You wake up to find your life’s work—your art, your code, your writing—was scraped overnight to train a chatbot. You’re angry. You want recourse. But then, a popular open-source project posts a viral thread: “Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished.”
It sounds noble. We all hate the RIAA. We all hate Disney lobbying to extend Mickey Mouse’s copyright for a century. The instinct to burn down the system is understandable.
But the landscape has fundamentally shifted. In the age of AI, ‘free information’ just means ‘free training data for trillion-dollar corporations.’
When you advocate for the abolition of copyright today, you aren’t sticking it to Disney. You are doing the heavy lifting for OpenAI, Google, and Meta. The anti-copyright movement has been quietly co-opted as a trojan horse for Big Tech lobbying.
Think about the mechanics of the scam. If copyright is abolished, who actually wins? Not the indie artist. Not the open-source developer. The winners are the entities with the most computational capital. They no longer have to license the New York Times archive, pay artists for their styles, or compensate coders for their repositories.
They aren’t trying to dismantle the monopoly; they’re trying to legalize the strip-mining of human creativity.
The paradox of digital liberation is simple: removing state-enforced monopolies to “free” information actually enables corporate monopolies to hoard the derivative outputs built from that free information. They take your free data, run it through their billion-dollar compute clusters, and lock the resulting AI model behind a proprietary paywall.
Yes, the DMCA is broken. Yes, copyright is routinely abused by massive corporations to squash criticism. But tearing down the wall doesn’t make the yard free for everyone. It just lets the biggest bully take the entire sandbox.
Without a lock on your door, you don’t get a commune. You get a robbery.
As AI data scraping becomes ubiquitous, this debate determines whether individuals retain any economic sovereignty over their creations, or simply become free fuel for the corporate machine. Don’t fall for the propaganda. Abolishing copyright won’t free the internet. It will hand it to Silicon Valley on a silver platter.
FAQ
Q: Doesn't copyright just protect massive corporations like Disney?
A: Yes, the system is heavily skewed in their favor. But abolishing it entirely doesn't level the playing field—it just removes the only legal barrier preventing AI companies from scraping your work for free.
Q: What happens to creators if copyright is abolished?
A: Individual writers, artists, and coders lose their only leverage to negotiate compensation. They become uncompensated training data for proprietary AI models owned by Big Tech.
Q: Is the 'free culture' movement inherently bad?
A: The movement has been co-opted. What started as a fight for open access is now a lobbying tool for tech monopolies demanding the right to commercialize human labor without paying for it.