OH-HAPPY-DANCE-TIME!
I just got the confirmation from the US. Copyright office today!
Since the later 1990's I had been "fed-up" with Wizards of the Coast and wanted to get my copyright back. Thanks to another M:TG artist, I became aware of a 1976 law that allows me to do exactly that. So to be clear, as of February 20, 2030 I will again become the sole owner of the copyrights for all of the art I made in the Antiquities, Legends, The Dark, and Fallen Empires Expansion sets.
And on February 22, 2031 I will again become the sole owner of the copyrights for all of the art I made in the Alliances expansion set. That's 26 images in all. And it was EASY. I didn't even need a lawyer. And it's a "Done Deal."
And I am going to use those rights any ol' which way I want.
WOTC offered to buy me out for $20k. I told 'em to get serious or forget it.
Randy Asplund on Facebook (src)
They were paying him a flat $100 fee per piece while selling the product for billions. Now imagine there are many other artists, hundreds of them, getting fucked over like this and having to sue the corporations in order to regain the copyrights to their own art.
The current copygrift model is unsustainable and exploitative, and anyone still supporting it is either a crook or a fucking rube.
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Most people tend to fixate on copyright violations by AI tools like text-prompt generators that allow users to create full songs, lyrics, and instrumentals in seconds.
I recognize that copyright protection is important, but current litigation supports established business models rather than benefitting working musicians. Instead of opening space for new models, current litigation may reinforce existing business structures rather than expanding opportunities for emerging artists.
Critics also worry that musicians won’t be able to make a living because a radio station, a restaurant, or even a studio won’t need to pay for music, since they can create their own — we don’t know yet.
Historian and musician John Hardin connects yesterday’s lessons to today’s AI concerns.
Why the fuck is every lazy hack and their simps so fucking fixated on copyrights? They're bullshit. They stopped protecting artists long ago and became a mechanism of extortion for corporate executives exploiting actual artists day in, day out.
This is something Cory Doctorow is pointing out for several years now, and John Hardin, being a musician himself, is painfully aware of the reality that eludes throngs of brainwashed bozos who would eagerly use Napster if you threw them back in time 25 years.
The first hip-hop DJs didn't ask anyone for permission to chop and screw shit your grandma is still listening to, which is ironic when you realize that Dr Dre is the biggest music industry cunt to ever have gone on stage. Outrunning Lars Ulrich by an 8th Mile.
Don't believe me? Ask Rick Beato instead. If he needs a lawyer to fight the Device of Malicious Corporate Abuse bullshit daily as a music historian, critic and journalist today, imagine how hard he's gonna be fucked if some over-eager fuckwits push for even more oppression from the Music And Film Industry Association of America.
If you can only scrape the web with explicit permission from the copyright holders to the works you’re scraping, then Google is the last search engine we’ll ever get, because no one else will have the capital and the reputation to get those permissions. We would also lose our archives. Making copies of, say, a corporate website before and after the Trump administration comes in and seeing everything they’ve changed about DEI and labor policy and fairness — that’s a socially useful activity that you only get if you’re allowed to scrape the web.
Worrying about whether AI can do your job is a blind alley, Cory Doctorow argues. The real danger is AI’s bubble: a speculative fantasy buil
That's right, you cretins. Kiss your beloved DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGoodbye, kiss the Internet Archive goodbye, you get nothing, you lose, good day sir!
And the Google AI summary? It will still be there.
To be an effective AI critic, you have to focus on the material conditions that amass capital for these firms. Instead of running around and saying, “AI can do my job,” you should say, “AI salesmen can convince my boss that the AI that can’t do my job will do my job.” You have to point out that invoking AI is a way of getting consumers to accept lower quality while blaming workers for that lower quality and letting bosses pocket the difference.
Worrying about whether AI can do your job is a blind alley, Cory Doctorow argues. The real danger is AI’s bubble: a speculative fantasy buil
We have mostly signs and some portents from the one and only Cory Doctorow stating the necessary obvious things about AI.
