This has nothing to do with centralization. AI companies are already scraping the web for everything useful. If you took the content from SO and split it into 1000 federated sites, it would still end up in a AI model. Decentralization would only help if we ever manage to hold the AI companies accountable for the en masse copyright violations they base their industry on.
The irony is that folks complain about stuff like Discord partly because it cannot be scraped by search engines but that would also protect it from being scraped by AI tools.
Copyright is an artificial, government given Monopoly.
Market Mechanisms don’t work when faced with a Monopoly or work badly in situations distorted by the presence of a Monopoly (which is more this case, since Stack Overflow has a monopoly in the reproduction of each post in that website but the same user could post the same answer elsewhere thus creating an equivalent work).
Pretty much in every situation where Intellectual Property is involved you see the market failing miserably: just notice the current situation with streaming services which would be completelly different if there was no copyright and hence no possibility of exclusivity of distribution of any titles (and hence streaming services would have to compete in terms of quality of service).
The idea that the Free Market is something that works everywhere (or even in most cases) is Politically-driven Magic thinking, not Economics.
This has everything to do with centralization, just not with the one small context for it which you picked.
With real decentralization in place market mechanisms work.
Monopoly situations along with market mechanisms invariably result in centralization (“monopoly” comes from the Greek word for “right of exclusive sale”), hence market mechanism won’t “work” in the sense you mean it in such a scenario, as I explained.
Your argument is circular because it’s like saying that it will work as long as it creates the conditions to make itself work (which is the same as saying “as long as it works”).
This has nothing to do with centralization. AI companies are already scraping the web for everything useful. If you took the content from SO and split it into 1000 federated sites, it would still end up in a AI model. Decentralization would only help if we ever manage to hold the AI companies accountable for the en masse copyright violations they base their industry on.
The irony is that folks complain about stuff like Discord partly because it cannot be scraped by search engines but that would also protect it from being scraped by AI tools.
This has everything to do with centralization, just not with the one small context for it which you picked.
With real decentralization in place market mechanisms work.
Copyright is an artificial, government given Monopoly.
Market Mechanisms don’t work when faced with a Monopoly or work badly in situations distorted by the presence of a Monopoly (which is more this case, since Stack Overflow has a monopoly in the reproduction of each post in that website but the same user could post the same answer elsewhere thus creating an equivalent work).
Pretty much in every situation where Intellectual Property is involved you see the market failing miserably: just notice the current situation with streaming services which would be completelly different if there was no copyright and hence no possibility of exclusivity of distribution of any titles (and hence streaming services would have to compete in terms of quality of service).
The idea that the Free Market is something that works everywhere (or even in most cases) is Politically-driven Magic thinking, not Economics.
You are not arguing with me. Not reading comments before answering them is disrespectful.
Monopoly situations along with market mechanisms invariably result in centralization (“monopoly” comes from the Greek word for “right of exclusive sale”), hence market mechanism won’t “work” in the sense you mean it in such a scenario, as I explained.
Your argument is circular because it’s like saying that it will work as long as it creates the conditions to make itself work (which is the same as saying “as long as it works”).