While I agree that this is true currently, I do not believe that it necessarily must be. Life plus 70 years is some top-tier bullshit, and no one who isn’t a corporate bigwig will fight you on that. But 20 years from release date is not, especially if enforced equally on all creative works instead of just the ones made by artists who can afford corporate lawyers. Imagine if we had some way to protect against art theft or freebooting besides the honor system. Imagine if OpenAI actually had to pay artists to use their works to train Midjourney instead of just saying “it would be impossible to do this without massive amounts of copyright infringement, therefore you should just let us.”
While I agree that this is true currently, I do not believe that it necessarily must be. Life plus 70 years is some top-tier bullshit, and no one who isn’t a corporate bigwig will fight you on that. But 20 years from release date is not, especially if enforced equally on all creative works instead of just the ones made by artists who can afford corporate lawyers. Imagine if we had some way to protect against art theft or freebooting besides the honor system. Imagine if OpenAI actually had to pay artists to use their works to train Midjourney instead of just saying “it would be impossible to do this without massive amounts of copyright infringement, therefore you should just let us.”