[canoebuilder]

Without Google, YouTube, and Dropbox, copyrighted material would just be where the copyright holder deemed and authorized it to be. (save some amount of piracy of course)

It would actually be more in line with the “Internet idea” of a decentralized network, not a massive hub and spoke arrangement.

Saying, “Hey, we already have some big corporations where copyright infringement plays some role in their business model, why not add a few more in the form of “Open”AI, and whoever else.” Is not a good argument.

The centralized server farms and behemoth corporations are in many ways representative of what the commercial internet has become, but are not a fulfillment of the original “internet idea.”

[siva7]

Piracy was at the core of the internet idea from its very inception through hacker culture.

[canoebuilder]

You seem to have misunderstood what I was meaning to convey. I wasn’t even meaning to say much in the way of the virtues or not of piracy, or the legitimacy of copyright in it’s present form.

If Google, YouTube, Dropbox didn’t exist you could still share files with your friends.

Sharing a file with a friend and him benefiting in some way from that is a different thing entirely than massive centralizing corporations flouting copyright rules to benefit commercially and increase their power.

More of the former, less of the latter.