Do they think the hands-off treatment that giant corporations that basically print money get is going to somehow “trickle down” to them, too?
Because last I checked, the guys who ran Jetflicks are facing jail time. Like, potentially longer jail time than most murder sentences.
…but letting OpenAI essentially do the same without consequences will mean Open Source AI people will somehow get the same hands-off treatment? That just reeks of bullshit to me.
I just don’t fucking buy it and letting massive corporations just skirt IP laws while everyone else gets fucked hard by those same IP laws just doesn’t seem like the best hill to die on, yet plenty of people who are anti-copyright/anti-IP laws are dying on this fucking hill.
What gives?
I am personally of the opinion that current IP/copyright laws are draconian, but that IP/copyright isn’t inherently a bad thing. I just know, based on previous history in the US, that letting the Big Guys skirt laws almost never leads to Little Guys getting similar treatment.
Also, I hope this is an okay place for this rant. Thanks for keeping this space awesome. Please remove if this is inappropriate for this forum, please and thank you.
I’d like to point out that the title is conflating two very different acts of “piracy”. What I think of as “the little guy” piracy is content “theft”, whereby they acquire some content they didn’t pay for to enjoy. What “the big guy” piracy looks like is licensing theft, whereby they take something “freely available on the internet” and use it to make their own product which directly affects the creator.
The world in which I watch some P&R or play some Warhammer for free in my little cave looks identical to the world in which I didn’t do that. The world in which I read all the Warhammer lore and make a game and sell it using the same setting and characters without talking to GW directly devalues their IP and the world looks different (this is effectively what AI does as it can be made to reproduce a lot of the training data).
I’d love to live in a world without DRM and “always online” and purchased**TM (arbitrarily revocable) games, and convenient and affordable ways to access media so piracy isn’t necessary and the degree to which it would still happen would be so minor we wouldn’t even need laws for it. I support the kind of piracy that rallies against that shit, I do not support arbitrary license theft.
I think you’re on the money there. Copyright was originally intended as industry regulation, a way to prevent larger book publishers from just copying a smaller publisher’s book on day one and flooding the market with their copies. It’s applied to many more industries than just books (good!) but also to a wider group than actual publishers (bad!). When someone running a massive free ROMs site gets taken down, that’s probably reasonable, they’re playing the role of a publisher there and unfairly undercutting the competition (although the penalties in the US are still absurdly steep, as they usually are for individuals in this country). But when someone gets attacked for posting an image on social media, or streamers have to worry about the music playing in their games, or ISPs have to enforce against downloaders of pirated software, or modders have to be careful about linking their mod in such a way that no original code is included, that’s not what copyright should be.
It is not, in fact, bad that copyright applies to a wider group than publishers, unless you are using “publisher” extremely broadly to apply to “creators”.
If “someone gets attacked for posting an image on social media”, that rarely means “lawyers came after me because I posted a screenshot of a page from Sandman”. It often means that the poster took someone else’s art, snipped off the artist’s signature, and posted without attribution, and the artist is rightfully angry. Copyright is what enables that artist to continue to eat and make more art. The same goes for music, or software, or movies.
Sure, the system is horribly abused by uneven power structures, as every system in the world is. For music especially, we all know that the takedowns are usually issued by people who have nothing to do with the creation of the protected work, because of the way licensing and rights grants work in that industry. Automated takedown systems (which have to exist because of the scale of online content) also have no reasonable appeal mechanism, and the people making the decisions don’t (and can’t) make reasonable assessments about fair use and transformative works.
I’m not saying that everyone who participates in piracy is a bad, wicked thief–I absolutely participate in it myself. But copyright is not the villain here; that’s just trying to make us feel justified about our actions. Someone made a creative work I enjoyed, and I don’t have a moral right to the product of their effort for free.