I agree. Knowledge should belong to all of humanity.
But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet.
But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet.
Enforcement being unjustly balanced in favor of the rich & powerful is a separate issue from whether there should be enforcement in the first place—"if we must do this, it should at least be fair, and if it's not going to be fair, it at least shouldn't be unfair in favor of the already-powerful" is a totally valid position to hold, while also believing, "however, ideally, we should just not do this in the first place".
Why can't you just be happy for those few who are lucky enough to be able to violate copyright with no consequences? Yes, I know you'd want everyone to be able to violate copyright, but we're not there yet.
I'd love to see copyright slowly become irrelevant, but even with that goal we should expect to see large corpos being the last to stop respecting it.
AI is not an attack on copyright, it is an attempt to replace it with something worse.
There are violations of copyright which are ethically fine, i.e. pirating an old movie to watch.
Then there are violations of copyright which are ethically problematic, i.e. pirating an old movie to sell.
When a big company violates copyright the nature of the violation is always much closer to the latter.
Are they?
I said they're profiting from other people's hard work, a separate concept.
Also Google respects robots.txt. Every site that Google surfaces chose to be in the index.
Knowledge is shared among humanity at a rapid speed. Everyone benefits.
It’s mind boggling how anyone could be opposed to that.
While not all the companies in question may or may not be profiting from these things some of them are, and most if not all of their employees certainly are as well.
I DO care that nearly 2M different IPs are used to try to pull 42k commits out of a git repo one by one when they could just git clone it ...
To deny people access to things is one thing, wanting to do it by impossible means is quite something else. Who even has time to scavage the universe looking for possible infringement on their works and also the money to deal with it?
I only rarely browse without some form of content blocking (usually privacy-focused... that takes care of enough ads for me, most of the time). I keep a browser profile that's got no customizations at all, though, for verifying that bugs I see/want to report are not related to one of my extensions.
Every once in a while, I'll accidentally open a link to a news site (or to an archive of such a site) in that vanilla profile. I'm shocked at how many ads you see if you don't take some counter measures.
I just confirmed in that profile: archive.is definitely puts ads around the sites they've archived.
And arguably I used to think it was the Internet Archive.
It does make this case seem problematic now that I know the details.
Anything which does that should be legal, and anything that stifles those advances should not.
Where US law applies varies by which law it is; there are US laws that apply only outside of the US [0], as well as US laws which have application both inside and outside the US.
[0] e.g., the federal torture statute, 18 U.S. Code § 2340A(a), “Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”
DCMA absolutely does apply to European firms selling their goods and services in the US.
I'm only angry with them when they pay hush money to IP extortionists.
This is true knowledge socialism.
- ChatGPT is in the "bait" phase of "bait and switch" plan. It is trying to make us dependent on it, so that it can extract maximum profit later.
Information can be made available to all, and at the same time, we can make it so others cannot resell or repackage it for profit like what AI companies are doing.