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.

  • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

      • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • KaiReeve@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            I see how I misunderstood.

            This conception of individual rights seems rather ad hoc. I don’t think I could have guessed that that’s what you meant, rather than copyrights.

            I don’t see the connection to copyright, in any case. How does fair use interfere with anyone’s right to earn a living? And if it does, why support the Internet Archive?

    • Kiernian@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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?

      • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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?

        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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It’s all the freedom of the high seas until AI gets mentioned.

      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.

      • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I may not be understanding the logic here. It sounds like your issue is control. You want to have control over media you bought, and you want to have control over AI models rather than just a subscription.

        There are a number of open models. As far as I can see, these are also largely rejected by this community. In lawsuits against their makers, the community also sides against fair use.

          • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            As far as I can tell, this community hates open models just as much as any others. Some seem to hate them even more. That’s the point about this “nightshade” tool.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Perhaps they’re confusing “open model” with “OpenAI” which is more of a misnomer given it’s increasingly cloistered state.

              But I tend to see people angry at the massive waste of resources in the enormous privatized patches of turf. Grok, for instance, fucking up a low income community in Mississippi with it’s fleet of gas generators.

              • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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                2 months ago

                That’s what’s so depressing about lemmy. People convince me that there is some genuine issue that should be addressed. The mob grabs torches and pitchforks and goes to demand that… Money be given to rich people instead of changing anything. It certainly makes you understand why the world is as it is and that it will only become more so.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      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:

      • copyright should be much shorter, perhaps back to the original 14 years w/ a single optional renewal of 14 years - principle: information should be freely available; caveat: smaller creators shouldn’t get immediately screwed by a large org with more publishing capacity
      • ISPs should only provide internet, and if a law is broken, LE should go after individuals - principle: personal responsibility, ISPs aren’t responsible for how you use their service, they’re only responsible for providing a consistent service
      • piracy is wrong, but it shouldn’t be prioritized - principle: piracy is a form of theft, since you’re accessing something you don’t have a legal right to; caveat: there’s no evidence that piracy actually reduces sales, and some evidence that it improves it, so let it be
      • AI is copyright violation because it has been shown to be capable of reproducing entire texts, so AI companies should compensate creators - principle: copyright, as above; exception: personal use should be fine (similar argument as piracy), but commercial use is profiting off another’s work directly

      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.