Force and control aren’t useful tools toward making things Open (knowledge, source, government, access, etc)
A metaviews article discussing copyright in the context of so-called “artificial intelligence” caught my eye.
This made me think more about the GitHub Copilot case, which has bothered me, and has left me with many open questions.
I believe the longer-term goals of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement should be to try to oppose the enclosure movement, not try to exert its own control. In this I agree with the take of this article, that these cases involving “artificial intelligence” can challenge “artificial scarcity”.
I think most people have been slow in recognizing some of the many obvious flaws in the logic of how recent centuries of Western governments have treated copyright, patents, and other government granted monopolies. This is exclusivity for what is often called “works of the mind”, and should always have been very narrowly restricted to HUMAN creativity for a very specific public interest reason. Corporations should never have been able to hold these exclusive rights (only license from humans), and this exclusivity should never apply to anything automated or mechanical.
Once we allow CCTV footage to have copyright’s exclusivity based on the theories that photographers or “makers of sound recordings” should have copyright, then we set up a regime where there is ownership based only on leveraging existing ownership (of technology), and nothing relating to “works of the mind” or human creativity of any kind.
The outputs of AI should never have been offered any exclusivity. As well as solving many other issues, this would drastically reduce the flawed incentives of capital to try to replace humans with machines, as the anti-competative exclusivity they desire would not be possible through mere ownership of technology.
I have also made this argument in the case of Educational Institutions where exceptions to copyright on the inputs to education should only apply to situations where there are exceptions to copyright’s exclusivity on the outputs (IE: all outputs of publicly funded educational institutions should be publicly licensed).
Unfortunately, there are branches of the FLOSS community that want their own control rather than reducing control. I wrote about this conflict in the context of the Affero General Public License back in 2008.
Where will lawsuits around AI bring us? I wish the outcomes would be logical and predictable, but that hasn’t generally been my observations with laws around technology. Flawed short-term thinking, often from people who should be thinking about a larger picture and longer term goals, have helped induce policy changes that conflict with their own interests.