[HN Gopher] No One Is in Charge at the US Copyright Office
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No One Is in Charge at the US Copyright Office
Author : rntn
Score : 109 points
Date : 2025-06-28 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| wfleming wrote:
| https://archive.ph/MF378
| mouse_ wrote:
| The purpose of copyright has evolved from protecting creators to
| mass oppression.
|
| AI is way better at mass oppression, however, and copyright is a
| threat to it, so it (copyright) will be dismantled.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Killing off copyrights, if it does, would be a big win for AI.
| chisleu wrote:
| Meh, AI doesn't have to kill copyrights. The two oppressive
| systems will find a way to unite into something worse than
| either of them alone.
| martin-t wrote:
| The idea of actual AI being used by governments (or just rich
| people) to spy on everyone, profile them, shape their ideas
| through targeted manipulation[0] and eliminate undesirable ones
| through social (destroying reputation), psychological (driving
| to suicide) or physical (killbots) means is way scarier than
| being turned into a paperclip.
|
| [0]: Not just or fake videos or comments. Do you have someone
| on the internet you consider a friend but have never met in
| person? In the future, rich people or governments will be able
| to plant ideas in people and influence their thinking by
| generating fake friends.
| mslansn wrote:
| Isn't this what this website has always wanted?
| chisleu wrote:
| Not this way
| latexr wrote:
| No? Copyright reform, sure, copyright abolished, maybe, but an
| uncertain future which may result in worse laws overall? Not
| really.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| Also consider that Thomas and Alito dissented in the
| Google/Oracle ruling, and wrote something inflammatory, to
| the effect of it being unreasonable that Google was being
| allowed to infringe upon Oracle's copyrighted code (by
| implementing a compatible API). And that was before the
| Supreme Court was stacked with more like-minded people.
|
| Not having sensible people steering copyright in a direction
| toward winding down its scope is being paired with a court
| that's likely to make it far more draconian, and create some
| massive problems that will be a problem for software
| development.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| There's a huge difference between "We don't want copyrights"
| and "We're just going to have no one enforcing laws for a
| random period of time and it's unknown if there will be
| historic enforcement activities if/when that changes"
| eikenberry wrote:
| Reform would be best, abolishment would be better and status
| quo would be worst. Of course there's always making things even
| worse... but we're talking about what people want, not what
| might happen.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Simplistically yes, because many see copyright as the thing
| that protects corporate interest from the social hacker.
|
| The reality of course is more complicated. Without copyright
| there's no GPL. Which I guess is fine if you're in the OSS camp
| more than the FSF camp. MIT and BSD licenses basically
| (functionally) give up copyright.
|
| Copyright is also what allows for hybrids like the BSL which
| protect "little guys" from large cloud providers like AWS etc.
|
| Copyright allows VC startups to at least start out life as Open
| Source (before pivoting later.)
|
| Of course thus is all in the context of software copyright.
| Other copyrights (music, books etc) are equally nuanced.
|
| And there are other forms of IP protections as well (patents,
| trademarks) which are distinct from the copyright concept.
|
| So no, I don't think most people here are against copyright
| (patents are a different story.)
| ronsor wrote:
| 1. I'm OK with no GPL if there's no copyright, because then
| proprietary programs can be copied and reverse engineered
| without restrictions from law or EULAs.
|
| 2. I generally don't like the BSL.
|
| 3. No comment. I think OSS projects that exist incidentally
| versus being the company's main product have always been more
| reliable (and less susceptible to the company pivoting to
| closed-only offerings).
|
| 4. Copyright has perhaps been the most evil in the music
| industry; books, less so. I'd rather not even talk about
| movies or TV right now. Nonetheless, I'd tolerate an
| extremely limited duration copyright, if no copyright at all
| isn't an option.
|
| 5. Trademarks are mostly fine, because they're primarily
| supposed to serve customers, not the companies. I'd like to
| get rid of patents now, however.
| tokai wrote:
| GPL was always about fighting the system with its own tools.
| The end goal is not good licenses but free software as a
| baseline.
| kelnos wrote:
| How else would you enforce Free Software, though? Without
| copyright, I cannot release the source to my software and
| require _anything_ of any recipient.
