Today is World Book and Copyright Day according to UNESCO.

I have mixed feelings about copyright. (Books are alright.)

The way I see it, copyright is simply the commodification of reason for the benefit of individuals over the common good.

Personally, I’m hopeful that LLMs (and a new world hegemony after the US that gets to reshape the capitalist system however it sees fit) completely destroy trademark and copyright law as they exist today. But I realize I’m in the minority there.

I have been amused by all of my friends and colleagues, mostly academics and artists, that have suddenly (and staunchly) started barking about how LLMs don’t respect copyright laws and therefore are a conspiracy of some sort. These conversations are mostly found in left-leaning social media echo chambers and on LinkedIn. “LLMs are built on stolen copyrighted material,” I keep hearing.

My question: what isn’t? Seriously, what story, song, research, idea… what isn’t built on others’ ideas? And why are so many of my open-source coding and artist friends, all of whom were borderline socialist if not anarchist until recently, suddenly harking on about copyright laws they once wantonly boasted about ignoring and stealing from for years. (Hell, trading  pirated ebooks among grad students at UW-Madison was a right of passage, as I recall observing, and let’s be honest, pirating movies and music is even more prevalent.)

But the absurdity of any semi-leftist academic or artist saying LLMs are bad because of they use stolen copyrighted goods are insane to me for two less anecdotal reasons. First, academics and artists, with few exceptions, are the very ones who have historically been absolutely screwed by copyright law. Academics don’t get paid for their writing directly. Then, they submit and have their articles reviewed by other unpaid reviewers. Then a commercial publisher (almost always) publishes your article and secures copyright and puts your work behind a copyrighted paywall with outrageous access fees. As a courtesy, and using the time-tested technique of guilt, they even get academics to pay thousands of euros and dollars to the publisher to allow people to access their unpaid written work for free. That’s what copyright gets you. It sucks. It’s horrible for sharing information and knowledge. And it rarely benefits the actual creators of content. This is even more the case for academics and frequently the case for artists – just ask Prince. (Oh wait, you can’t, because he’s both reclusive and very much dead. But you can read about it here.)

Second, I still haven’t had anyone explain to me how feeding books to an LLM agent so you and others can ask questions about what it has consumed later is different than taking notes from a book and storing them for personal recall later. Or reading a book and not remembering where you learned something when you recall a fact later and parrot it off as your own. Yes, machines are now far superior at information recall and parroting, but it’s not really different from you reading a book (pirated or not). Every book you check out and read from the library results in stolen copyright assuming you aren’t citing every sentence you utter. Just saying… your entire life is based off of consuming copyrighted materials, embedding them in your brain, and regurgitating the content as new information. Until someone can actually prove otherwise, I side with the argument that humans are stochastic parrots just like the machines we have created.

So before blindly joining (or liking) the chorus against LLMs based on stolen copyright – and there are plenty of other real reasons to be concerned about LLMs, e.g., the environmental impact and the fact that it’s going to replace a lot of us in the labour force – please do take a moment to reflect on the fact that copyright and trademark laws are not a logical reason for people. It’s well argued that intellectual property laws actually hamper the spread of useful human information, knowledge production, and are a blight on the already disenfranchised of the world. And I would argue true scientists want to spread knowledge and useful information to the masses, not lock it in ivory towers. (I highly recommend the book “The Crime of Reason” to see a wicked takedown of intellectual property laws.)

Alas, these are just my rambling thoughts. I’m but an aging dinosaur sitting in a freezing Minnesota garage with a map due tomorrow. So while I wait the four minutes for my ChatGPT agent to pump a map out, I thought I figured I would riff against copyright law in this blog before posting the result.

Alas, it’s been 10 minutes and it’s done. I just opened it for the first time and, darn, if this isn’t an epic complement to my rant. 🙂

Enjoy todays’ map celebrating World Book and Copyright Day!

View the map here

Prompt Used (WebMapGPT ~6 minutes)

# Intention
I would like to make a map for international copyright day. In order to do so, I will need you to find data for me. The goal is to show a qualitative and categorical map about the stringency of copyright laws country-by-country.