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Comment by beeboobaa | Hacker News Reader

The thing is that countless of lives have been ruined by bigcorps for doing "piracy".

But now the bigcorps see it as a way to gain more money and control over other's lifes, so suddenly doing piracy is totally fine and for the greater good!

The worst part is that these individuals whose lives have been ruined weren't even harming anyone. Their operations were on such a small scale that it barely had any impact.

But these bigcorps are looking to reshape society, destroy many jobs and industries, rewrite social contracts, and it's all just hunky dory.

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> But now the bigcorps see it as a way to gain more money and control over other's lifes, so suddenly doing piracy is totally fine and for the greater good!

I'm definitely about as anti-corporation as you're going to find on HN, but I'm not sure I'm seeing what you're describing. It seems like bigcorps are definitely still fighting against piracy. At the moment, players like Anna's Archive appear to be winning because they've largely figured out technical means to bypass the legal problems, but I've been in this sphere for long enough to know you never really "win" this war--all you ever can do is carve out a temporary, limited space where knowledge is preserved and liberated. In fact, there are some pretty glaring weaknesses to stuff like Anna's Archive (which I'm not going to share here because I don't want to give anyone ideas) and I expect someone on the wrong side will figure those out in a decade at the most, and services like this will disappear.

> It seems like bigcorps are definitely still fighting against piracy

Microsoft with OpenAI is leading the race, but all of the AI orgs are basically just laundering copyrighted material they do not have the rights to.

Sure, but I'm not sure what your intent is for bringing this up.

If your intent is to claim that this is evidence bigcorps aren't still fighting against piracy, I don't think that's true. Corporations are amoral, and it's naive to expect that they have a consistent ethical stance which they apply to themselves.

That is to say, Microsoft can be pirating everything they can get their hands on while at the same time trying to prevent anyone from pirating their intellectual property. They don't care that that's hypocritical; it's profitable and that's what matters to corporations.

That is right. The near sole determiner of whether an idea flourishes these days is whether it greases the wheels of capitalism. Sometimes, those ideas are in line with our morality and greater good, but most of the time they are not.

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