|
| It would be nice of FOSS was the baseline, but I don't see
| that ever happening, especially in a world without an
| enforcement mechanism.
| Karliss wrote:
| That's the thing you don't need to enforce anything if
| there is no law which forbids you from doing things. It's
| the copyright law which restricts you from doing most of
| the things that GPL license gives you permission. GPL
| gives you back the rights to copy, modify, create
| derivative works and redistribute any GPL licensed
| software you receive. Without copyright law you could
| copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute
| any software you receive.
|
| Sure having source code would be nice, but then again
| half the software nowadays is using electron and written
| in javascript anyway. Also plenty of examples of hardware
| manufacturers using software/firmware copyright as excuse
| and making legal threats to people who have made their
| own software to control hardware they bought even though
| they didn't have access to original source code.
|
| There are probably more examples of people reverse
| engineering an reimplementing or decompiling large
| nontrivial software than there examples of companies
| making their whole software open source due to using a
| GPL licensed library (as opposed to avoiding the GPL
| licensed code or violating the GPL by not releasing the
| source code).
| martin-t wrote:
| > companies making their whole software open source due
| to using a GPL licensed library
|
| Does not mean that GPL is ineffective. IT forces them to
| reimplement the functionality, thus giving copyleft more
| time to compete with them. Imagine if they were to free
| to take all public code and just use it. They would
| always be ahead and open source products wouldn't stand a
| chance competing.
|
| Not to mention I feel like GPL being so strong is why big
| companies pretend to love open source but permissive
| licenses so much - to drown out the GPL competition they
| hate so much and to attract more developers to permissive
| rather than copyleft open source projects.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you don 't need to enforce anything if there is no law
| which forbids you from doing things_
|
| This is extend-and-extinguish on rails. Raise capital,
| hire a team to fork a public project, develop is closed
| and only release inscrutable blobs. Add a marketing
| budget and you get to piggyback on the open-source
| project while keeping the monetisation.
| chgs wrote:
| You release that blob what stops others just copying it?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _You release that blob what stops others just copying
| it?_
|
| Obfuscation techniques. Compatibility updates. Hell,
| hardware-enforced DRM.
| qingcharles wrote:
| "This website" is a sweeping statement for a group of people
| who have a wide range of views on this.
|
| If I was to guess, I would imagine most on here believe in
| _some_ copyright, and not total anarchy.
| standardUser wrote:
| Reform comes through legislation, not through executive
| incompetence and malfeasance.
| kelnos wrote:
| "This website" is a diverse bunch of people with diverse goals
| and policy positions. Please don't make generalizations.
|
| Copyright in its current form is ridiculous, but I support some
| (much-pared-back) version of copyright that limits rights
| further, expands fair use, repeals the DMCA, and reduces the
| copyright term to something on the order of 15-20 years
| (perhaps with a renewal option as with patents).
|
| I've released a lot of software under the GPL, and the GPL in
| its current form couldn't exist without copyright.
| __loam wrote:
| The top comment in this thread is about deprecating copyright
| izacus wrote:
| And the dumb strawman the post is answering to isnt.
| martin-t wrote:
| Current copyright is too strong in terms of length but too
| weak in terms of derived work. Well, pending some lawsuits,
| perhaps.
|
| What copyright should do is protect individual creators, not
| corporations. And it should protect them even if their work
| is mixed through complex statistical algorithms such as LLMs.
|
| LLMs wouldn't be possible without _trillions_ of hours of
| work by people writing books, code, music, etc. they are
| trained on. The _millions_ of hours of work spent on the
| training algorithm itself, the chat interface, the scraping
| scripts, etc. is barely a drop in the bucket.
|
| There is 0 reason the people who spent mere millions of hours
| of work should get all the reward without giving anything to
| the rest of the world who put in trillions of hours.
| monetus wrote:
| Indefinite royalties on Spotify are one thing, but how are
| they supposed to work in neural nets? Dividing equal share
| based on inputs would require the company to potentially
| expose proprietary information. Basing it on outputs could
| make sense as well I suppose, but would take some slightly
| ridiculous work for an arguable result.
|
| Your point remains, but the problem of the division of
| responsibility and financial credit doesn't go away with
| that alone. Do you know if the openAI lawsuits have laid
| this out?
