It’s been amazing to see the arc of tech people going from “evil Disney, copyright is an abomination, information wants to be free” to “OMG copyright is inviolable and AI is taking money out of Plato’s descendants’ pockets!”
Yeah, remind me - is it Plato's descendants that people are concerned about here, or is it every single author who had any work in Anna's Archive, any work published online, any work published on github, etc?
I think that people are probably upset about the harm to living people who had their work stolen by Meta and other LLM companies - regardless of license, terms of use, or any other attempted protection.
I’m not even disagreeing. I’m just saying the shift in attitude about copyright in the tech space has been sudden, dramatic, and really funny. Remember “you wouldn’t steal a car”? Today’s anti-AI tech contingent are enthusiastically embracing that false equivalence that we all laughed at 20 years ago.
If like, Disney did a 180 overnight and bought rights from Google to scan every writer's saved work in Docs with some flimsy legal argument then a person saying "wait doesn't copyright actually protect that" would make sense. Even if you were previously upset about them suing schools for using 80 year art.
Creative works have always been accretive. There had never been a creative work made out of whole cloth, with no debt to any previous work.
The fact your opinions about creative works change based on who’s profiting does not change that.