You can download a song, and thus be in possession of the data of that song, and you can even copy the file within the parameters of copyright law.

However, simply having the data is not the same thing as owning or holding a license to the song itself, and so you are in violation of the law (where I live, at least) if you try to distribute that song or use it in a non-fair-use context.

IF you were to copy my work and exploit it in a for-profit context for millions of dollars (and you happened to be operating in a region in which applicable copyright laws happen to apply) you’re damn right I would come after you for a slice of the pie, and I would almost certainly win. Just copying what I say and pasting it in a quote isn’t something that I can prove damages on, because it isn’t something you’re profiting on in any way, so the idea of “enforcing” it is irrelevant and obviously not worth it.

I agree with you, corpos shouldn’t have this amount of power. But you won’t get there by trying to protect the work of artists writers etc with the exact same scheme corpos pulled to protect their power and interests. Like, it didn’t work, did it?

This is where we are going to have to disagree. I am absolutely willing to fight fire with fire by using the copyright system against big tech. I don’t make the rules, but IF rules are to exist in terms of what is or is not fair use of copyrighted material, then I DO expect those rules to apply equitably. (Whether they will or not remains to be seen, but let’s see what precedent gets set and I’ll adapt from there.)

No copyright for me, thanks

Can I ask you a personal question: what do you create, and do you submit it to the public domain?

As for me, I write music, create art, make games and write computer code and do a number of other things that I absolutely claim ownership over. So, when I write a song or paint a picture who the fuck is anyone else to try to take that away from me or claim it as something that they own and control? I’ve written thousands of lines of GPL code and contributed to many hippy-dippy open source free software projects over my lifetime, and even in that kind of copyleft context we still maintain a copyright over the code we right (as seen at the top of every source and header file).

I only ask because I find that the people who are most pro-AI and most anti-copyright are generally people who have never created anything of their own–they’ve written no songs, they’ve drawn no pictures, they’ve written no stories–and now they incorrectly generative see AI as something that “evens the playing field” by compensating for their lack of skills and drive.

But I’ll repeat myself, AI isn’t ushering us into a post-copyright world where the little guy is empowered in anyway. It’s just a punch of useful idiots downloading completely proprietary binary blobs from the biggest, richest corporations, fooling themselves into thinking that they’re being empowered to create things when in reality they’re just beta testing a plagiarism machine on a industrial scale that’s designed to enrich the richest.

We aren’t talking about “ideas” being stolen here, we’re talking about work being stolen and exploited for corporate profit.

Personally I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that the person who writes a book should own it, the people who compose a song should own it, the artists who paints a painting should own it, etc.

As much as techbros love to pretend that AI is ushering us into a post-capitalist, post-copyright Star Trek future, it is actually in fact doing the exact opposite–it’s empowering the biggest and richest tech companies to exploit human creativity in the largest industrial plagiarism scheme in history, all so some bullshit VC investors can gain their way up the pyramid scheme known as the stock market.

If these guys thought they could out-bootleg the fucking Chinese then I have an unlicensed t-shirt of Nicky Mouse with their name on it.

Trump did this, and by extension that means that idiot American voters did this.