[klustregrif]

Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry, that is until they started doing it themselves at scale and now they are claiming it’s the law that’s broken, it’s crazy.

[socalgal2]

Nina Paley was against copyright, and she's still against copyright.

Her position is all artists copy

https://ninapaley.com/category/creativity/

[mock-possum]

Copying is not theft!

I do tend to vibe wjth Paley’s views on originality and creativity, though I haven’t kept up with her recently, good reminder!

[mock-possum]

Follow-up - hmmmm she’s a self professed terf though apparently

[troad]

Take the good, leave the bad. People are messy, flawed, complex.

[amarcheschi]

I think you can replace copyright with whatever the law <insert big company here> wants to break

Last but not least, generating csam and deep fakes porn on social medias and having to see it called free speech

[Spivak]

All of that last one really says is that broadly speaking the average person has no idea what free speech actually is and the kinds of things that it covers. I put it in the same bucket as like the young kids uploading to YouTube with the comment no copyright infringement intended thinking it's like plagiarism.

[thinkbud]

Can you elaborate on your view about "no copyright infringement intended" being related please?

[xgkickt]

In space, no-one can ... serve you warrants.

[Permit]

> Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry

Every day hundreds of links to archive.is are posted[1] to this website to get around paywalls. Technologists built file sharing tools to subvert copyright. It has never been one of the worst crimes imaginable in tech circles.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru... (85 instances in the last week)

[avaer]

You might be looking at a small time horizon.

What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists ?

[direwolf20]

Let's not forget the death of Aaron Swartz.

[avaer]

I don't think that was the "tech circles" being pro-copyright though.

I've never met someone who wasn't on Aaron's side on that one.

[anonymous908213]

"Tech circles" was never the claim. The original phrase was "tech industry", and that seems to be accurate. The post replying to it may have misread or misinterpreted what "tech industry" means. (Or perhaps the term is simply ambiguous and each person who reads it comes away with a different meaning!)

[aleph_minus_one]

> I've never met someone who wasn't on Aaron's side on that one.

This rather says something about the people by who you are surrounded. I know quite a lot of people who are on Aaron Swartz side here, for example people who are in academia or those who left academia but are still deeply interested in scientific topics.

[direwolf20]

You agree with them

[Dracophoenix]

Jstor is a tech company?

[jazzyjackson]

Well they certainly aren’t selling paper

[Dracophoenix]

Jstor is an information database provider that that specializes in the republication of academic journal articles. The web is the company's delivery mechanism, not the defining trait of the its existence. A public-facing website doesn't make it anymore of a tech company as such than it would the New York Times.

[ineedasername]

Maybe the time horizon for a statement like that shouldn’t include the decades before most current tech companies existed, much less at this scale even for the few still kicking around from 50 years ago.

[scotty79]

To be honest I don't care. Whatever helps the copyright industry burn is my ally.

[Spivak]

Hollywood sure, publishers sure, but tech? Where? The pro piracy pro game cracking open source p2p distribution people?

[account42]

The people adding DRM to operating systems, display connector standards and even the web.

[godshatter]

I doubt they are all for locking people out of copyrighted works, but more for keeping their jobs. But maybe they are, who knows.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry

This is rather the opinion of the copyright-industrial complex, as Spivak implied in his comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874194) by referring to Hollywood.

The attitude of the tech industry has always been much more vague (example: Google Books), and people from the hacker culture, who often work as programmers, are traditionally rather sceptical of at least the concrete manifestation of the copyright system ("information wants to be free", circumvention of paywalls, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, ...).

[int_19h]

This is from 1986 even:

"We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals."

[ineedasername]

The tech industry? I don’t remember that being the case, at least not in general. Content owners yes— and there’s tech overlap there with Sony and some others. Beside that it’s never been a major hill for tech to die on, except in having to implement systems to deal with DMCA takedowns, and that only as half baked as they could get away with. Which unfortunately has meant “not in favor of users” when it comes to to failure modes and where and how to default actions.

[hulitu]

"The laws are valid as long as they serve us". Regards, The Ruling Party.

[at1as]

I think this is part of a recurring pattern in tech of pushing boundaries around copyright.

In the last few years, we had Google scanning books, Google threatening to shut down News in Canada rather than pay publishers, LLMs summarizing articles on social platforms, crawlers bypassing paywalls, and so on.

Each time, the industry frames it as their interpretation of the current law, which were usually not written with these specific future use cases in mind.

In my view the current discussion regarding Gen AI is similar.

[8note]

i still dont see why google should pay news publishers for each reader google sends to the publisher. like the publisher is getting that view already and can monetize it how they see fit

[troad]

The Canadian and Australian news link taxes are a naked hand out to powerfully connected individuals like Rupert Murdoch. They're completely incoherent as policy without that fact.

Big Tech spinelessly folded when they should have just banned news links instead. Google has no obligation to index or link to extortionist news media at all. Watch Murdoch U-turn in ten seconds when no one can find his trash online.

In general, there's far too much compliance with protectionist mandates from corrupt foreign governments. One silver lining of the mostly dark cloud of deglobalisation is the fact that US businesses should no longer care what Australian or Turkish or Russian laws say at all, if they're not in those markets.