| Here it's good to point out that most of what is published is published within a platform that owns that content. Say you post a blog post on medium, or you write something on a subreddit. Who owns that content? The corporations? Reddit can sell this content if they wanted to and they do. If someone grabs this content without the platform's explicit permission it is copyright infringement. But to what end? The user? Do you think the corporation is thinking about the user when it argues for copyright infringement? It's about money. Now, we can go further with this and argue that copyright infringement can also hurt smaller businesses. Let's say the platforms start making deals with certain corporations so they can get ahold of this content. Maybe as training datasets. Maybe they already do. Now only bigger corporations with money and contacts will get access to this content and less smaller open-source projects will have the same resources to build models of the same caliber. Now it's hurting the competitive economy. Yes, an individual should be allowed to own their own content but if they freely post something on a blog or a forum, that is owned by someone else, they have already given their content away. And whether they like it or not it is being sold for monetary gain. That these corporations use the idea of copyright infringement as a way to bar everyone from this data without paying them is not about what is right, it is about money. It's a strategy. |