Technology

It's almost as if the people here favor individual rights over corporate profits.

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the "everyone has a streaming service" model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don't.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say 'please watch it this way, that's just how they rank stuff, sorry'?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that's behind all of the money they're trying to force it to make for them.

And that's just for one side of the debate.

Why isn't the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it's current incarnation?

Here's my guess. Piracy provides a competition against the horrible practices of streaming and entertainment companies that doesn't otherwise exist, forcing them to provide a better service.

Artists are just a single person making art and their service isn't gobbled up by the capitalist machine and turned into something user unfriendly. They don't usually make too much money, unlike huge entertainment corporations, either.

When it comes to piracy, individual content creators often don't care as long as they get money to live. There have been people who work on video games or movies who say they don't care if others pirate their work as long as others get to see it. But for AI, it copies and changes the work, stripping the art of its original watermark, and it sets itself up to be a replacement of the artist itself. It doesn't just spread their work without having you pay for it, it replaces the concept of needing an artist altogether, but only by using their labor in the first place without paying them for it.

If piracy let movie studios replace the idea of needing individual content creators, writers, artists actors, etc then people would feel differently I think. As it is now, people don't care about big studios, they care about the individual. Piracy currently only really harms the former and not the latter. AI is the opposite.

Everyone is different.

I personally think copyright and patent laws need to die. If you can't protect your own secrets, don't rely on taxpayer resources to do it for you.

White-collar workers were cool with machines and poorer nations taking blue-collar jobs. Now that it threatens them and their money, the hypocrisy is on full display.

It’s all the freedom of the high seas until AI gets mentioned.

The issue isn't quite so much copyright as privatization. And the distinction between "freedom on the high seas" and "AI" gets into the idea of the long term ownership of media.

One of the problems I run into, as a consumer of media, is that I can purchase a piece of content and then discover the service or medium I purchased it on has gone defunct. Maybe its an old video game with a console that's broken or no longer able to hook up to my TV. Maybe its a movie I bought on a streaming service that no longer exists. Maybe its personal content I've created that I'd like to transfer between devices or extend to other people. Maybe its a piece of media I don't trust sending through the mail, so I'd prefer to transfer it digitally. Maybe its a piece of media I can't buy, because no one is selling it anymore.

Under the Torrent model, I can give or get a copy of a piece of media I already own in a format that my current set of devices support. Like with a library.

Under the AI model, somebody else gets to try and extort licensing fees from me for a thing they never legally possessed to begin with.

I see a huge distinction between these two methods of data ownership and distribution.

Personally I think AI training is free use. I also think AI is a fad and generally used as a way to scam people.

However, artists complain about AI because it pulls from their business (in theory.) Artists generally don’t complain about piracy by the end user because the artist is usually still credited in someway (signature watermark etc.) and piracy doesn’t generally stop other people from paying for their art. AI in theory steals their jobs.

The main people who complain about traditional piracy are the executives of companies that purchased copyright on artist’s works through contracts that do not favor the artists.

Yeah, that's what happens when you decide on issues separately instead of following a consistent set of principles. I, personally, try to follow a consistent set of principles, with as few caveats as I can muster. Here's my take:

• copyright should be much shorter, perhaps back to the original 14 years w/ a single optional renewal of 14 years - principle: information should be freely available; caveat: smaller creators shouldn't get immediately screwed by a large org with more publishing capacity
• ISPs should only provide internet, and if a law is broken, LE should go after individuals - principle: personal responsibility, ISPs aren't responsible for how you use their service, they're only responsible for providing a consistent service
• piracy is wrong, but it shouldn't be prioritized - principle: piracy is a form of theft, since you're accessing something you don't have a legal right to; caveat: there's no evidence that piracy actually reduces sales, and some evidence that it improves it, so let it be
• AI is copyright violation because it has been shown to be capable of reproducing entire texts, so AI companies should compensate creators - principle: copyright, as above; exception: personal use should be fine (similar argument as piracy), but commercial use is profiting off another's work directly

I think everyone should decide what their principles are, and frame every time they deviate as an exception to those principles instead of just taking every issue at face value. If we don't have that foundation, everything becomes way too subjective.

I take my principles from libertarianism (NAP), not from objectivism (Ayn Rand), and I make exceptions based on utilitarianism.