It's like the world turned upside down in the last 20 years. I used to pirate everything as a teenager, and I found it silly that copy right would follow along no matter how anything was encoded. If I XORed copyright material A with open source material B, I would get a strange file C that together with B, I could use to get material A again. Why would it be illegal for me to send anybody B and C, where the strange file C might just as well be thought of as containing the open source material B?!

Now when I've grown up, starting paying for what I want, and seeing the need for some way of content creators to get payed for their work, these AI companies pop up. They encode content into a completely new way and then in some way we should just accept that it's fine this time.

This page was posed here on hacker news a few months ago, and it really shows that this is just what's going on:

https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-arche...

Maybe another 10 years and we'll be in the spot when these things are considered illegal again?

I went through exactly this process.

Then I discovered (A)GPL and realized that the system makes sense to protect user rights.

And as I started making my own money, I started paying instead of pirating, though I sometimes wonder how much of my money goes to the actual artists and creators and how much goes to zero-sum occupations like marketing and management.

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It comes down to understanding power differentials - we need laws so large numbers of individuals each with little power can defend themselves against a small number of individuals with large amounts of power.

(Well, we can defend ourselves anyway but it would be illegal and many would see it as an overreaction - as long as they steal only a little from each of us, we're each supposed to only be a little angry.)

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> Maybe another 10 years and we'll be in the spot when these things are considered illegal again?

That's my hope too. But it requires many people to understand they're being stolen from and my fear is way too few produce "content"[0] and that the majority will feel like they benefit from being able to imitate us with little effort. There's also this angle that US needs to beat China (even though two nuclear superpowers both lose in an open conflict) and because China has been stealing everything for decades, we (the west) need to start stealing to keep up too.

[0]: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text...

just pirate again. It's the only way to ensure a game or movie can't be recalled by publishers the next time they want everyone to buy the sequel.