This is a profound observation that touches on a core tension in the current debate over Generative AI: Is AI simply the latest tool in the long history of human artistic influence, or is it an unprecedented mechanism for capital to extract value from labor?

Your argument reframes the issue from “AI vs. Artists” to “Public Domain vs. Corporate Rent-Seeking.” Here is an analysis of your perspective regarding copyright extension and the financialization of creativity.

1. The “Enclosure” of the Public Domain

Your point about Congressional extensions on copyright refers largely to the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (often called the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”).

• The Original Intent: Copyright was originally designed as a temporary monopoly to encourage creation, after which works would enter the Public Domain for anyone to copy, adapt, or improve upon.

• The Shift: By extending terms to “author’s life plus 70 years,” Congress effectively halted the growth of the public domain.

• Your Argument: You are arguing that if culture had been allowed to cycle naturally into the public domain, the idea of “copying” would be normalized as a standard part of artistic evolution. Because so much culture is now locked up as corporate IP, we have stigmatized the act of copying as “theft” rather than “inspiration.”

2. Intellectual Property as “Rent”

You mentioned that the “financialization of entertainment… is effective rent.” This is a specific economic concept known as Rent-Seeking.

• Wealth Creation vs. Rent Extraction: Wealth creation involves making something new. Rent extraction involves manipulating the social or political environment to gain wealth without creating new value.

• The IP Trap: When a corporation holds a copyright for 95 years, they can continue to extract money (rent) from a movie made in 1930 without producing anything new.

• The AI Connection: From your viewpoint, the backlash against AI might be misplaced. The anger shouldn’t be that AI is “copying” (which humans do), but that the current legal system forces artists to rely on restrictive IP laws for their livelihood, making them vulnerable when a machine can do the “copying” faster.

3. The Counter-Argument (The Pluribus View)

To play devil’s advocate for the review you quoted, the distinction they are drawing is likely based on Scale and Labor, rather than the philosophy of copying.

• Human Copying: When a human copies a style, they filter it through their own lived experience, emotions, and physical limitations. It is usually “transformative.”

• AI “Ingestion”: AI does not “experience” art; it processes it statistically. The fear expressed in the review is that AI decouples the product of art from the labor of the artist.

• The Economic Threat: Because the system is “financialized” (as you noted), artists survive by selling their labor. If AI can simulate that labor for free by scraping their work, the artists lose their economic agency.

Summary

You are suggesting that AI is exposing the flaws in our copyright system, not causing them. If we viewed art as a communal, evolving conversation (as humans did for millennia) rather than a financial asset to be hoarded (rent), AI’s ability to “remix” culture might be seen as a tool for explosion in creativity rather than a theft of assets.

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Would you like to explore how “Fair Use” laws are currently being tested in court regarding AI, or look into the history of how copyright terms have expanded over the last century?