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Comment by phantasmish | Hacker News Reader

There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money.

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".

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> There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money.

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.

You're assuming way too much with "not there yet". The point is the corpos will violate copyright with impunity today, and then in a few years sign a bunch of settlement agreements and pull the ladder up behind them.

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.

Because we’d like the powerful to feel the crunch from bad law rather than get a backdoor, so they have to use their power to change things for everyone instead of just getting it changed for themselves.

More often than not the rich just codify the "backdoor" for themselves in such case. A rich man can buy the $30,000 registered machinegun and pay the $200 NFA stamp and be 100% legal, the poor man who 3d prints a $0.50 of plastic to do the same thing goes to jail for 15 years.

"Why can't we just be happy" that individuals and smaller companies get sued into oblivion over copyright violations, while large AI companies can scrape everyone's data and use it for training and completely ignore copyright while generating code and images and text and music based on all that that displaces the demand for the originals? Is that what you're asking?

The entities training AI are not anti-copyright, or anti-intellectual-property. If I were to steal their AI models they would sue me into the ground and probably win. Furthermore, even if you are anti-copyright, you probably still don't want your shit scraped by AI trainers since the bots are extremely aggressive, almost like a bona fide DDoS attack.

AI is not an attack on copyright, it is an attempt to replace it with something worse.

He might be happy for them and also sad because there is no rule of law.

Its the rule of bribery quite frankly. Name it lobbying and nobody bats an eye on it.

It's not so simple.

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.

Pirating an old movie to sell is not considered ethically problematic everywhere. In many, many countries on earth pirated DVDs were sold at the marketplace, and no one – buyer or seller – had qualms about it. When the authorities shut down such sales, it was almost entirely because they were being pressured by the USA and a handful of other Western governments, not because the local ethical perspective on this changed.

This genre of comment is so tedious. We aren't talking about everywhere, the FBI is a US agency, the big companies we're discussing have won in US court. This thread is about the US.

The FBI and courts are enforcing the law that exists solely because the Founding Fathers enshrined it, but that says nothing about the ethical views that might exist among Americans. There are plenty of Americans who don’t find selling pirated media ethically problematic and would like to see the kind of marketplace sales and wide use of Bittorrent boxes that people in other countries have enjoyed.

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