Comment by strogonoff

If yesterday we were sued for singing the happy birthday song in public, and today we see corporations with market caps the size of countries pretending that IP ownership is not much of a thing, the alarm bells should be deafening. Control over intellectual property has given us fantastic things—Linux, Blender, etc.—and you can’t have GPL without an ability to defend copyleft. IP laws provide that ability.

One does not need to be a skeptic about machine learning and its potential as technology to refuse to engage with its practical applications when they are clearly ethically corrupt. The ends do not justify the means. Just like refusing to buy products of forced labour or disproportionate environmental impact, or to invest in war and bloodshed, everyone makes this decision for themselves.