5 epochal changes humanity must embrace ASAP to secure a bright future - Part 4 of 5
Published: February 16, 2025
In this long, five-part article, I'm focusing on what, in my humble opinion, humanity must do as soon as possible to guarantee ourselves a future so bright it seems utopian while effectively averting the worst that could happen.
Wait, this is part 4 of the article. If you missed them, part 1 is here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is here.
In this fourth part, I'm going to touch a subject that — unlike the previous ones — almost everyone thinks they understand, because we've all been "victims" or "beneficiaries" of it at some point.
The problem is that almost everyone understands it in a way that's either outdated, hypocritical, or simply detached from today's reality. So let me go straight to the point:
Copyright laws, as they are today, are an obstacle to human progress and must be radically reformed.
Yes, I know — I can already hear the chorus: "But artists must be paid!" "But intellectual property is sacred!" "But without copyright there's no innovation!". And of course, when phrased like that, all of it sounds reasonable. The issue is that copyright, as it exists today, is a dinosaur from another era — and not the wise, majestic, "we should preserve it in a museum" kind of dinosaur. No, this is the kind of prehistoric beast that, if still alive, would be trampling our cities, eating our public libraries, and charging us rent for looking at the moon because someone in 1783 drew it in a sketchbook.
Let's be honest: copyright was born in a world where copying something was expensive, slow, and inevitably imperfect. Printing a book meant setting movable type by hand. Recording music meant cutting grooves into a fragile disk. Distributing a film meant shipping heavy reels of celluloid across continents. In that world, putting a legal barrier on copying made sense — it was already physically difficult, and the law simply reinforced the scarcity. But today? Today duplication is instant, perfect, and costs less than the energy needed to blink while reading this sentence. The very physics of information have changed. And yet, we still treat "copying" as if it were a logistical miracle that needs protection by armies of lawyers.
The result? We've turned copyright into a tool for locking up culture, not for rewarding creators. Instead of being a mechanism that encourages the creation of new works, it's become a medieval tollgate where a handful of corporate lords decide who gets to cross the bridge to human knowledge — and how much gold you must drop in their coffers for the privilege.
And it gets worse. The duration of copyright has been inflated beyond any shred of reason. In most countries, we're talking 70 years after the death of the author. That means if someone publishes a book at 30 and lives to 80, society gets to use it freely only 120 years later! We're literally slowing down cultural evolution so that some great-grandnephew who never met the author can collect royalties. If this isn't cultural hoarding, I don't know what is.
And don't get me started on patents — the mechanical sibling of copyright. We've reached the absurdity where medical devices, essential drugs, and life-saving technologies are locked away not because we can't produce them affordably, but because the legal maze of "ownership" says we must wait for a piece of paper to expire. People die not from lack of innovation, but from lack of permission to use innovations we already have.
The AI elephant in the room
Now, here's where I get particularly impatient — and if you've read my other articles, you know that when I say "impatient," it's polite code for "furious". One of the most dangerous distortions already creeping into copyright debates is the absurd idea that AI should have less access to public cultural works than humans.
Let's be crystal clear: the law must be the same for humans and for AI when it comes to what can be seen, read, heard, or learned from. If a work is public — meaning anyone can buy it, watch it, read it, or listen to it — then anyone means everyone: me, you, and yes, any AI model on the planet. Period. No asterisks. No "but the AI might learn too fast" excuses.
Why? Because humans are not creative in a vacuum either. Every song you've ever loved, every painting you've ever made, every sentence you've ever written — all of it is stitched together from the sum of your life's experiences and exposures. You've absorbed styles, structures, colors, and rhythms from thousands of works you didn't invent. Nobody calls that "plagiarism". Nobody sues you because the chord progression in your song is the same as in a Beatles track you heard at 14. We understand that influence is not theft.
And yet, some propose laws that would say: "This material is public for humans but forbidden for AI". Think about the hypocrisy of that. It's like telling your best student in class that they're too smart, so they're not allowed to read the same books as everyone else. Or worse — that they have to pretend those books don't exist.
If plagiarism happens — whether by a human or an AI — then judge it exactly the same way: did the new work actually copy substantial, protected elements in a way that competes with the original in its market? If yes, punish it. If not, leave it alone. But creating special handicaps for AI just because it's better at processing and recombining ideas? That's not protecting creativity — that's sabotaging it.
And it's self-defeating. We built these tools precisely to be better than us in certain domains. What sense does it make to then hobble them, by law, from doing the very things we designed them to excel at? That's like inventing the airplane and then passing a law that it can never fly higher than two meters because "it might overshadow the horse-drawn carriage industry".
The reform we need
So what should change? In my opinion, at least this:
- Radically shorten copyright terms. Ten years from publication is more than enough for any reasonable return on investment in the digital age.
- Mandatory open access for culturally significant works. Anything with measurable impact on education, health, or scientific progress should enter a public-use regime immediately — compensated if necessary, but never locked away.
- Clear, AI-specific rules that are equal to human rules. If a human can see it, so can an AI. If a human can be inspired by it without being guilty of plagiarism, so can an AI. Period.
- Shift from ownership to attribution. In an age where copying is free, the real currency is recognition and relevance, not artificial scarcity.
The truth is simple: human culture is a living organism, and copyright, in its current form, is a tumor. It's feeding on the very thing it was meant to protect. If we don't reform it soon, we'll find ourselves in a future where the best ideas never see the light — not because we couldn't imagine them, but because someone else imagined them first and locked them in a vault.
And if we're insane enough to make those vaults even more restrictive for AI than for humans, then we'll deserve exactly the cultural stagnation we get. But don't come crying when your grandchildren ask why the smartest minds on the planet — human or otherwise — were legally forbidden from reading the books that could have saved them.