The AI bubble will leave behind a bunch of stuff that will be useful. If you wait long enough, you’ll be able to buy graphic processing units (GPUs) at 10 cents on the dollar, hire as many applied statisticians as you want, and run open-source models in ways that would beggar the imagination of people today who compare them to these so-called frontier models. And the genuinely useful things that AI can do, it will keep doing.
Yup, this is biblically accurate view of AI. And as you already probably know thanks to me, Doctorow and Zitron mentioning the open source solutions that are a massive pain in the Sillycunt Valley's silly cunts, those things can be used to do some actual work, coupled with normal tools to deliver meaningful results.
If it weren’t for the bubble, we would call AI a plug-in. We get plug-ins for our tools all the time, and sometimes they’re useful, and sometimes they’re not. We don’t decide to reorganize the entire economy around them. We don’t decide to fire everyone and use the last seven drops of potable water left to see how far we can push them.
Exactly. The data center boom is scumbaggery at first sight and sheer fucking idiocy once you start digging. The only ones benefiting from those data centers are the AI corporations, and only because it allows them to centralize and monetize (and, in the end, monopolize) the tech.
I went to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this year with Ed Zitron. He brought some of his favorite tech critics to go and make fun of it for his podcast. Everything at CES this year was just a chatbot integrated into a thing: a chatbot in a toy, a chatbot in an appliance, a chatbot in a brick wall. Our question for all of them was what they’ll do if OpenAI goes under, or if OpenAI starts charging a hundred times what they do now for tokens. And they all said they’d switch to Chinese models — which, so long as you never ask your robot companion about Tiananmen Square, may or may not work.
But the point is that if you can use a Chinese model, you can use a local model. The heart of AI mania is not just a bet that you can use automation to replace a worker but also that automation can be proprietary to the firm you’re investing in.
We have already seen multiple companies go under, leaving their highly sophisticated, electronics-laden, web-enabled hardware as useless bricks. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what happens to all the products plugged into a proprietary AI model from a company that's going to bomb sooner than later. The only reason those things get funding is because the AI service provider gets a cut - say you want to use Chinese model or some local setup, and you won't even launch that shit on a Kickstarter.
The argument goes that AI companies that take works to train on are breaking copyright law as it stands, and I think many people do not understand how weak and contentious a legal argument that is.
Yep, the argument is bullshit and several precedents already confirm this. And tightening copyright regulations would be disastrous for several very good reasons:
If you can only scrape the web with explicit permission from the copyright holders to the works you’re scraping, then Google is the last search engine we’ll ever get, because no one else will have the capital and the reputation to get those permissions. We would also lose our archives. Making copies of, say, a corporate website before and after the Trump administration comes in and seeing everything they’ve changed about DEI and labor policy and fairness — that’s a socially useful activity that you only get if you’re allowed to scrape the web.
That's right, you cretins. Kiss your beloved DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGoodbye, kiss the Internet Archive goodbye, you get nothing, you lose, good day sir!
Step two is performing a mathematical analysis on a work. In the case of a large language model, it’s counting words, how far apart those words are, and how often one appears near another — within one word, within two words, and so on. You don’t need a copyright holder’s permission to derive facts from a creative work. You can count all the adjectives in the lyrics on a CD or make a dictionary citing where each word was first used, and all of that would be extinguished if we created a new regime where those activities require permission.
Read about Markov chains, it's very enlightening and necessary to explain how LLMs work. Andrey Markov used the relation between vowels and consonants in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin as a proof of one of the laws of mathematics, and in over a century, it got us to LLMs. How? To quote a classic, "this, I know from nothing!"
And then, the final piece of making a model is publishing the facts. Software is a literary work; that’s why it’s covered by copyright. A model is a literary work full of facts about other literary works. It’s basically the proximity of words in some abstruse vector space that is populated by counting all the words in everything we could find. And again, publishing compendia of facts about copyrighted works is not a thing that you need copyright permission for.
