The push to expand repressive copyright laws because machines can learn from human produced text, code and art is going to hurt us all in the long run.
People usually say contemporary media sucks because of commercial pressures, but those commercial pressures and conditions wouldn't exist without the expansion of copyright.
Yes, giant studios are struggling to introduce new ideas like 1993's Jurassic Park. But that doesn't mean Shane Carruth (of Primer fame) can't. And he could have if Jurassic Park had been released any time between 1790 and 1900.
Our stilted media landscape is directly downstream of prior legislation expanding copyright.
Expanding copyright even more so that text / art that looks stylistically similar to another work is counted as infringing will, in the long run, give Disney's lawyers the power to punish folks for making content that even looks anything like Disney's many, many, many IP assets.
The "infringement" in this case was a diamond encrusted Steamboat Willie style Mickey pendant.
Questionable taste aside, I think it's good for society if people are able to make diamond encrusted miniature sculptures of characters from a 1928 movie in 2025. But Disney clearly disagrees.
Disney (and other giant corps) will use every tool in their belt to go after anyone who comes close to their money makers. There has been a long history of tension between artists and media corps. But that's water under the bridge now. AI art is apparently so bad that artists are willing to hand them the keys to their castle.
> Expanding copyright even more so that text / art that looks stylistically similar to another work is counted as infringing will, in the long run, give Disney's lawyers the power to punish folks for making content that even looks anything like Disney's many, many, many IP assets.
Legal doctrines like the "Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test", "total concept and feel," "comprehensive non-literal similarity," and "sequence, structure and organization" have systematically ascended the abstraction ladder. Copyright no longer protects expression but abstractions and styles.
The ugly part is the asymmetry at play - a copyright holder can pick and choose the level of abstraction on which to claim infringement, while a new author cannot possibly avoid all similarities on all levels of abstraction for all past works. The accuser can pick and choose how to frame infringement, the accused has to defend from all possible directions.
The idea that copyright holders are at the better end of a legal asymmetry here is kind of a baffling one.
I guess if the copyright holder's name is Disney that might be true. But the vast, vast majority of the time it is way too expensive to enforce any kind of copyright claim to be worth even bothering.
> Expanding copyright even more so that text / art that looks stylistically similar to another work is counted as infringing will, in the long run, give Disney's lawyers the power to punish folks for making content that even looks anything like Disney's many, many, many IP assets.
This made me wonder about an alternate future timeline where IP law is eventually so broad and media megacorporations are so large that almost any permutation of ideas, concepts or characters could be claimed by one of these companies as theirs, based on some combination of stylistic similarities and using a concept similar to what they have in their endless stash of IP. I wonder what a world like that would look like. Would all expression be suppressed and reduced to the non-law-abiding fringes and the few remaining exceptions? Would the media companies mercifully carve out a thin slice of non-offensive, corporate-friendly, narrow ideas that could be used by anyone, putting them in control of how we express ourselves? Or would IP violation become so common that paying an "IP tax" be completely streamlined and normalized?
The worst thing is that none of this seems like the insane ramblings that it would've probably been several decades ago. Considering the incentives of companies like Disney, IP lawyers and pro-copyright lawmakers, this could be a future we get to after a long while.
The scenario you've described is essentially neo feudalism. A small group who own everything and control all power and wealth and everyone else who struggles to survive on whatever the owners deem sufficient.
Some iteration of that (albeit, probably a lot more mundane and boring than what I described just above) sounds like what we're inevitably going to be living through.
There is a weird interaction here and I am not a ip lawyer and do not know how to resolve it But I will try to explain.
There is steamboat willie(the work) it is in public domain and you are able to distribute it and modified copied of it freely, the weird interaction is where and how it conflicts with mickey mouse which is still a registered trademark of disney. And items bearing that mark are protected as such.
So I think legally to distribute a variant of steamboat willie you would also have to prove how your use of mickey mouse does not infringe on disney's trademark. You have to show how your product can not be confused with a disney product. Put a big "Not a disney product" on the back?
While Chinese models train on all Western cultural output, our own models are restricted. And in the corporate world the models of choice for finetuning are DeepSeek and Qwen, wonder why.
