memes, copyright, intellectual property, ai, the internet: what do we do now?

[wraith]

something that's been on my mind is the idea of intellectual property, that is as artists or posters of things online. we live in a weird time where intellectual property is sort of futile? we can watermark stuff or add metadata but if someone wants to erase it, they will.  i'm thinking specifically about art/aesthetic photography and memes. both things get posted to hell and back online (pinterest and tumblr are known for this) and then you find the person that made it and they have a couple thousand followers compared to the millions of people who have seen their meme/art. ive noticed with a lot of web revival sites, i see people use various graphics from old sites that dont exist anymore or edits of stuff that other people made awhile ago that they may never see, completely removed from their original context. melonland forums itself has a ms paint drawing of ariel from the little mermaid as the "profile" icon right above this post 

on some level, it's cool that the idea of intellectual property is going away because copyright is a way for companies to oppress small artists and people ie anne rice notoriously hating fanfic of interview with the vampire, or disney suing that family that wanted to put spiderman on their son's coffin. small artists have copyright law on their side but if companies just find ways to get around that with ai or by suing artists into oblivion about their own work, what's the point of respecting those rules anymore? obviously, respect eachother, credit eachother, but it feels almost inevitable that eventually you get removed from your work. it's death of the author online in the most literal way.

counterculture art movements where artists infringe on big copyrights on purpose have been a thing for awhile but i dont have a lot of articulated thoughts on what shapes that would take for our current age. recontextualizing stuff? collaging? it would definitely be a response to ai and "slop" aesthetics, like the live action disney remakes and enshittification. i saw this thing on declarations for a tool where someone could "scrapbook" pieces of css from the internet that made me think of some of these ideas, also net art just in general?

other ideas that are related but i cant articulate how/why: bootlegging, punk/diy, this declarations tool about scrapbooking css from the internet, net art in general, the idea of "appropriation" in an artistic or cultural context

this is kind of a broad topic and i've thought about it so much that i don't know where to start when talking about it so this post might not make sense. if anyone has any tangentially related thoughts it could be cool to discuss anyway.   

[Janky]

Oh my goodness, you have no idea how relieving it is to find someone asking the same questions I've asked before!

So, context, I'm majoring in economics in college, and I've already taken intro to micro and macro, so I have a bit of knowledge. One big thing is that in a free market society, there is no intellectual property. Because information isn't a scarce good, as in it can be copied endlessly without physically stealing it, it cannot be owned. It can be created, destroyed, and be made artificially scarce by people (like secrets being made scarce by people not talking about them) but it can never be OWNED. It's a key principle of economic theory, and it's not just recently that intellectual property has harmed people, it has ALWAYS been the case that it has discouraged innovation and monopolized information.

In fact, and I discussed this in another post of mine, the destruction of intellectual property would lead to a decentralized and more prosperous internet, one where AI is not as big of a threat, and where spaces are more curated and human oriented rather than being led by algorithms and bots.

Everything at the end of the day comes down to economic incentive, and if we take away the economic incentive of creating huge algorithms and legions of bots it will make the internet a better place.

I've never been more excited to create something knowing that it's all in vein, take a page out of King Sisyphus' book and find glory in the struggle, find beauty in impermanence. Fight and boycott those who plagiarize, and make art for passion, not profit!

[Blue]

I think the issue with copyright right now is that not having it will actually harm smaller artists or independent ones (basically, anyone who isn't a large company). As of now, in the society we live in, if someone wants to be an artist in any way, they still need to make a profit off of their work in some way to make a living for themselves. If they have a day job, great for them, there are many people who do that, but if someone is able to make a living of something they love in its purest way (making exactly what they want with their own want in mind and not focusing on 'how can I make a large number of people like/buy this) it's kinda hard if you're on your own. If someone can just take something you create and twist it in any way, and that draws more attention than your original work, it becomes a huge problem, as it endangers you on an existential level.

That being said, I do think that there should be a change on how copyright is handled with big corporations/very rich people (something like, once your company/you have an earning of x per year, you can sustain yourself without a problem and copyright does not apply to you the same way it does to other creators). There is a huge difference between a local artist/writer who probably sells within their little circle in their city/country and a corporation that earns millions of dollars every year, and I think that should be taken into account.

[Janky]

Still, even without copyright, there are a number of ways artists can protect their works and still make money without intellectual property. Artists could form unions to boycott those who plagiarize artwork, use tools like Nightshade to poison AI's that train on the art, and use watermarks to prevent the theft of artwork. Plus, there is commission work, where art must be paid for at the time of creation instead of after the fact. This prevents theft of the work since it has already been paid for.

And there are further solutions beyond just individual artists! Platforms can host art and enforce an anti-plagiarism policy on its users, and databases can be set up to work like enormous historical records to document who invented what and when, like patents without the enforcement side.

Finding solutions to these problems takes a lot of thinking outside the box and using previously unconventional solutions to replace a broken system.