When billion dollar companies, which are praised and supported by governments, download pirated material and do not pay, why should ordinary people restrain themselves and pay? I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now. It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it. People also have a right to train their real neural network for free without paying.

Plus the idea that if you pay someone to "purchase" and "own" (their terms!!) content, then it's yours forever. Unless, of course, they renegotiate something upstream and subsequently remove the content from your "library" or your device. Or perhaps they lock you out of those things altogether. This means it wasn't ownership, it was subscription.

So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2023-12-08...

The film and music industries really shot themselves in the foot when they got a tax on recordable media introduced in Canada.

OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media.

At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.

This is a good point. Stealing is a crime only for end users and not for companies. Why should end users feel any shame violating the DMCA when the government itself says it’s ok for companies to not honor it

I was in film school in the 00s, when the media companies were in the news for trying to bankrupt the families of high schoolers to make a point that piracy is bad. This was the "you wouldn't download a car" era, when they tried to redefine "stealing" to include piracy.

The executives of these companies would come speak to our class in the evenings. I didn't even bother counting the number of times one of them would be making elated chitchat before/after class about how he had just been on some flight and watched some series on his iPod. On the one hand, everyone is just people. The people at the heads of film studios are also out of touch grandparents whose grandkids show them how to use modern tech over the holidays.

But it was pretty disgusting to see the people in charge of the companies that were trying to ruin people's lives over widespread behavior, themselves participating in that behavior, and with no sense of irony or remorse. It never occurred to them that the thing they were doing in their personal lives is the same thing they were vilifying in their professional ones.

There were never any good moral arguments against digital 'piracy' to begin with.

> I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now.

I cannot see how these arguments could ever have been made. Intellectual property is logically reducible to monopolistic ownership of numbers. It's such a schizophrenic distortion of reality. It should be abolished.

> It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it.

It's not just "others", it's trillion dollar corporations!

In the end I don't even blame them... There's no reason why technology should be held back because of intellectual property nonsense. I want them to train AIs on the entire body of works of the entire human race. And when they're finished doing that, I want their AIs to get leaked and pirated so I can run them locally on my computer.

Piracy did kill creativity in film just like people warned. Content is never going to be priced the way it used to be. The argument for respecting licenses when training AI is the same, if you make (or buy) something then you set the terms.

Real question... Is it actually legally tested to torrent any media, and claim its for training purposes?

What do you mean? is this about AI training on copyrighted material?