What does Mondrian's estate owe to Oliver Byrne's estate, since he basically stole Byrne's color scheme and style from his version of Euclid's Elements? (And what does Byrne's estate owe to Euclid's estate?)
IP law is a purely practical matter: what most incentivizes intellectual production? If a culture errs too far toward restriction, that country ultimately falls behind. The US itself jumpstarted its industry by mass IP theft and industrial espionage to steal the hard work of British inventors and entrepreneurs; its entire publishing industry got its start by copying British works wholesale in what was then the world's most flagrant IP violation. As an angry sputtering Dickens wrote:
> You take the uncompleted books of living authors, fresh from their hands, wet from the press, cut, hack and carve them... all this without permission, and against his will; and then, to crown the whole proceeding, publish in some mean pamphlet, an unmeaning farrago of garbled extracts from his work, to which your name as author, with the honourable distinction annexed, of having perpetrated a hundred other outrages of the same description.
Americans mostly shrugged, or attacked him as a mercenary scoundrel, before proceeding to build the world's largest publishing industry.
The US needs to make laws governing how copyright applies to generative AI; when it does, those laws should grant expansive fair use rights. Otherwise, the US will be left behind.
IP law is a purely practical matter: what most incentivizes intellectual production? If a culture errs too far toward restriction, that country ultimately falls behind. The US itself jumpstarted its industry by mass IP theft and industrial espionage to steal the hard work of British inventors and entrepreneurs; its entire publishing industry got its start by copying British works wholesale in what was then the world's most flagrant IP violation. As an angry sputtering Dickens wrote:
> You take the uncompleted books of living authors, fresh from their hands, wet from the press, cut, hack and carve them... all this without permission, and against his will; and then, to crown the whole proceeding, publish in some mean pamphlet, an unmeaning farrago of garbled extracts from his work, to which your name as author, with the honourable distinction annexed, of having perpetrated a hundred other outrages of the same description.
Americans mostly shrugged, or attacked him as a mercenary scoundrel, before proceeding to build the world's largest publishing industry.
The US needs to make laws governing how copyright applies to generative AI; when it does, those laws should grant expansive fair use rights. Otherwise, the US will be left behind.