[gruez]

>why ordinary people cannot

They can. I don't think anyone got prosecuted for using an illegal streaming site or downloading from sci-hub, for instance. What people do get sued for is seeding, which counts as distribution. If anything AI companies are getting prosecuted more aggressively than "ordinary people", presumably because of their scale. In a recent lawsuit Anthropic won on the part about AI training on books, but lost on the part where they used pirated books.

[codedokode]

People got in trouble for filming in the cinema as I understand, there is a separate law for that.

[gruez]

But in that case even though filming isn't technically distribution, it's clearly a step to distributing copies? To take this to the extreme, suppose you ripped a blu-ray, made a thousand copies, but haven't packaged or sold them yet. If the FBI busted in, you'd probably be prosecuted for "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement" at the very least.

[snickerdoodle12]

It's just "training"

[gruez]

You seem to equate "training" (with scare quotes) with someone actually pirating a blu-ray, but they really aren't equivalent. Courts so far have ruled that training is fair use and it's not hard to see why. Unlike copying a movie almost verbatim (as with ripping a blu-ray), AI companies are actually producing something transformative in the form of AI models. You don't have to like AI models, or the AI companies' business models, but it strains credulity to pretend ripping a blu-ray is somehow equivalent to training an AI model.

[snickerdoodle12]

Who's to say why I downloaded and am now watching a movie? Is it for my enjoyment? Is it because I'm training my brain? How is me training my brain any different from companies training their LLMs?

Same goes for recording: I'm just training my skills of recording. Or maybe I'm just recording it so I can rewatch it later, for training purposes, of course.

[gruez]

>Who's to say why I downloaded and am now watching a movie? Is it for my enjoyment? Is it because I'm training my brain? How is me training my brain any different from companies training their LLMs?

None of this is relevant because Anthropic was only left off the hook for training, and not for pirating the books itself. So far as the court cases are playing out, there doesn't appear to be a special piracy exemption for AI companies.

>Same goes for recording: I'm just training my skills of recording. Or maybe I'm just recording it so I can rewatch it later, for training purposes, of course.

You can certainly use that as a defense. That's why we have judges, otherwise there's going to be some smartass caught with 1KG of coke and claiming it's for "personal consumption" rather than distribution.

None of this matters in reality, though. If you're caught with AV gear in a movie theater once, you'd likely be ejected and banned from the establishment/chain, not have the FBI/MPAA go after you for piracy. If you come again, you'd likely be prosecuted for trespassing. In the cases where they're going after someone in particular for making these rips, they usually have a dossier of evidence, like surveillance/transaction history showing that the same individual has been repeatedly recording movies, and watermarks correlating the screenings that the person has been in to files showing up on torrent sites.