[xienze]

Remember how people used to justify their own personal software piracy with arguments like "information wants to be free", "no one stole anything, you still have the data", "I was never going to buy it anyway", and "copyright should be abolished?"

> Instead the AI companies reached these absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims.

Isn't that at least something? How many people pirating software ever settled with the companies they "victimized?"

[monooso]

How many people pirating software stole every piece of copyrighted material in existence and then used that material to generate billions of dollars which they kept for themselves?

[xienze]

You keep using that word "stole", you can't steal digital information, remember?

> then used that material to generate billions of dollars which they kept for themselves?

Hasn't it also lead to distilled, free and open models that everyone can benefit from?

[curtisblaine]

No. I want either:

1. The copyright infringement of big corpos fully justifying my copyright infringement in the face of law

2. The copyright infringement of big corpos being prosecuted in the same exact way as my copyright infringement would.

There is really no middle ground.

[matheusmoreira]

> Remember how people used to justify their own personal software piracy

A courtesy. There was never any need to justify it.

> Isn't that at least something?

Yes, it's a joke. Why do they get to infringe copyrights with impunity while normal people get destroyed? Either go after them like the copyright industry always does and punish them properly, or abolish copyright straight up. This "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense is straight up disgusting.

> How many people pirating software ever settled with the companies they "victimized?"

Too many to list. Also, nobody is victimizing billion dollar corporations.

[phoghed]

So you don’t actually care, you just want them punished out of spite because some other guy was for doing something similar but not the same?

[matheusmoreira]

Correct. I'm one of the copyright abolitionists the other person alluded to. It's the selective enforcement that's disgusting.

I mean, what is this? Their balls suddenly drop off? They only have the audacity to prosecute random people? Smaller companies? When they're up against trillion dollar AI companies they suddenly become cowards? That's so incredibly disgusting, and it made me completely lose even the small amount of respect for copyright that I had managed to rationalize over the years.

[phoghed]

So you believe a dude was wrongly punished, and to you justice would be for everyone else to also be wrongly punished? Kind of dumb tbh

[matheusmoreira]

My mind is not capable of the cognitive dissonance necessary to accept that billionaires get a slap on the wrist while mere mortals get police helicopters descending upon them. In order to maintain my mental health, I must have consistency.

So either enforce the law the same way against everyone correctly and proportionally, or your law and its enforcement are illegitimate and shouldn't exist. If some activity is harmless enough for some billionaires to do at massive scales and settle in court like it was some footnote in history, then nobody should be punished for it at all.

[phoghed]

Brother Kim Dotcom was worth about $200,000,000

[cinntaile]

Settlements after the fact, not agreements beforehand.

No that's not something. That's just having infinitely more money to fight legal battles.

[mapontosevenths]

When a crime is only punishable by fines it isn't a crime, it's just an activity with a tax.

The AI companies knew that and bet, correctly, that it would be worth the cost.