Four more large Internet service providers told the US Supreme Court this week that ISPs shouldn’t be forced to aggressively police copyright infringement on broadband networks.
While the ISPs worry about financial liability from lawsuits filed by major record labels and other copyright holders, they also argue that mass terminations of Internet users accused of piracy “would harm innocent people by depriving households, schools, hospitals, and businesses of Internet access.” The legal question presented by the case “is exceptionally important to the future of the Internet,” they wrote in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Monday.
I never understand how this community relates to copyright. It’s all the freedom of the high seas until AI gets mentioned. Then the most dogmatic copyright maximalists come out It’s all anti-capitalist until AI is mentioned and then the most conservative, devout Ayn Rand followers show up.
Some of it is about the "Why"s.
Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.
Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.
The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)
Why is it the opposite with AI?
Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.
And that’s just for one side of the debate.
Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?
To me the AI thing is about big vs small.
Steal from a big company, that’s the cost of doing business baby!
Steal from a small business and… WTF do you think you’re doing?
The AI thing is largely large companies stealing from everyone. Large and small alike.
Real-world example: I’m not alone in this, as has been made clear from my time on the internet, but if I saw someone shoplifting groceries from Walmart or something, then, I didn’t see anyone stealing from Walmart. I didn’t see shit. Turn that around and say someone stole some handmade trinket from a booth at a convention, I’m going to go find the nearest security guard.
AI steals from small artists and authors, commentators and you and I, as much as it steals from big businesses. We, the people, don’t have the same capability to fight against someone like openAI taking our shit, compared to a multinational media conglomerate. The AI folks seem to believe that it’s fine as long as nobody complains, then enter agreements with meta and Reddit to buy up all of our written, photographed, and otherwise self-published information to buy everything we’ve ever submitted to their platform.
The big companies are raping us of our intellectual property, claiming it as their own, and selling it to other businesses for fun and profit. We generated all of that content that they sold and they gave us nothing for it. They got it for free, all the while, selling us ads and confusing “algorithm based” feeds of bullshit to try to enhance their bottom line.
We’ve been lied to, stolen from, intellectually and financially raped, and we’ve gotten nothing in return. They took our inherent need to connect with one another, and turned it into dollars in their bank accounts. They’re not providing a service, certainly not providing one worth using… What they are doing is farming us to line their own pockets. Our ideas, thoughts, comments, videos and pictures are their crops that they repackage and sell to whomever will pay for it. This is just the latest in “people are the product” things that gets repackaged and resold back to the people it came from, and we get the privilege to pay to use the AI they develop off the backs of our labor.
If AI wants to steal from big businesses like news media outlets, or companies like Disney, nobody would give any shits about it. Go the fuck ahead. You want to wholesale steal the thoughts and ideas of every person who has ever submitted anything to the internet? Fuck you.
AI is borderline useless anyways, just the hallucinations of a machine that’s doing it’s best to regurgitate the most likely combination of symbols that will make the “success” metric go up. The order of those symbols is entirely based on a long history of what symbols, in what order, followed a real interaction between two flesh creatures. Emulate the response of the flesh creatures, win the favor of the flesh creatures.
It doesn’t think, it doesn’t care, it gives canned responses from a mind bogglingly large dataset of possibilities. The ones that are given the blessing of the fleshy creators are ranked higher than those that don’t. It’s a tape recorder with more steps. A lot more.
I’m not seeing anything remarkable from organized groups. For example, the Internet Archive and libraries favor strong fair use. The copyright industry obviously sees this as an opportunity to expand property rights against the public interest. Tech companies have always been on either side, depending on their particular interest. Basically, everyone is on the usual side, just as you’d expect. Only on social media are things kinda weird. I don’t think people are considering their own interests, but I really don’t get what drives this.
Here’s my guess. Piracy provides a competition against the horrible practices of streaming and entertainment companies that doesn’t otherwise exist, forcing them to provide a better service.
Artists are just a single person making art and their service isn’t gobbled up by the capitalist machine and turned into something user unfriendly. They don’t usually make too much money, unlike huge entertainment corporations, either.
When it comes to piracy, individual content creators often don’t care as long as they get money to live. There have been people who work on video games or movies who say they don’t care if others pirate their work as long as others get to see it. But for AI, it copies and changes the work, stripping the art of its original watermark, and it sets itself up to be a replacement of the artist itself. It doesn’t just spread their work without having you pay for it, it replaces the concept of needing an artist altogether, but only by using their labor in the first place without paying them for it.
If piracy let movie studios replace the idea of needing individual content creators, writers, artists actors, etc then people would feel differently I think. As it is now, people don’t care about big studios, they care about the individual. Piracy currently only really harms the former and not the latter. AI is the opposite.
The issue isn’t quite so much copyright as privatization. And the distinction between “freedom on the high seas” and “AI” gets into the idea of the long term ownership of media.
