It's true, before copyright existed, no one made any art at all, and they certainly weren't paid for it. Thanks to copyright, the large majority of artists have been well and fairly compensated for their work.
Okay, you're right. I mean, there was patronage for a long time, and then a good era of proper copyright protections. The modern system really does need a reform, I agree. But I don't think we should wholesale put everything in the public domain. I mean, AI scrapers already think that's the case, but…
It's not just AI scrapers, it's the entire concept of the internet.
The internet _wants_ to copy bytes. That's what it does. Right now you're reading this because bytes were copied from my local machine to the HN server, and then to a cache, and then to your machine.
Copying bytes is, in some low-level sense, the entire function of interconnection in the human species.
The idea of trying to bolt-on little machines to restrict the flow of bytes at every vector of network connectivity, just to satisfy some abstract claim of "property" - it's completely nuts. It's never going to work. Tomorrow it will work worse than it does today, and every day going forward until states realize that the laws they want to enforce around this concept are simply not possible on the internet.
And you know who will celebrate that? Musicians like me. Nobody will be happier to see a lubricated copying machine become the human identity more than people who are trying to get their music out there, and trying to be inspired by the music of others.
