Mass scraping the Internet and linking to different places was also legally questionable until lawyers hammered it out. Would the world be a better place if search engines had been preemptively ruled illegal?
As a regular joe, try to do something legally questionable against Oracle, and then "have the lawyers hammer it out". See how much of a good place the world is in this case.
The problem is this stuff is highly asymmetric. Things are always "hammered out" in their favor, because you cannot afford to be a party to the "hammering out".
Google torrent lawsuits. Tens of thousands of people have had their lives ruined due to torrent use.
Claiming that there's anything illegal about adblockers is a real stretch, although I can definitely believe that they will eventually be outlawed either by statute or through some torturous legal argument agreed to by corrupt judges.
> Tens of thousands of people have had their lives ruined due to torrent use.
That is a tiny fraction of the number of people who did it. There are companies that got destroyed due to lawsuits as well, I wouldn't say lawsuits are less of an issue for companies than people, significant lawsuits are very rare in either case.
> Claiming that there's anything illegal about adblockers is a real stretch
It is legally questionable, I didn't say it was illegal we were talking about questionable actions.
So in which sense was it "hammered out"? Since not many people got in trouble for it, is it now legal to torrent copyrighted content, and to block ads?
If you're claiming it's still legally questionable, then it was not "hammered out" at all, was it?
I can think up a few legal ideas off the top of head in regards to adblockers:
From a copyright point of view… adblockers make a derivative work so they should pay the content maker for those. Those are worth orders of magnitude more than the ad would have paid.
Or maybe unfair business practice. Their whole aim is deprive another business of income. Or how they shake down companies for money so the blocker becomes less effective on that site.
People did get in trouble for pirating content. That you don't know any of them personally is irrelevant. I don't personally know anyone who got radiation poisoning, so I suppose radiation is not toxic?
Anyway, you downloading torrents is in no way "hammering out a gray area". It's just you being a small fish and slipping under the radar. The area is just as gray as before. Try to do something significant with the pirated content, as the AI startups do, and you'll immediately get trouble.
> Try to do something significant with the pirated content, as the AI startups do, and you'll immediately get trouble.
No they won't. 80% of the people I meet at tech events either have an AI startup or are working at one. Basically all of them are doing legally questionable stuff, when it comes to copyright law.
Anyone who has ever trained a model, or finetuned a model, is likely using other people's data. This is universal. It is almost everyone.
And yet, despite this being a gray area, basically nobody is getting into trouble for this. We are all getting away with it. And there is only a singular lawsuit about this against like 4 companies and nobody else. (midjourney, runwayML, Stable diffusion, and deviant art)
So the point stands. Almost nobody is getting into trouble, despite this behavior being widespead everywhere, and if you don't do the same thing then you are going to fall behind and fail.
> Anyone who has ever trained a model, or finetuned a model, is likely using other people's data. This is universal. It is almost everyone.
Citation needed.
The whole reason there's no legal trouble is that it cannot be proved conclusively that they used copyrighted data for training.
"when the CTO of OpenAI is asked if Sora was trained on YouTube videos, she says “actually I’m not sure” and refuses to discuss all further questions about the training data". Why do you think she's denying the obvious?
Most of the hammering out is giant corporations hammering each other, trying to forge a niche to more effectively extract rents.
The solution is minimal or no government intervention to create state-sponsored monopolies. When you do have those interventions, sometimes corporation A will win, sometimes corporation B will win, but the small scale individual will always lose.
I think the initial idea to make disparate knowledge available more easily is a great one. And as old as recorded knowledge.
So the idea of a search engine in itself is a great one imho. But the idea of an ad-display-engine is imho not so clear cut. Especially when it is a de facto monopoly.
Especially when the monopolist can go the route of active enshittification, making stuff harder to find just to increase ad revenue.
Just to name one example, where we might want to wait until we take a look at the scales and decide if it really is a net benefit to the world, what Google is doing.
The playbook of "Do something legally gray > raise funding & expand > pivot away from legally gray OR employ lawyers to make it not legally gray" is basically the standard playbook of startups, the examples are countless: AirBnb, YouTube, Spotify, Uber, OpenAI, etc, etc...
I'm sure it isn't always a bad idea, but struggling to come up with good examples for when the outcome from doing so have been more than just "shareholder value went up".
Airbnb, Spotify, YouTube and Uber wouldn't see shareholder value increase if people didn't find those services useful. The number doesn't just magically go up if you build something nobody wants.
Sure, but also, "shareholder value go up" just isn't very interesting or overall helpful to the world. It's helpful to the shareholders, sure, but beyond that?
It’s the ideology of disruption. As if this were an inherently good thing.
They could go the democratic route and raise awareness, create enough support within the constituency for their idea and have the democratic institutions adapt the respective laws.
Or they can decide that they are above such trivialities as the law and democratic process, move fast and break things and grab the fortune they feel entitled to have.
That’s the ideology behind this anti-democratic capitalist system.