| martin-t wrote:
| I admit, rewarding work fairly is very difficult with
| perfect information, much more with proprietary models
| and training data.
|
| With code, some licenses are compatible, for example you
| could take a model trained on GPL and MIT code, and use
| it to produce GPL code. (The resulting model would _of
| course_ also be a derivative work licensed under the
| GPL.) That satisfies the biggest elephant in the room -
| giving users their rights to inspect and modify the code.
| Giving credit to individual authors is more difficult
| though.
|
| I haven't been following the lawsuits much, I am
| powerless to influence them and having written my fair
| share of GPL and AGPL code, this whole LLM thing feels
| like being spat in the face.
| logicchains wrote:
| Your approach will be completely untenable in future when
| we'll have embodied LLMs capable of dynamically learning
| (live weight updates). It'd make it illegal for such a
| machine to read any book, watch any movie or browse any
| webpage, because it could potentially memorise and
| regurgitate the content. Which would be completely
| impossible to enforce.
| martin-t wrote:
| Please, don't anthropomorphize it. A model does not
| "read" a book - an algorithm updates weights which are
| _based on_ (therefore derivative work) existing training
| data. Basing them on more work performed by other people
| does not make it less derivative.
|
| It's not only about regurgitation verbatim. Doing that
| just means it gets caught more easily.
|
| LLMs are just another way the uber rich try to exploit
| everyone, hoping that if they exploit every single
| person's work just a little, they will get away with it.
|
| Nobody is 1000x more productive than the average
| programmer at writing code. There is no reason somebody
| should make 1000x more money from it either.
| welder wrote:
| You're confusing Copyright (implementation) with Patent (idea).
|
| We don't like gatekeeping ideas because many people have the
| same ideas.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Copyright is mostly privately enforced. The USPTO being
| dysfunctional doesn't prevent me from suing someone for
| infringement, it just sucks informed voices out of that room.
| ronsor wrote:
| Copyright is finally being deprecated as it should be.
|
| I'm still waiting for an update on the final removal timeline.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Copyright is finally being deprecated as it should be._
|
| If you hide behind corporations and have millions of dollars,
| sure, but not for us normies it isn't.
| kelnos wrote:
| That's a dangerous assumption to make. Dropping staffing levels
| at the US copyright office doesn't change the law. The next
| administration (or even this one, given how fickle Trump can
| be) may ramp up enforcement again and go after people
| committing violations during the current period.
|
| And it's not like copyright outside the US is a wild west; most
| national and international copyright regimes in the developed
| world are based on the US's system (often because the US has
| strong-armed other countries to comply).
| analog31 wrote:
| How does the copyright office enforce the law?
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| They don't have to. youtube and every other company are
| doing it for them, only without any of that annoying due
| process or assumption of innocense or burden of proof or
| right to recourse or any of that stuff a real public legal
| process should have.
| tw04 wrote:
| > go after people committing violations
|
| At this point it's a bold assumption they'll go after people
| violating anything. It's become apparent the decade of
| accusations of "weaponizing government" was a projection and
| the only people they'll go after are people they consider
| enemies, whether they're breaking any laws or not.
|
| That's the beautiful part of a puppet Supreme Court, you
| don't actually need to worry about the laws, you can just
| make it up as you go.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > Dropping staffing levels at the US copyright office doesn't
| change the law.
|
| We see this at the patent office, where overworked patent
| examiners leads to _more_ junk patents being granted. Which
| is utterly backwards, and stems from viewing patents as
| something the applicant has earned and needing a good
| justification to deny them the fruits of their labor, and not
| as what they are - an enormous restriction on everyone else.
| __loam wrote:
| Software engineers and tech workers will make their living off
| producing IP then say shit like this.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > You criticize society and yet you participate in it. How
| curious.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| without siding with the perspective being voiced, i feel
| compelled to point out your comment sounds like you believe
| there is a real alternative to criticize yet participate.
| even if you attempt to disengage and decide to go live in a
| cabin in the woods off the grid, the irs and any number of
| other agencies will go after you and your loved ones for
| doing basic human things like having and raising kids in a
| non-sanctioned way. so is there really any practical
| alternative to just voicing dissent?
