[NewsaHackO]

Everybody has had a complete 180 in terms of copyright protections. Before, nobody cared about downloading music, movies, TV shows, or pirating games. Now, when the copyright law is affecting them, they are gungho about protecting these billion-dollar companies' copyrights.

[jeppester]

A more logical explanation would be that there are different opinions and those who complain are usually louder.

[NewsaHackO]

Yes, that's my point. They are different and contradictory opinions, which show hypocrisy.

[inexcf]

No it is not your point. You're just arguing about a strawman that holds both of those contradictory positions.

[NewsaHackO]

You are attempting to invoke strawman. So is your point that there is not a significant overlap between posters who think that AI companies should not be allowed to pirated use copyrighted material in their training corpus and posters who themselves pirated copyrighted material such as movies, music, games, etc.?

[Dylan16807]

Yes, that is their point. Do you have evidence against it?

I'm sure you can find some overlap, but I bet the vast majority is caused by people making a distinction between commercial and noncommercial piracy. I don't think there's a big cohort of piracy hypocrites.

[NewsaHackO]

Due to the nature of the argument, of course I do not have evidence for or against it. However, I am willing to leave it at that, because I think that any rational observer will be able to look at the general mood toward copyright/privacy online (including using Limewire back in the day, pirating movies, downloading Photoshop etc.) and come to their own conclusion whether or not it's plausible that there isn't a significant overlap between the two.

[MSFT_Edging]

It's all power.

The music and movie companies have power. They have the funds to bankrupt you with a small army of lawyers. You as an individual do not stand a chance against corporate lawyers. They can destroy your life over fairly minimal and non-violent offenses.

AI companies are backed by the very powerful. They can steal all they want and use the same army of lawyers to bankrupt any small rights holder. The big rights holders go to the same parties and allow it to happen.

Regardless of the actual take on copyright, both methods skullfuck the little guy without power.

People cry foul because, at least in the US, we claim to live in a free country based on equality, yet there is a very obvious caste system of the haves and the havenots.

It errodes the legitimacy of the system. Imagine if for years you see news reports of a mother getting a judgment against her where she owes 100s of thousands because she seeded a Brittany Spears song. Then you suddenly see the same laws that were leveraged to instill fear in you, tossed aside when the rich and powerful say it doesn't count anymore, you're going to cry foul!

It's not a hypocrisy of position on copyright, it's bearing witness to the illegitimacy of the laws they're bound by.

[AuthAuth]

Its not a 180. You can be against copyright but as long as copyright is still being enforced on you then you can think it should be enforced on AI companies.

I'd prefer no copyright but we live in a world where there is copyright so its unfair that only AI companies get to be immune.

[preisschild]

Its not about "billion-dollar companies' copyrights", but also about voluntary copyleft free software. If I license my code under GPL I don't want other persons/companies just whitewash that code through LLMs and use it in their proprietary code.

[NewsaHackO]

I agree with this, and I think that it is an open question whether or not training on copyrighted material is considered transformative or not. However, someone said that thumbnails of full photos are considered transformative enough to allow fair use, and LLM training is (in my opinion) clearly more transformative than converting a picture to a thumbnail. But we will see how it plays out.