Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.
Further facilitating millions, or even billions, of other people to discover new ideas and create new things. It's not hard to see the benefit of that.
I get that the purpose of IP laws are psychological, rather than moral. A culture where people feel as though they can personally benefit from their work is going to have higher technological and scientific output, which is certainly good, even if the means of producing that good are sort of artificial and selfish.
It's not hard to imagine, or maybe dream of, a world where the motivation for research and development is not just personal gain. But we have to work with the world we have, not the world we want, don't we...
Nobody will starve themselves, even if doing so will feed hundreds of others.
> the purpose of IP laws are psychological, rather than moral.
Neither. They are purely economic. You even acknowledge this when you call out personal benefit.
The stated intent is to facilitate creators realizing economic benefits from time spent creating. The reality is that large corporations end up rent seeking using our shared cultural artifacts. Both impacts are economic in nature.
The economic benefit is derived from a psychological effect: the expectation of personal gain.
The economy as a whole benefits from technological progress. The technological progress is fueled by each individual's expectation of personal gain. The personal gain is created via IP law.
If someone shows up to work based on the expectation that they will receive a paycheck at the end of the month would you also describe that as a psychological effect? I certainly wouldn't. That's an economic activity.
There's a psychological component regarding trust. Either that your employer would never try to cheat you or alternatively that your employer is the sort that might try to cheat you but won't thanks to our society's various systems. But the showing up to work itself is a simple exchange of time and skill for money.
In the case that the IP, and thus the financial benefit, is not owned by an individual, but owned by a large corporation, as with your example, what does the individual care whether or not the IP is infringed?
They don't. In this case democratizing the IP is more likely a social / economic benefit, not a harm.
We're talking about intellectual property rights, the benefits of which only go to the intellectual property holder.
Although how big a corporation has to be before we cross the line from social / economic harm to social / economic good is an interesting question.
I get that the purpose of IP laws are psychological, rather than moral. A culture where people feel as though they can personally benefit from their work is going to have higher technological and scientific output, which is certainly good, even if the means of producing that good are sort of artificial and selfish.
It's not hard to imagine, or maybe dream of, a world where the motivation for research and development is not just personal gain. But we have to work with the world we have, not the world we want, don't we...
Nobody will starve themselves, even if doing so will feed hundreds of others.