| __loam wrote:
| The alternative is corporations stealing your work with no
| recourse.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| There are two broad classes of software people write.
|
| One is general purpose software used by significant numbers
| of people. This is the sort of software that could be, should
| be, and often already is open source. Enough people use it to
| sustain a community around maintaining it, and then you don't
| have to deal with the overhead and rent seeking incentives
| created by proprietary software. Obvious advantage: No more
| ads in the start menu.
|
| The other is custom code. Now "IP protection" is pretty
| worthless, because the company employing you is the only one
| that wants or uses the thing, or they're a SaaS company not
| interested in publishing or licensing the code to anyone else
| anyway.
|
| Neither of these has a strong need for IP laws and moreover
| either of them would do fine under a regime where there is no
| extrajudicial DMCA takedown process or anti-circumvention law
| and copyright terms last 14 years, but you can still sue a
| company that violates the GPL or fails to pay you for
| services rendered.
| rurp wrote:
| It's being deprecated _for billionaires_. IP laws are one of
| the most blatant cases I 've seen in this country of wealthy
| connected people being immune from laws that affect everyone
| else. I know it happens in many other areas, but usually it's
| much quieter and less in the public's face.
| gametorch wrote:
| Yes. I am an anti-copyright extremist.
|
| May the best implementation win.
|
| Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can
| artificially collect rent through a government-enforced
| monopoly.
|
| _Accelerate._
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| I write novels. What am I supposed to do to earn in this new,
| copyright-free regime where anyone is free to "implement" my
| novels?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Attract an audience and ask for patronage or get a job
| writing on behalf of an employer.
| martin-t wrote:
| So basically instead of doing real work (positive sum
| games - producing value), everyone has to either:
|
| a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion,
| advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)
|
| or
|
| b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are
| already richer than them?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion,
| advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)
|
| How is advertising a book you've written and are selling
| different than advertising your writing or skills to
| potential patrons and clients with regard to being
| negative-sum?
|
| b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are
| already richer than them?
|
| Who said anything about the relative wealth or patrons
| and authors? People seem totally willing to subscribe to
| people whose creative output they value. Sometimes such
| patronage is barely enough to live, sometimes it's an
| impressive total sum.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Leads to a class system where those who actually create
| for society are parasitically leeched on by a class whose
| wealth only exists because of another government enforced
| monopoly.
| logicchains wrote:
| > those who actually create for society
|
| If someone's unable to find anyone willing to pay them in
| advance for their work or purchase a subscription, is
| their work really creating much value to society?
| tobias3 wrote:
| Why would someone that is somewhat constrained w.r.t.
| spending pay for something they would get for free?
| martin-t wrote:
| In fact, if _just taking_ someone else's material
| possessions (rather than intellectual work) was legal,
| why would anyone build anything they can't physically
| protect themselves?
|
| A lot of the people bashing on copyright seem to have no
| concept of the second order effects abolishing copyright
| would have and no intention to game it out.
|
| Copyright has issues. For example it protects
| corporations instead of individual creators and workers.
| But not having it means rich people who own brands and
| have access to massive advertising can just take
| someone's work and make money from it while contributing
| nothing of value by themselves.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| It's called feudalism. The lords have a monopoly not just
| on the means of production, they own the full stack of
| society and economy in their domain.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| We had a few very violent revolutions and civil wars to
| get out of feudalism and patronage, and I can't believe
| how many techies want to take us back.
| hatthew wrote:
| Downwards acceleration is free
| martin-t wrote:
| Ever since I learned that my open source work was stolen and
| is being resold to me (laundered through statistical
| algorithms) without any credit or compensation, I stopped
| writing open source.
|
| Any copy-left code is basically free to be used in closed
| source software, as long as it's not a verbatim copy? Count
| me out.
|
| LLMs are used to subvert the spirit of GPL, if not the
| letter.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| That's where I'm at as an author of several popular open
| source libraries.
|
| That's it, they're in maintenance mode and I'm not
| releasing anything again in the future.
|
| My model used to be to build products and spin off
| components into generic open source libraries others could
| use, and some caught on. Now I'm just keeping them for
| myself or attempting to monetize them somehow.
| tobias3 wrote:
| Coming to about the same conclusion here. Companies are
| using my AGPLv3 project without following the license
| already and enforcing the license seems bleak with not
| much gain for me.
