Comment by NewsaHackO
19 hours ago
Everybody has had a complete 180 in terms of copyright protections. Before, nobody cared about downloading music, movies, TV shows, or pirating games. Now, when the copyright law is affecting them, they are gungho about protecting these billion-dollar companies' copyrights.
It's all power.
The music and movie companies have power. They have the funds to bankrupt you with a small army of lawyers. You as an individual do not stand a chance against corporate lawyers. They can destroy your life over fairly minimal and non-violent offenses.
AI companies are backed by the very powerful. They can steal all they want and use the same army of lawyers to bankrupt any small rights holder. The big rights holders go to the same parties and allow it to happen.
Regardless of the actual take on copyright, both methods skullfuck the little guy without power.
People cry foul because, at least in the US, we claim to live in a free country based on equality, yet there is a very obvious caste system of the haves and the havenots.
It errodes the legitimacy of the system. Imagine if for years you see news reports of a mother getting a judgment against her where she owes 100s of thousands because she seeded a Brittany Spears song. Then you suddenly see the same laws that were leveraged to instill fear in you, tossed aside when the rich and powerful say it doesn't count anymore, you're going to cry foul!
It's not a hypocrisy of position on copyright, it's bearing witness to the illegitimacy of the laws they're bound by.
A more logical explanation would be that there are different opinions and those who complain are usually louder.
Yes, that's my point. They are different and contradictory opinions, which show hypocrisy.
No it is not your point. You're just arguing about a strawman that holds both of those contradictory positions.
1 reply →
Its not about "billion-dollar companies' copyrights", but also about voluntary copyleft free software. If I license my code under GPL I don't want other persons/companies just whitewash that code through LLMs and use it in their proprietary code.
I agree with this, and I think that it is an open question whether or not training on copyrighted material is considered transformative or not. However, someone said that thumbnails of full photos are considered transformative enough to allow fair use, and LLM training is (in my opinion) clearly more transformative than converting a picture to a thumbnail. But we will see how it plays out.