One of the problems I run into, as a consumer of media, is that I can purchase a piece of content and then discover the service or medium I purchased it on has gone defunct. Maybe its an old video game with a console that’s broken or no longer able to hook up to my TV. Maybe its a movie I bought on a streaming service that no longer exists. Maybe its personal content I’ve created that I’d like to transfer between devices or extend to other people. Maybe its a piece of media I don’t trust sending through the mail, so I’d prefer to transfer it digitally. Maybe its a piece of media I can’t buy, because no one is selling it anymore.
Under the Torrent model, I can give or get a copy of a piece of media I already own in a format that my current set of devices support. Like with a library.
Under the AI model, somebody else gets to try and extort licensing fees from me for a thing they never legally possessed to begin with.
I see a huge distinction between these two methods of data ownership and distribution.
It’s almost as if the people here favor individual rights over corporate profits.
You have a corporation that doesn’t want to spend money to care for individual copyrights, or even lose customers over it. That describes ISPs. Still, people side with the corporation.
When you say individual rights, you, of course, mean copyrights; intellectual property rights. Giving property such a high priority is such a clash to the otherwise anti-capitalist attitudes here. It’s not just pro capitalist. It’s pro conservative capitalist.
I don’t think anybody here is siding with ISPs. We’re just happy to hear that they’re having difficulties policing piracy.
When I say individual rights I mean any and all rights an individual has or should have. In the case of piracy, an individual should have a right to entertainment media at a reasonable cost. The more corporations increase the cost of media access, the more piracy proliferates. In the case of AI, an individual should have the right to earn a living. Corporations are using the works of individuals to ultimately increase their own profits without due compensation to the individual.
I don’t know how you got to pro conservative capitalism from a single anti-corporatist statement, but it likely took you several leaps of logic that I’m not going to even try to follow.
Everyone is different.
I personally think copyright and patent laws need to die. If you can’t protect your own secrets, don’t rely on taxpayer resources to do it for you.
White-collar workers were cool with machines and poorer nations taking blue-collar jobs. Now that it threatens them and their money, the hypocrisy is on full display.
Americans would not want the price of produce to get higher but a) it relies on employing undocumented labor and b) it’s very hard to find American citizens these days willing to do that kind of hard physical work.
No it isn’t. It’s very hard to find Americans willing and to work hours past a normal shift with little to no protective gear in a workplace that makes OSHA look like a bedtime fable.
Put workers in shifts, give them gear, and stop asking ridiculously dangerous stuff, and you’ll find plenty of Americans willing to work the job. The Meat Packing industry is the perfect example of this because they were hiring Americans. Then they decided immigrants were cheaper and they raised the price. This idea of them passing the savings along is literally marketing material. They aren’t dripping prices unless the market forces them to do so.
It was always the boss versus the workers.
Heh. Yes. It’s even beyond hypocrisy. Many will outright say that automation is supposed to churn over these “dirty, boring” jobs while making their own lives better. Even finding themselves on the receiving end of progress, they don’t call for a better social safety net. No, they just want to get rent for their property. I wonder how much copyright industry has to do with the steady move to the economic right, through its huge influence on culture.
Well yeah, but the displaced workers should get a share of the profits. Most proponents of automation are also proponents of a UBI. It’s not supposed to be an existential threat.
Yeah, that’s what happens when you decide on issues separately instead of following a consistent set of principles. I, personally, try to follow a consistent set of principles, with as few caveats as I can muster. Here’s my take:
I think everyone should decide what their principles are, and frame every time they deviate as an exception to those principles instead of just taking every issue at face value. If we don’t have that foundation, everything becomes way too subjective.
I take my principles from libertarianism (NAP), not from objectivism (Ayn Rand), and I make exceptions based on utilitarianism.
Personally I think AI training is free use. I also think AI is a fad and generally used as a way to scam people.
However, artists complain about AI because it pulls from their business (in theory.) Artists generally don’t complain about piracy by the end user because the artist is usually still credited in someway (signature watermark etc.) and piracy doesn’t generally stop other people from paying for their art. AI in theory steals their jobs.
The main people who complain about traditional piracy are the executives of companies that purchased copyright on artist’s works through contracts that do not favor the artists.
My line with AI is between AI for profit and AI for fair use.
Hmm. That’s not how the US legal concept Fair Use works. What do you mean when you say fair use?
I would infer from what they wrote that they mean anything not for profit. Seeding isn’t “fair use” in the legal definition.
Yeah stuff like fan art, modding games, etc
AI for that kind of stuff is pretty fun
Yes, but it’s still not quite clear. Arguably, when you pirate rather than paying, your profit is the money saved on the purchase. Courts tend to see it that way.
Besides, Meta releases its models for free and I don’t see them getting less flak. In fact, when they were sued by the NYT corporation looking for a profit, people still sided with the profiteers.