[NoMoreNicksLeft]

The dead corpses of filmmakers and authors and actors are buried in unmarked graves out behind those companies' corporate headquarters. Unimaginable horror, that piracy. Why has no one intervened?

>If you're just a normal person you get to spend years in jail or worse.

Not that I'm a big fan of the criminalization of copyright infringement in the United States, but who has ever spent years in jail for this?

Besides, if it really bothered you, then we might not see this weird tone-switch from one sentence to the next, where you seem to think that piracy is shocking and "something should be done" and then "it's not good tht someone should spend time in jail for it". What gives?

[degamad]

> who has ever spent years in jail for this?

Aaron Swartz?

EDIT: apparently he wasn't in jail, he was on bail while the case was ongoing - but the shortest plea deal would still have had him in jail for 6 months, and the penalty was 35 to 50 years.

[moralestapia]

Nope, he didn't go to jail.

[snickerdoodle12]

> Besides, if it really bothered you, then we might not see this weird tone-switch from one sentence to the next, where you seem to think that piracy is shocking and "something should be done" and then "it's not good tht someone should spend time in jail for it". What gives?

What a weirdly condescending way to interpret my post. My point boils down to: Either prosecute copyright infringement or don't. The current status quo of individuals getting their lives ruined while companies get to make billions is disgusting.

[brookst]

> Either prosecute copyright infringement or don't

This is the absolute core of the issue. Technical people see law as code, where context can be disregarded and all that matters is specifying the outputs for a given set of inputs.

But law doesn’t work that way, and it should not work that way. Context matters, and it needs to.

If you go down the road of “the law is the law and billion dollar companies working on product should be treated the same as individual consumers”, it follows that individuals should do SEC filings (“either require 10q’s or don’t!”), and surgeons should be jailed (“either prosecute cutting people with knives or don’t!”).

There is a lot to dislike about AI companies, and while I believe that training models is transformative, I don’t believe that maintaining libraries of pirated content is OK just because it’s an ingredient to training.

But insisting that individual piracy to enjoy entertainment without paying must be treated exactly the same as datasets for model training is the absolute weakest possible argument here. The law is not that reductive.

[wormius]

> But law doesn’t work that way, and it should not work that way. Context matters, and it needs to.

As Anatole France famously quipped:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

[snickerdoodle12]

Pretty funny that your argument boils down to: It's okay to break the law if you do it as a company.

Copyright laws target everyone. SEC laws don't.

[brookst]

Not sure if I was unclear or you’re disingenuous. But that is not at all what I said.

[HWR_14]

It doesn't matter whether it's transformative. Copyright covers derivative works.