Doctorow explained how the corporations controlling the media market maintain a stranglehold and keep fucking artists over money while fat middlemen parasites like record execs reap record profits year after year back in January, and I think he keeps a pre-packaged answer in case someone asks that stupid question again. More important is what he says next:
The media industry is somewhat explicit about this. When Midjourney was sued by Disney and Universal, I got a press release from the CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America that basically said, “We’re really disappointed that Midjourney took all these creative works from media companies rather than licensing them, because we could have just done a partnership.” It’s not that media companies don’t want to use AI to replace creative workers; it’s that they want to get paid for the training data and, presumably, to have some guardrails on the model that gets produced.
Note, the artists weren't even involved in anything here. The Music And Film Industry Association of America just rolled up, extended a hand and demanded payola. Who gives a shit what the artists think? The corporate leeches need to get a cut, and then fuck it, do whatever you want. Compare this to the utter fucking bullshit of a press release that, in one breath, threatened Udio and Suno with a lawsuit and announced an "ethical" music generation algorithm for "internal use" at Universal (which, these days, tries to chase the Udio users off with the help of Scooby-Doo level bullshit). No matter how much money they'd ask, artists would see about tree fiddy of it in total, and that after a decade or two. I wouldn't expect anything else after seeing Spotify's royalty fuckery in action, moving the goalposts, changing the way numbers are calculated and coming up with excuses why the artists can't get shit while the company announces yet another quarter of record profits.
We’ve already got a ready-made solution for creative workers’ rights, which is that the US Copyright Office has repeatedly stated, and litigated, and gone all the way up to a certiorari petition at the Supreme Court to say that works generated by AI are not entitled to a copyright. This is the thing that creative workers should be shouting from the rooftops. If your investors get wind of the fact that you just fired all your workers, spent billions of dollars on chatbots, and you’re not going to be able to stop people from selling or giving away everything you produce from now on, they’re going to be really angry.
This is what I mentioned multiple times: publishing industries are a protection racket. An artist gets paid bubkes, the company makes millions on his work and goes after anyone who dares to bootleg the product. The Dead Kennedys hung a fuckass huge lampshade on it ages ago. And if Disney's humiliation at the hands of OpenAI is supposed to tell you something, it's that the companies don't give a fuck about the artists they employ. Disney wanted to sue OpenAI, was told to fuck off, abandoned the lawsuit and came back groveling on all fours, begging to be allowed to use the new tech.
So here's the story: the guy posted a video of a silent movie now in public domain, with the music he composed, on Youtube, and at the same time, posted the music itself on CD Baby. This way, he got slapped by the Device of Malicious Corporate Abuse and had to grant permission to himself to keep the video on Youtube.
If it sounds absolutely psychotic, rest assured that it is. And of course it's cheaper to put an idiot regexp algorithm in charge of it than have someone think for five fucking minutes and set everything on fire, then grind the remains and fire them from a cannon over the nearest body of water.
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It appears that despite their lofty declarations of "originality" and "human touch", accepting just about any half-assed, plagiarized dogshit from hacks willing to take the lowest flat fee is the Standard Operating Procedure for Wizards of the Coast.
Plagiarism cases in Magic: the Gathering keep happening, as if nobody learned a thing. We have painted-over celebrity photos, much like Bioware did, we had personal pieces stolen and pasted as the background of half-assed character shots, and worst of all, we have shit just copied and pasted from the work of other artists working (or having worked) for the very same company.
I mean, what the fuck. How can you think that nobody's going to notice copying the main part of the previous version of the same fucking card depicting an iconic artifact of pop culture in its best known version? And just respond with a shrug despite making a big show of blacklisting the previous (and next) case? Particularly when the artist in question is known for working in traditional media and not digital, when the piece is a blatant digital job with a shockingly half-assed background?
