[mannanj]

The companies that did copyright infringement and unethically scrapped data think that copyright infringement and unethically scrapping data is wrong and needs to be stopped.

Though only in particular situations, like when it’s done to them and not when they do it. Cause they have the power and are morally right and know better than you. And if you question this at all, well you’re a threat to American values and a supporter of the Chinese and leading to the break down of Democracy.

This isn’t a type of reasoning argument or manipulation tactic used by the rich throughout history to trick the naive and gullible masses or anything like that. Trust me, I’m rich and I’m morally right. /sarcasm

[brookst]

It’s been amazing to see the arc of tech people going from “evil Disney, copyright is an abomination, information wants to be free” to “OMG copyright is inviolable and AI is taking money out of Plato’s descendants’ pockets!”

[solid_fuel]

> taking money out of Plato’s descendants’ pockets

Yeah, remind me - is it Plato's descendants that people are concerned about here, or is it every single author who had any work in Anna's Archive, any work published online, any work published on github, etc?

I think that people are probably upset about the harm to living people who had their work stolen by Meta and other LLM companies - regardless of license, terms of use, or any other attempted protection.

[brookst]

Sure, that’s the motte / bailey. Easy to point to living, starving writers who suffer grevious harm, in defense of perpetual copyright. Disney and others use literally this exact argument year after year.

I’m not even disagreeing. I’m just saying the shift in attitude about copyright in the tech space has been sudden, dramatic, and really funny. Remember “you wouldn’t steal a car”? Today’s anti-AI tech contingent are enthusiastically embracing that false equivalence that we all laughed at 20 years ago.

[toraway]

Having a static, immovable belief system about something like copyright that is unaffected by seismic shifts in the real world also doesn't seem very logical.

If like, Disney did a 180 overnight and bought rights from Google to scan every writer's saved work in Docs with some flimsy legal argument then a person saying "wait doesn't copyright actually protect that" would make sense. Even if you were previously upset about them suing schools for using 80 year art.

[brookst]

Sure. So you’re saying MPAA was right and you’ve come around?

Creative works have always been accretive. There had never been a creative work made out of whole cloth, with no debt to any previous work.

The fact your opinions about creative works change based on who’s profiting does not change that.