What's blowing my mind lately though is the people complaining about copyright today are some of the same people I saw 30 years ago screaming "Information wants to be free" and running around with the DeCSS code on their T-Shirts. But suddenly, now that they hate AI, copyright is important and the information should be locked away. I can't wait for this all to settle down.
For example, nobody cared about data centre water or electricity use when it was serving us up cat pictures. Collectively the past 20 years of doing that is still significantly more use than AI data centres so far. We suddenly care about it because its anti-AI ammunition, not because we care.
Things being done as part of a massive boom are usually harder to accommodate then things done as part of longer term growth and data centers are no exception.
I don't think I've ever seen people query with such fervour; the energy usage of our existing internet structure. or supply chains to provide us all with electronic devices, despite them being inherently problematic in similar ways.
I was in a British supermarket today and there were apples on the shelves that were transported there from New Zealand. Again, no protests. Do we really care about energy usage or do we simply find convenient ammunition to attack ideas that we are already apprehensive about? We live in a world that is overheating as a consequence of the energy bounty of fossil fuels and yet people are still driving cars, SUVs are more popular than ever. There is no global carbon tax in sight while every nation on the planet slinks from their responsibility for all the co2 in the atmosphere, blaming each other and charging towards our scientist's worst case outcomes. So who really cares about energy consumption on its own?
They validated the concept of copyright by employing it themselves to create the gpl, to make information free and arm it's ongoing freedom.
Define excessive. Who makes that determination and how?
Among other factors: time value of money and future-value discounting mean that economically ever-expanding copyright terms offer virtually no present-value benefit.
Most works see virtually all of their economic value in the first few years of publication. There are some (rare) long-tailed exceptions. The original US copyright term of 14 years, with extensions, actually fits the economics pretty well.
What extreme copyright duration does do is:
1. Create vast copyright-holding monopolies, often of works for which authors were poorly compensated if at all. (For the latter: academic publishing.)
2. Create a vast category of "orphan works" which aren't or cannot be published, in the latter case because rights simply cannot be clearly established, or competing claims (survivors, estates, publishers) exist.
"Seventeen Famous Economists Weigh In On Copyright : the Role of Theory , Empirics , and Network Effects" <https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v18/18HarvJLTech43...> (2005)
"The true impact of shorter and longer copyright durations: from authors’ earnings to cultural creativity and diversity" Jimmyn Parc & Patrick Messerlin (2020) <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10286632.2020.1...>
Orphan Works: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work>