Copyright Was Never Your Friend

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There’s this weird new consensus forming on the left (or so it would seem): AI is coming for the artists, the creators, the makers, therefore copyright must be defended at all costs. The same people who spent years dunking on Disney for locking up the public domain are now acting like the DMCA is a progressive institution. It’s embarrassing.

Copyright does not protect regular people. It never has.

It is the reason you can’t stream on Twitch with music playing in the background without risking a ban. It is the reason YouTube will mute or demonetize a video the second a three-second sample of a song shows up, even if the song is decades old and the label hasn’t given a shit about it in twenty years. It is the reason Spotify exists in the first place. Record labels and publishers used copyright as a bludgeon against Napster and every other file-sharing service, then handed the entire distribution system to a handful of platforms that pay artists fractions of a cent while making sure you no longer own a single song you listen to. Physical media is dying not because people stopped caring about music, but because the legal regime made ownership inconvenient and expensive. Now we rent culture instead.

And when someone actually steals your work? Good luck.

You make something. Someone else claims it. The official process is a takedown notice. A lot of platforms ignore those, or process them so slowly that the damage is already done. If you want to escalate past that, you need lawyers. You need money. You need time. People who are paying $400 every two weeks for groceries do not have those things. Corporations do. That is the entire enforcement model. Copyright is a weapon that only works in one direction.

The people currently screaming about AI “stealing” art are the same ones who will never be able to enforce their own copyrights against anyone with an actual legal budget. They’re LARPing as guardians of culture while defending the exact machine that turned culture into a gated product owned by a handful of rights-holders.

If you actually care about people who make things, clinging to copyright is the wrong move. It’s why so many of us grew up feeling like culture was something that happened to us instead of something we were allowed to touch.

Copyright is a sham that mostly protects the already powerful. Pretending it’s suddenly sacred because a chatbot that trained on the open internet makes you feel icky isn’t solidarity. It’s just ownership cosplay with better branding.

On a final note: actually investigate AI. Learn how it works and what it does instead of repeating the same three-year-old line about “typing a sentence doesn’t make you an artist.” That talking point is also embarrassing at this point. Watch the timelines long enough and you’ll notice the same people insist AI is both an unstoppable force about to replace everyone’s job and a piece of garbage that doesn’t do anything well, or correctly. Both things can’t be true at once, and the fact that the rhetoric keeps holding both without blinking should tell you something.