> AI art is apparently so bad that artists are willing to hand them the keys to their castle.
Because - believe or not - a lot of artists benefit from Disney and other giants. By directly getting hired by them, building social media followers with fanart of their IP, taking questionable commissions of their characters, etc.
Is this a fair and healthy relationship? Perhaps not. But it's indefinitely better than what "AI artists" brought to human artists.
Of course Disney is not artists' friend and we all know what will happen: artists will end up being squeezed from the both sides, AI and big IP holders (who deploy their own AIs while suing open weights) anyway.
Corporates can't have it both ways - the Hollywood corporates lobbied intensively to extend copyright for as long as 75+ years (if I recall right) because that's what would benefit them. Many have protested about this. Some tech corporates (namely search and AI companies) now feel encumbered by this, and even indulge in piracy to circumvent copyright (without any meaningful consequences), and we are now supposed to feel sorry for them? Are any of these Tech corporates also lobbying for changes to copyright laws? (I don't believe so, as many of them are now also trying to become media moghuls themselves!)
> The push to expand repressive copyright laws because machines can learn from human produced text, code and art is going to hurt us all in the long run.
Exactly. I always thought it was hilarious that, ever since LLMs and image generators like Stable Diffusion came online a few years ago, HN suddenly seemed to shift from the hacker ethos, of moving fast and breaking things, and using whatever you could for your goals, to one of being an intense copyright hawk, all because computers could now "learn."
> People usually say contemporary media sucks because of commercial pressures, but those commercial pressures and conditions wouldn't exist without the expansion of copyright.
I think this is a pretty bold assertion. Copyright protection exists because of what you call "commercial pressures", and what I would call "the desire of content producers to pay their bills". Sure, it leads to self-reinforcing pathologies that seek to expand the scope of the protections, but for every Disney, there are millions of small-scale creators who get to make a living because there are at some legal hinderances to third parties selling copies of their music, books, and so forth.
I don't think we can assume that if copyright did not exist, we'd live in an utopia where all the same content is still available and we get some additional liberties to write Mickey Mouse erotica. More likely, we'd see a significant drop in certain types of creative activity, because in the absence of royalties, you need a wealthy patron to pay your bills, and wealthy patrons are in short supply. I'd also wager that media empires would still be built, just structured around barriers less pleasant than copyright. A Disney-operated cinema with metal detectors and patdowns for all guests. Maybe a contract you need to sign to enter, too.
> there are millions of small-scale creators who get to make a living because there are at some legal hinderances to third parties selling copies of their music, books, and so forth.
They may be benefiting from copyright’s existence, but with rare exceptions they are not benefiting from its expansion, which is the topic in what you were responding to. And its expansion probably harms them.
Abolishing copyright altogether is almost never what is being proposed, though some will suggest tearing it all down to replace it with something much more restricted, often more like the Statute of Anne.
People usually say contemporary media sucks because of commercial pressures, but those commercial pressures and conditions wouldn't exist without the expansion of copyright.
Yes, giant studios are struggling to introduce new ideas like 1993's Jurassic Park. But that doesn't mean Shane Carruth (of Primer fame) can't. And he could have if Jurassic Park had been released any time between 1790 and 1900.
Our stilted media landscape is directly downstream of prior legislation expanding copyright.
Expanding copyright even more so that text / art that looks stylistically similar to another work is counted as infringing will, in the long run, give Disney's lawyers the power to punish folks for making content that even looks anything like Disney's many, many, many IP assets.
Even though Steamboat Willie has entered the public domain, Disney has been going after folks using the IP, https://mickeyblog.com/2025/07/17/disney-is-suing-a-hong-kon... / https://mickeyblog.com/2025/07/17/disney-is-suing-a-hong-kon...
The "infringement" in this case was a diamond encrusted Steamboat Willie style Mickey pendant.
Questionable taste aside, I think it's good for society if people are able to make diamond encrusted miniature sculptures of characters from a 1928 movie in 2025. But Disney clearly disagrees.
Disney (and other giant corps) will use every tool in their belt to go after anyone who comes close to their money makers. There has been a long history of tension between artists and media corps. But that's water under the bridge now. AI art is apparently so bad that artists are willing to hand them the keys to their castle.