Comment by SamPatt
3 years ago
Illegality and wrongdoing are completely distinct categories.
I'm not convinced that most copyright infringements are immoral regardless of their legal status.
If you post your images for the world to see, and someone uses that image, you are not harmed.
The idea that the world owes you something after you deliberately shared it with others seems bizarre.
Imagine if every book or advertisement or public conversation you overheard led to future claims that you had unethically learned from public information. It’s such a weird worldview.
(BTW I forbid you from using my comment here in your future reasoning)
> If you post your images for the world to see, and someone uses that image, you are not harmed.
Let me define a few cases of 'uses that image' and see where your line in the sand drops
* If someone used that image as part of an advertising campaign for their product, they are profiting off your work. Are you not harmed?
* If someone used that image and pretended they created it. Are you not harmed?
* If someone used that image and sold it directly. Are you not harmed?
Someone claiming they created something which I created is the closest to harm on that list. Fraud should be punished.
The others aren't harmful, unless you're defining harm to include the loss of something which someone believes they are entitled to, a concept which is fraught with problems.
Creating an image (or any non-physical creation) doesn't obligate the world to compensate you for your work. If you choose to give it away by posting it on the internet, that's your choice, but you are entitled to nothing.
>I'm not convinced that most copyright infringements are immoral regardless of their legal status.
You're right and wrong. You're right because most infringement is from people who can do minimal damage and in fact so more help by giving awareness to your works by sharing. But this is only becsuse copyright it working (most of the time) against corporate entities who don't want to leave any room for legalities to come in.
If copyright ended I'd bet my bottom dollar Disney and all the other billionaires companies would be spamming any and everything that gets moderately popular. And Disney can put advertise the original artist easily.
My statement above is that their activities are illegal and wrong, not that one implies the other. They are illegal because of the copyright violation, and wrong because regardless of what the law says, using the images for training despite the artists' every appeal to the contrary (being vocal about the issue, putting a robots.txt file to avoid scraping, and now using adversarial techniques to protect their work from being stolen) is just moronic. It's like shitting on their front yard when they've asked you a million times not to shit in the front yard, put a sign that says "Please don't shit on my front yard", and sprayed insecticide all over the grass to try to deter you from shitting on the front yard. And yet you still shit on their front yard and even have the balls to argue that there's nothing wrong or illegal about it. This is absolutely insane.
Your analogy makes no sense.
Your yard is your property. If I shit on your property then I've trespassed and damaged your property.
Digital images are nonrivalrous.
If you make an infinite number of photocopies and hand them out for free to all passing strangers (aka sharing an image online) then if a stranger uses one of those photocopies, they haven't trespassed or damaged your property.