Speaking as a creative who also has gotten paid for creative work, I'm a bit flustered at how brazenly people just wax poetic about the need for copyright law, especially when the creator or artist them selves are never really considered in the first place.
It's not like yee olde piracy, which can even be ethical (like videogames being unpublished and almost erased from history), but a new form whereby small companies get to join large publishers in screwing over the standalone creator - except this time it isn't by way of predatory contracts, but by sidestepping the creator and farming data from the creator to recreate the same style and form, which could've taken years - even decades to develop.
There's also this idea that "all work is derivative anyways, nothing is original", but that sidesteps the points of having worked to form a style over nigh decades and making a living off it when someone can just come along and undo all that with a press of a button.
If you're libertarian and anarchist, be honest about that. Seems like there are a ton of tech bros who are libertarian and subversive about it to feel smort (the GPL is important btw). But at the end of the day the hidden agenda is clear: someone wants to benifit from somebody else's work without paying them and find the mental and emotional justification to do so. This is bad, because they then justify taking food out of somebody's mouth, which is par for the course in the current economic system.
It's just more proof in the pudding that the capitalist system doesn't work and will always screw the labourer in some way. It's quite possible that only the most famous of artists will be making money directly off their work in the future, similarly to musicians.
As an aside, Jay-Z and Taylor Swift complaining about not getting enough money from Spotify is tone-deaf, because they know they get the bulk of that money anyways, even the money of some account that only plays the same small bands all the time, because of the payout model of Spotify. So the big ones will always, always be more "legitimate" than small artists and in that case they've probably already paid writers and such, but maybe not.. looking at you, Jay-Z.
If the copyright cases get overwritten by the letigous lot known as corporate lawyers and they manage to finger holes into legislation that benifits both IP farmers and corporate interests, by way of models that train AI to be "far enough" away from the source material, we might see a lot of people loose their livelihoods.
Make it make sense, Beehaw =(
Can't put the genie back in the bottle, I guess =\ seems the only real protected forms is modern art, because nobody understands that anyways ^^;
I'm thinking the problem of AI has to be solved by AI, that those decades need to be replaced with AI training - like you said, having it generally available.
But that too leaves an outlier, people who don't want to work with AI. Their only option is to never digitally publish and make all their work bounce light so that cameras can't capture it. It'd be physical DRM in a sense.
I don't really want to work with AI, because it takes away the process I love, but in the end we're sort of forced to do so =\ It's like the Industria and digital revolution all over again. Some people (like me) will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
I think there will always be a market for real physical artists. Yeah you can boxed wine, but people pay to get the real artisinal stuff. Pretty sure real art will become a similarly highly sought after luxury product. If you really like the process and keep at it, you probably won't have that much competition, because there will be less and less people with that skillset. There's mass manufactured Ikea furniture, but people still buy handmade tables for ridiculous prices.
And who knows, maybe AI will grow on you too.
Or you'll be highly sought after once we finally inevitably ban AI lol.
So the future isn't all doom and gloom, if you ask me.