I hear this argument with some regularity and i don't think it would work the way you expect. Have you gamed it out in your head?
1) A lot of people would immediately stop contributing to open source. In fact i ahead have because ML is being used to launder my work to use it without resourcing my licenses. Same with any other area where people share their work for free. It would all be monetized by those with access to better advertising.
2) Anything published would be immediately scooped up by the big players. How would a small competitor like Nebula compete with YouTube if YouTube took all its content and offered it for free with ads?
3) How would you even know who the original creator was if those stealing the work stripped away attribution? They already do but at least you have some limited ways to fight them.
1) I contribute to open source because I want the thing to exist. I use open licenses because I don't want anybody to use the law to deny anybody else access to it. If we gut the parts of the law by which others would deny access, I no longer have to worry about licensing, but my original motivated is untouched.
2) what do you mean "scooped up"? What's to stop a small platform from providing the same content that a large platform does, if we've done away with intellectual property?
3) I'm confused. If you're paying somebody to create a proposed work, and then they create it and get paid for doing so, and then nobody is allowed to restrict access to it, where does the theft come in?
1) So you are perfectly happy with somebody else taking over, taking your code, giving it a different name, or not even that, spending a bit of money on advertisement to get more users than you, adding features to drag over your users, then taking development private and enshittifying it? EEE?
You have to understand in this world, advertising and network effects are much stronger than building a good product.
2) Again, advertising, cost of storage, having a better (meaning more addiction inducing) algorithm, etc.
3) You said it yourself, people have to create something first (which will be stolen or as you phrase it, unrestricted) so they can prove themselves so that anybody pays them to produce the next thing. Or would you pay a random guy with no credentials and no portfolio claiming he can create what you want?
Or what if somebody creates something really good but it's a one off. He changes hobbies, has children, has to care for an elderly parent, ... and doesn't have time to create more. Should he not get paid for the value of his existing work?
Your take basically means people will only get paid as long as more value can be extracted from them and then they're no longer economically viable so screw them.
1&2) its not my code, its just code that I wrote. The enshittification problem goes away if anybody can fork it and make a less enshittified version. We could have--brace yourself for this radical concept--competition over who could make a better thing. All the bad things you're saying will happen if we don't assert ownership over data are in fact only happening because we assert ownership over data.
Somebody else owning the solution to our problems is why we tolerate such abuse. Otherwise we could cut out the abuse parts and solve the problem directly.
3) I was unspecific about how much money they'd get ahead of time versus upon completion because I figure that ought to be a case-by-case thing.
The idea that people should be able to live well based on having done good work in the past is a good one. Let's make that happen, but why should it have anything to do with property? If I build a particularly strong bridge which surpasses expectations re: longevity shouldn't I get the same retroactive compensation as somebody who wrote a particularly good book? If I publish freely the cure for a disease, should society not reward me to a greater extent than if I sold the patent to a company that will decline to act on the discovery because it's more profitable to treat that disease than to cure it?
The things you seem to want from intellectual property are important, but pushing the concept of property beyond what is natural for it is a harmful way to achieve them.
A) its not working particularly well for the artists
B) its not working at all for workers outside that domain
C) it has all kinds of really awful side effects which are far more harmful than whatever good we can reasonably expect it (property) to do.
When IP was invented to justify the church's right to prevent the wrong kind of bible from being printed we didn't have the ability to implement the alternatives that are available to us today. The best we could do is play-by-the-rules-or-we'll-take-your-printer. We have new capabilities now, let's solve these problems head on instead of leaning on ideas from the 1600's to do so.
Better product does not matter, advertising and network effects do.
Think about this: with IP you have strictly more options than without. You can literally release under public domain if you want to. People generally don't.
Having strictly more options is always better _by definition_. You're literally saying people will be better off if you take away their choice. Stop and think, man.
2) Don't ignore a point you don't like. Tell me how a small creator can compete with a big corporation. Take into account marketshare and network effects.
3) You were unspecific because you can't control it and you know it. With IP the artist can decide if the money offered is good enough for permission to use his work. Without IP you shift the decision how much to pay entirely to the people with money, artists have 0 say. They can only say "please" and "thank you".
A) How now? I don't see creators giving away their work for free under public domain, citing it's better for them.
B) Ok, let's come up with a system which rewards creators, builders, workers in other professions.
C) Like what?
So what are those alternatives except "give away your work for free and hope to get paid next time"? Because this one is already possible today and creators don't use it because it would suck for them.
1) It can't have closed source extensions if there's no longer any such thing as closed source. I'm not proposing that artists shouldn't bother with IP, I'm proposing that we build something new and once we have it working we abolish IP.
If it seems like I've beee avoiding 2, it's because the point I'm trying to make is
> IP isn't doing the job we want it to, we can do better.
3) No, I was unspecific because the ideal payment depends on a variety of factors like whether their content bothered to share attribution with its source, whether it was supported or contradicted by more trustworthy evidence, whether it harmed or hurt the people who relied on it... things that you can't prescribe up front.
> artists have 0 say. They can only say "please" and "thank you".
That's been the case for every kind of artist ever since there was technology that could copy their work. The best we can do is find ways to ensure that it's more "thank you" than "please".
A) Do you know any artists who are making a living based on their art? (I don't). Do you know any who have tried and failed because it either wasn't enough money, or because they were too afraid that fluid definitions of "derivative work" might upend their business model? (I know several). The existing system is working only for incumbents.
B) Yeah, working on that
C) Like people going hungry because John Deere remote-killed a bunch of tractors on the basis of their copyrighted firmware having been tampered with. Like having billionaires instead of the masses in control of our elections because all information reaches the people through advertiser-controlled chokepoints. Like being spied on or sabotaged via back doors in our tech which were added to accept remote firmware updates related to content protection but are now being uses for other more nefarious things. Or having blind people be unable to navigate the internet because their screen reader software isn't compatible with the copy protection in place. Like having cures for diseases go unused because the patent on the treatment can still be squeezed for profit. Like having a brittle internet that is broken all the time because the rights holders needed single points of control, and now we have single points of failure. The list harms of the Advertising-IP partnership goes on and on and on. Cory Doctorow makes this point well in his (2011) talk: The Coming War on General Computation: https://media.ccc.de/v/28c3-4848-en-the_coming_war_on_genera...
