Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates
ShepherdPie@midwest.social 1 week agoBecause most people pirating are doing it for their own personal entertainment while these companies are doing it to build a commercial product for sale. Pirates that sell access to their collections get a lot of negative attention, even from other people who pirate like me.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Copyright is utterly corrupted. Besides, I believe it is corrosive and outright dangerous in the age of the internet. Every time you open a website or a stream or anything, that is copied to your device. In the age of the printing press, it was about what happened in a few “factories”/printing houses. Libraries were fine because they didn’t copy, but online libraries do. Now, copyright is about all our communications. Total enforcement would mean total surveillance.
So this is not a defense of copyright. It is simply an explanation.
Building products for sale is what US-copyright is all about. Think about the copyright clause: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Without copyright, everything would be public domain. Everyone would be free to share any book or movie. That makes it hard to make money, to monetize your product, to recoup your investment. Copyright is supposed to be a way to enable that. It’s supposed to create an incentive to entertain you. If you have to pay for your entertainment, then someone will come along and entertain you to get your money. Piracy is an attack on that system.
If AI companies have to buy licenses, that would not incentivize much of anything. Licensing curated datasets for AI training would be one thing, but paying for individual books or even Reddit posts makes no sense. It would just make development slower and much more expensive. That makes it an unconstitutional use of copyright.