Comment by klustregrif
15 hours ago
Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry, that is until they started doing it themselves at scale and now they are claiming it’s the law that’s broken, it’s crazy.
Nina Paley was against copyright, and she's still against copyright.
Her position is all artists copy
https://ninapaley.com/category/creativity/
I think you can replace copyright with whatever the law <insert big company here> wants to break
Last but not least, generating csam and deep fakes porn on social medias and having to see it called free speech
All of that last one really says is that broadly speaking the average person has no idea what free speech actually is and the kinds of things that it covers. I put it in the same bucket as like the young kids uploading to YouTube with the comment no copyright infringement intended thinking it's like plagiarism.
Can you elaborate on your view about "no copyright infringement intended" being related please?
> Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry
Every day hundreds of links to archive.is are posted[1] to this website to get around paywalls. Technologists built file sharing tools to subvert copyright. It has never been one of the worst crimes imaginable in tech circles.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru... (85 instances in the last week)
You might be looking at a small time horizon.
What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists ?
Let's not forget the death of Aaron Swartz.
8 replies →
Maybe the time horizon for a statement like that shouldn’t include the decades before most current tech companies existed, much less at this scale even for the few still kicking around from 50 years ago.
The tech industry? I don’t remember that being the case, at least not in general. Content owners yes— and there’s tech overlap there with Sony and some others. Beside that it’s never been a major hill for tech to die on, except in having to implement systems to deal with DMCA takedowns, and that only as half baked as they could get away with. Which unfortunately has meant “not in favor of users” when it comes to to failure modes and where and how to default actions.
> Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry
This is rather the opinion of the copyright-industrial complex, as Spivak implied in his comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874194) by referring to Hollywood.
The attitude of the tech industry has always been much more vague (example: Google Books), and people from the hacker culture, who often work as programmers, are traditionally rather sceptical of at least the concrete manifestation of the copyright system ("information wants to be free", circumvention of paywalls, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, ...).
To be honest I don't care. Whatever helps the copyright industry burn is my ally.
I think this is part of a recurring pattern in tech of pushing boundaries around copyright.
In the last few years, we had Google scanning books, Google threatening to shut down News in Canada rather than pay publishers, LLMs summarizing articles on social platforms, crawlers bypassing paywalls, and so on.
Each time, the industry frames it as their interpretation of the current law, which were usually not written with these specific future use cases in mind.
In my view the current discussion regarding Gen AI is similar.
Hollywood sure, publishers sure, but tech? Where? The pro piracy pro game cracking open source p2p distribution people?