The production of knowledge needs to be funded as it isn’t “free”. Copyright and licensing is one model that has worked for a long time. It has flaws, but it has produced good things.
At this point with the quality of current web content and the collapse of journalism as an industry I think we can say online ads have utterly failed as a replacement income stream.
Unless you want all LLM to say “I’m sorry the data I was trained on ends in 2023” you still need a content funding model. Maybe not copyright, but sure as hell not ads either.
"Copyright and licensing is one model that has worked for a long time. It has flaws, but it has produced good things."
By some definition of "worked". If we define "worked" as "made money for", who it worked mostly for are the middlemen and a minority of writers... a minority that with the advent of LLMs is likely to shrink even further.
You state this as a fact, but it's actually much less certain wherever it's ever been net-positive.
It was probably intended that way, but the reality is that the power has been with the publisher since the beginning, and they've absolutly been screwing over the author's as well. Only the most successful author's have gotten decent deals.
I don't have an answer to this either though, i just wanted to point out that copyright has arguably never been successful at getting money to the content creators proportional to the value the Publisher extracted from the work either.
The only way you’d know is to A/B test with a country with no copyright, and see how their authors get by.
My guess is extremely poorly. Again, the biggest might be fine. Instead of publishers paying fairly little to authors they could just literally take the best books and print them, taking all of the profits…not to mention ebooks.
I’m not an author so I can’t speak to how much publishers make, but I’d assume that if one was way better than the others in how much they’re distribute to authors all of the best authors would jump ship. Markets have a way of working things out.
A lot of people want to be authors, and any time that happens - game dev, teachers, musicians, etc. - you’re going to take on a bit of extra hardship compared to other jobs.
I'm not saying that it would be better for authors without copyright. That would indeed be hard to ascertain without a/b testing.
My point was that it doesn't improve their lives, and that's much easier to check in isolation just by reading the news about the current writers strike and how the industry just ignores it until fall, expecting their savings to run out.
Really, copyright just doesn't give the content creators any meaningful power as this right is generally owned by the industry/publisher, not the authors.
The production of knowledge (I assume you're mainly talking about scientific research here) is absolutely not funded by copyright royalties or anything like that.
Journals get their content for free. Actually often they charge the authors for it.
Research is mainly funded by governments and taxes.
But again, "funding" is merely common and/or one step in the process. It's not always necessary and is definitely never sufficient, and I think when you bring it up, the mental model that people have is of the incorrect scale?
Put differently, we consider -- but don't think a whole lot about -- about Wikipedia's "funding," because that's NOT the most important part/innovation of that model.
>The production of knowledge needs to be funded as it isn’t “free”. Copyright and licensing is one model that has worked for a long time.
Can you give some examples of new knowledge that was copyrighted? Generally copyright is used to protect art, software and textbooks. People who produce new knowledge generally are not paid by copyright. The knowledge is either kept secret or published in a journal from which the author recieves no compensation.
At this point with the quality of current web content and the collapse of journalism as an industry I think we can say online ads have utterly failed as a replacement income stream.
Unless you want all LLM to say “I’m sorry the data I was trained on ends in 2023” you still need a content funding model. Maybe not copyright, but sure as hell not ads either.