But, that one was spotted and questioned by the fans, unlike the next one that, once again, was spotted by the creator of the original. And this time, the creator of the original has a whole lot of history with WotC, being famous for creating a shitton of card artworks for MtG. And once people started digging even deeper, they noticed that the entire image is frankensteined from over half a century of pieces by various artists and half-assed to a comical degree.
If you're not terribly bothered with ethics, I know better ways to half-ass a job and slap a price tag on it.
In April 2025, Sky News reported via extraction from old campaign PDFs that the actual font used was Xband-Rough, a widely-distributed pirated version of FF Confidential. Van Rossum was aware of the font Xband-Rough, but was unaware that the advert has used the pirated font and described its use as "hilarious"
So I was just reminded of the old "You Wouldn't Download a Car" and tried to find the font used in it.
That fucking farce literally wrote itself. Those greedy fucks from MAFIAA used a bootleg font that, normally, had a $60 license they could easily purchase, in order to whine about their imaginary losses. Unfortunately, this came to light long after the statute of limitations expired, but it's very telling.
So, Cory Doctorow helpfully pointed out that the EU is slowly getting off its colossal ass in a move to curb the social media bullshit we're suffering from, except...
EU member-states are minting new "digital sovereignty" ministries as fast as they can print up new business cards, the EU itself has just appointed its first "Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy" czar:
https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/henna-virkkunen_en
They're building the "Eurostack," a fleet of EU-based data centers that will host free, open, auditable, trustworthy equivalents to the US tech giants' offerings:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp
But Eurostack is about to run into a wall: Article 6 of the EU's own Copyright Directive, which prohibits reverse-engineering and modification of tech products. It's a law that the US Trade Rep lobbied hard for, winning the day by promising tariff-free access to the US for Europe's exports (a promise Trump has now broken):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate
So long as Europe continues to hold up its end of this one-sided bargain, it will not be able to create the reverse-engineering based tools to let EU companies, governments and households get their data out of US tech silos, let alone let them build and enjoy successors to OG App, which will make it easy for them to leave US social media without sacrificing contact with the people who matter to them.
Yep, the fucking copygrift raises its ugly head yet again and there's nobody willing to curbstomp it for good.
People hate ads. More than half of all web users have installed an adblocker (which also protects their privacy). It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
But no one has ever installed an adblocker for an app, because reverse-engineering apps and the mobile platforms they run on is illegal under laws like Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. As a result, tech companies – especially US giants, who can violate EU law with impunity – love to enshittify their apps, because they know that no one can do unto them as they did unto their own rivals (like Myspace).
Meta's new ad strategy for Threads is the perfect cue for a European repeal of Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. Procedurally, this is a great moment for it, as the EU is finalizing the Digital Fairness Act, which could include an exemption to EUCD 6 for privacy-enhancing technologies:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-protecting-our-democracy-upholding-our-values/file-digital-fairness-act
Giving Europeans an effective way to push back against Meta's wholesale violation of their rights is a way that the Eurostack can score popular support right now – not in five years when the new data centers come online. It's a way of improving the lives of Europeans in immediate, concrete ways, rather than asking them to be grateful that some ministry has changed cloud providers – an important change, sure, but one that has no real impact on their daily lives.
What's more, legalizing jailbreaking for the purpose of making Threads alt-clients wouldn't just give Europeans a better social media experience – it could bootstrap European social media services. Remember, Threads was able to achieve instant scale by moving Instagram users onto Threads wholesale, maintaining their Insta follows and followers when they created their Threads accounts.
Do you hear it, you lazy assholes? You fell for the copygrift bullshit way back when, now here's your chance to un-fuck it. Just like in every other field, the current copyright regulations benefit giant corporations (from the US) first, nobody else second. And no, if the German record industry starts crying, you punt them in the cunt, then defenestrate them right from the top floor. They fully deserve getting the shit kicked out of them, being even worse than the Americans in this regard.
Also, cut the "think of the children" bullshit and don't force us to hand over our vulnerable personal data to anyone, neither you nor Big Tech.
