Fair enough, it looks like the main disagreement there was just whether the word “upload” included backups.
Copyright won’t be the operating legal principle for all sorts of reasons. First is that copyright pertains only to “creative works” that were authored by a person. Uploaded people are very unlikely to be considered “creative works”. Modifications might be, but those seem more likely to be governed by patent-like laws if anything, as processes rather than end result.
Another is that copyright is fundamentally about ownership rights, and while it is possible that the future may be a dystopian hell in some ways, it won’t necessarily be one in which people are legally owned by others. If your prior is a conservative extension of current law, reinstating slavery does not seem to fit that. Even if it were, I doubt that copyright law specifically would be the means by which it is enacted.
Another is that copyright is primarily about publication, not use. I would expect there to be substantial legal restrictions surrounding how mind-states may be used along the same lines as existing laws about how people are permitted to interact with other people, though I suppose in some hell-world even that may be absent.
I do think there’s a key difference between a full upload that more or less maintains continuity of consciousness (e.g. you don’t experience anything beyond going to sleep and waking up in a different ??body??) and a backup that restores you to a point after a definite permanent break in said continuity, e.g. death or brain injury.
What is your epistemic confidence in “Copyright won’t be the operating legal principle for all sorts of reasons.”? I know we are both making assumptions here, how do we best test those assumptions and validate which world seems like the more possible world to exist in? Predicting the future is hard. I will make a Metaculus question on this matter. I tried just now but ran into “An unexpected error” and don’t have time to troubleshoot.
I had not thought about the distinction between patent & copyright law in this case, I’ll have to examine that further another day.
Fair enough, it looks like the main disagreement there was just whether the word “upload” included backups.
Copyright won’t be the operating legal principle for all sorts of reasons. First is that copyright pertains only to “creative works” that were authored by a person. Uploaded people are very unlikely to be considered “creative works”. Modifications might be, but those seem more likely to be governed by patent-like laws if anything, as processes rather than end result.
Another is that copyright is fundamentally about ownership rights, and while it is possible that the future may be a dystopian hell in some ways, it won’t necessarily be one in which people are legally owned by others. If your prior is a conservative extension of current law, reinstating slavery does not seem to fit that. Even if it were, I doubt that copyright law specifically would be the means by which it is enacted.
Another is that copyright is primarily about publication, not use. I would expect there to be substantial legal restrictions surrounding how mind-states may be used along the same lines as existing laws about how people are permitted to interact with other people, though I suppose in some hell-world even that may be absent.
I do think there’s a key difference between a full upload that more or less maintains continuity of consciousness (e.g. you don’t experience anything beyond going to sleep and waking up in a different ??body??) and a backup that restores you to a point after a definite permanent break in said continuity, e.g. death or brain injury.
What is your epistemic confidence in “Copyright won’t be the operating legal principle for all sorts of reasons.”? I know we are both making assumptions here, how do we best test those assumptions and validate which world seems like the more possible world to exist in? Predicting the future is hard. I will make a Metaculus question on this matter. I tried just now but ran into “An unexpected error” and don’t have time to troubleshoot.
I had not thought about the distinction between patent & copyright law in this case, I’ll have to examine that further another day.