|
| Now they can just copyright-wash it through AI models.
| Stealthisbook wrote:
| The Copyright Office doesn't have much to do with copyright
| enforcement. That's almost entirely hashed out in court. If
| anything, the office provides one of the few streamlining
| mechanisms in an unwieldy system by maintaining registration
| records so you can track down ownership and at least arrange
| licensing for works that would otherwise represent an unknown
| rights minefield.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Don't need it anymore. President decides who owns what now,
| supreme court will confirm it sometime next week.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Exactly, what happened to the libertarian spirit of HN?
| 9283409232 wrote:
| You're going to have to expand on that because I'm out of the
| loop.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Start by reading up on who won the November 2024 US
| presidential election and then read
| https://bsky.app/profile/stevevladeck.bsky.social.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| I see so nothing concrete happened and this is just
| speculation.
| lastdong wrote:
| I'm not sure if the comment below is alluding to this, but
| search for Project 2025. Robert Reich has published some
| informative articles in the Guardian newspaper, but plenty of
| other sources.
| abeppu wrote:
| So, this article describes the sequence of events as the Trump
| administration attempting to replace the librarian of congress,
| and Trump's named replacement saying he was replacing the
| Copyright Register with a Trump DOJ person.
|
| I am not a lawyer but I thought it was pretty well established
| that (a) the library of congress is part of the legislature, not
| an executive branch office and (b) that the president can remove
| some people but can't install people in the other branches
| without confirmation (e.g. when a SCOTUS justice dies or retires,
| the president can't name a temporary justice).
|
| https://www.govtrack.us/posts/503/2025-05-13_president-trump...
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| It's kind of confusing since the LOC serves Congress, but the
| Librarian of Congress is a President-appointed and Senate-
| confirmed position. They're supposed to serve for 10-year terms
| (she was appointed in September 2016) though, and my
| understanding is it's a open question whether the President can
| legally fire a LOC before their term is up.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/136-1?hl=en-US
| bdw5204 wrote:
| The President can, in fact, recess appoint a Supreme Court
| justice per Article II, Section 2, Clause 3[0].
|
| Since the George W. Bush administration, Congress has used pro
| forma sessions[1] to prevent recess appointments. Both the
| House and Senate would have to agree on a time to adjourn
| Congress per Article I, Section 5, Clause 4. If they disagree
| but one of them wants to adjourn, the President can adjourn
| them under Article II, Section 3. But no president has ever
| done this. President Trump talked about doing it to ram through
| his appointments both in 2020 and last year during the
| transition period. But so far it hasn't been deemed necessary
| because the Senate has, surprisingly to me, confirmed his
| cabinet in a timely manner and without significant pushback
| even on the less conventionally conservative choices like the
| DNI and the HHS Secretary. In all likelihood, the threat of
| adjourning Congress and of using his billion dollars plus of
| fundraising for 2026 to primary uncooperative Republican
| members of Congress has forced them to largely fall in line for
| now.
|
| Recess appointments to the Supreme Court were common in the old
| days when the Court was less politically contentious. Justice
| William J. Brennan was recess appointed by Eisenhower and later
| confirmed by the Senate. A recess appointment who is not
| confirmed by the Senate would be null and void at the start of
| the next Congress on January 3rd of the next odd numbered year.
| I doubt any president would recess appoint a Supreme Court
| justice today both because it would be likely derail their
| nomination and also because a recess Justice might get to hear
| at most 1 term of cases depending on timing. Recess appointing
| somebody to run the FDA or the Justice Department or even to be
| a district court judge would be much more useful to a
| President's agenda.
|
| [0]: "The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies
| that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting
| Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next
| Session."
|
| [1]: These are sessions where they immediately adjourn by
| unanimous consent after doing the formalities to open the
| session. C-SPAN broadcasts them live and they only last a few
| minutes at most.
| magicfractal wrote:
| Before AI, copyright was a way to increase profits for the ruling
| class, now with AI it's disadvantageous to keep copyright to the
| detriment of the petite bourgeoisie (like artists and self-
| employed software engineers). It's the rule in capitalism that
| big capital eats small capital leading to income concentration in
| fewer and fewer hands.
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