Half of young Norwegians say online piracy is an acceptable way to save money

Have you traveled with friends or a family before? If you go on a 18-hour cross-ocean flight and forgo in-flight meals because eating is food industry propaganda, then you're going to have a lot of hungry/angry travel companions.

Audiobooks.com can be much cheaper, click through from Google shopping

Artists - and even movie studios - do deserve to get paid. I have no qualms with paying them so long as the arrangement is reasonable. Paying for downloads that I actually own is reasonable; streaming is not.

As for everyone else... I could pirate my music too. But I don't because I can afford it, so I should pay for it.

Those living in poverty already fall short of fulfilling their hierarchy of needs in many ways. They certainly do not have the money to access film and media, so it's not like the production company is losing out on sales.

Do we really want to take the position of putting forth a monetary requirement for cultural enrichment (by condemning piracy)? It isn't like stealing someone's movie or concert ticket, where it deprives someone else of their enjoyment. It's a societal net-positive in all regards.

When it comes to mediums of knowledge such as books, the argument becomes even stronger. There are so many books that are either exorbitantly priced or just completely unavailable. We live in an age where we can send robots to other planets, create AIs that beat the Turing Test, and communicate with (almost) the entirety of the global population from a small rectangle in our pockets--but you're telling me I can't read this book because either I don't have $200 or because there's only 10 physical copies and they're all rented out? The hill that knowledge and information should be accessible to everyone is the hill I'm willing to die on.

Now do social security benefits. Or hell, money in a bank account.

Are you suggesting that we never had ownership, it just wasn't obvious? If so, please cite your sources.

And that right there is the crux of the argument. Cancelling access to physical media was never a thing, because you "bought" it. Digital media shouldn't be any different. If I buy a file and someday it doesn't work because of something you did, you're responsible for it, but corporations have been able to get away with no responsibility. Example:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/02/playstatio...

> [Diddy] was arrested and indicted in the Southern District of New York in September 2024 on charges of racketeering, sex trafficking by force, and transportation for purposes of prostitution. He is awaiting trial in federal custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. His cellmate is Sam Bankman-Fried, who is serving a 25-year sentence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Combs

Saville was mind-meltingly evil, but in terms of the damage done, even he pales in comparison to Cheney, W, Obama, Netanyahu, Biden, Murdoch, etc.

Many people won't like these facts, and will reject them with prejudice. And that's largely because of corporate media :/

So yeah, the hypocrisy really stings when they try to blame online piracy for the state of the world. It's staggering weaponized hypocrisy.

What premise that can infer "pirating art to watch is acceptable" can also simultaneously infer "pirating art to train LLMs on is not acceptable"? "Information should be free to be replicated and reused as long as you're not making a profit"? This would rule out OpenAI, but Stable Diffusion would be acceptable (it's a true non-profit).

What other premises could there be? "One should be able to watch all information, but not replicate it"? But you can't pirate without replicating the information. "You shouldn't repost stuff without consent"? But this rules out piracy.

"Information should be free to be replicated and reused as long as it comes from a big corporation"? But piracy from indie games is a thing, too. And how do you define "big"? Also, is training stuff solely on Getty, Shutterstock etc okay, then? What about books3? "But even though publishers own the rights to the book, individual authors wrote it." But the same is true for piracy from big corporations. People worked on it.

This is why it's so hard to square it, because I cannot see any rational moral foundation that simultaneously condones piracy (possibly indie games too) while condemning Stable Diffusion and the hobbyist AI ecosystem. The only other explanation is that it is irrational, or as the GP put it, "that people are by and large just in it for themselves". Piracy for me but not for thee.

If you mean because OpenAI is selling access to the LLMs then an artist is doing the same selling art which was painted using skills they gained from consuming pirated material

Of course some Copyright Fans want to give artists cuts of AI revenue if the material was used for training. Laws that will absolutely never be used on human artists of course...