YT’s system that had messed up and not the legal system.

Oh the legal system is very much messed up, YouTube tried to put a bandage in it. You have to consider that usually you would need a full personalized legal contract for each piece of copyrighted material you use. Content id tries to automate the process, but it’s not perfect.

A 10-20% royalty should be more than enough to incentivise research while still preventing price-fixing and monopolies.

Which is what happens with patents today. The company holding the patent rarely also physical produces the drug, they usually have “manufacturing agreements” expecially in geographic far markets; where they let a second company make the drug with the company holding the patent on it and they are free to sell it in exchange for a percentage of the label price.

That’s also what happened with vaccines and many other medications, it’s like the standard procedure lol

Look at this.

It’s just a single example, there are endless songs which are samples of samples of samples… Once in a while YouTube content id will have some problems as it’s not perfect. It doesn’t mean the system is fundamentally flawed. Like saying every car on the planet is cursed because once you got a flat tyre.

Only the rich and powerful or those willing to go deeply into debt are able to benefit from all of that extra research.

Pay attention because the alternative to patents is not a “free for all” approach , it’s industrial secrecy. As research is still very much expensive for entities to carry out.

Set aside than, no, extra research benefits everyone in the society as new cures for diseases are discovered faster and medicine evolve organically. Patents were the compromise to ensure companies could monetize their research while sharing their knowledge, are there other possible equilibrium? Sure, but we still have to remember we live in the real world, you can’t have a cake and eat it

let people reuse each other’s melodies

I think this is an interesting example, because it’s already like this. Songs reusing other sampled songs are released all the time, and it’s all perfectly legal. Only making a copy is illegal. No one can sue you if you create a character that resembles mickey mouse, but you can’t use mickey mouse.

And pharmaceutical patents serves the same scope, they encourage the company to release publicly papers, data and synthesis methods so that other people can learn and research can move faster.

And the whole point of this is exactly regulating AI like people, no one will come after you because you’ve read something and now you have an opinion about it, no body will get angry if you’ve saw an Instagram post and now you have some ideas for your art.

Of course the distinction between likeness and copy is not that defined, but that’s part of the whole debacle

then go around selling Binbows and MSFT can’t do anything about it

I think this already happen. A very practical example, windows GUI has been copied by many Linus distros. And with windows 11 there’s clearly a reference to Apple MacOS GUI with a sparkling of Google material design.

Should apple and Google be able to sue Microsoft because it “copied” their work? Should Google be able to sue apple because they “copied” the notification drop-down in iOS?

As you say it’s really a grey area because the only reason we consider AI code to be “regurgitated” while human code to be “inspired” is only because we give humans more recognition of their intellectual abilities.

I think the topic is more complex than that.

Otherwise you could say you’d rather stop posting creative endeavours entirely than simply let it be stolen and regurgitated by every single artist who use internet for references and inspiration.

There’s not only the argument “but companies do so for profit” because many artist do the same, maybe they are designers, illustrators or other and you’ll work will give them ideas for their commissions

Democracy spreads the power out through as many people as possible in order to lessen the potential for abuse by any individual actor

Well, that’s not our democracies work. We don’t let people vote every law by referendum, that would be spreading power as much as possible.

In ancient Athens it was common, as was common for judiciary decision to be made by 3-4 hundreds people drawn at random. But that’s something almost universally considered stupid now, we have a judge, who we consider an “expert” in law.

By your definition, we don’t live in a democracy, on the contrary, democracy is extinct on this planet

between one buyer with fairly limited funds and few large corporations with extensive funds

Which is the same as saying that every vote is transferred between one voter, with very limited knowledge and political awareness and a few politicians with extensive power because politics is what they do their entire life.

Democracy is, in many practical sense, a market for votes. One which is way less regulated than the one for goods and services

the classical- and neoliberal ideas that humans are rational actors

Be very careful with this, because this is also the very foundation of democracy. If we start saying humans can’t decide for themselves over insignificant phone charger, how could we trust them selecting the people who has much more power than that?