In the past, many developers were against copyright law because they saw it as a way for big corps to stifle competition and curb creativity in order to increase their profits. A lot of people right now invoke the violation of the same copyright law because the tide has changed and now companies, by ignoring copyright law, are hurting artists/smaller companies and/or not contributing back or unlawfully closing the code in the case of GPL.

I don't see any kind of hypocritical stance here honestly. All this time the criticism of the enforcement of copyright law or now the lack of it just reflects the fact that some people are genuinely concerned that bad actors(big corps) are using the law to damage society in order to pursue their own interests.

Correct, and for some reason America has gotten to an "over legalization" state where every concept has to filter through a legal system in order to be good / bad. I think that's where the matter comes from. Pedantic legalists insist that everyone couch their ideas in a rigid set of legal statutes.

"But you just said that an individual should be able to use copyrighted works. Therefore you should have no qualms with a legal individual (corp) utilizing every copyrighted work in the world to destroy society, as nothing they are doing is illegal under your rubric."

The reality is most humans operate from a more natural and intuitive sense. A single artist who made a song shouldn't be destroyed by the big corp that is stealing it for their own profit (e.g. Elastic vs. Amazon). But its hard to interpret this in the strict legalist sense, because in the US, law is setup to make corps/people, money/speech, art/product, all hard to distinguish, and generally doesn't give much affordance to "what the law reasonably meant" when challenged by corporations (but it does seem to be applied quite conservatively for individuals).

For example, data protection laws tend to be applied quite loosely to corps with slaps on the wrist and stern words. For individuals, accessing data you shouldn't can mean the rest of your life in prison. People feel this is unfair, but the legalists will use a bunch of reasoning to excuse the clear immorality.

Its definitely "using the intellect and words to override correct human moral intuitions."

The law (and the system/society) generally serves capital, instead of humans.

That's why big corporations can both use copyright against smaller companies and individual creators, while also ignoring the same copyright laws when it suits them.

I think this is unjust. As we see capital concentrate, we see more injustice as the power balance becomes more lopsided. This isn't good for anyone, not even the super wealthy because it undermines the stability of the whole system upon which their wealth depends.

Developers in the past were strongly for copyleft. The promise of copyleft is how we got all the great software that underlies the Internet today, starting with Linux itself.

The fact to keep in mind is that, despite what the name might suggest, copyleft is not at odds with copyright! The core feature of copyright is having a degree of control over what you have authored, and copyleft is ingeniously using copyright to prevent corporations from just taking open code, volunteer contributions, and modifying and using it for profit without giving anything back to the community.

Death of copyright would be the death of copyleft.

Well, no, not really - there's no "they" in general. Copyright law is constructed by design for large institutions, lobbying, case law, and attendant legislation allow it to be abused by data hoarders. It was never built to protect individual creators or authors or artists, despite the PR campaigns and marketing for it.

There are just companies big enough to ignore those institutions for which copyright law was created, like Google, etc, and the fair use exceptions Google carved out empowered AI companies to make similar moves. To an extent.

What's hurting artists and smaller companies and various licensing schemes intended to push back is the fundamental structure of the laws.

All copyrights need to be nuked and replaced. If we want to support individuals and maximize protections of individuals, and we want to disincentivize data hoarders that do nothing but recycle old content and IP in perpetual rent-seeking schemes, we should implement a 5 year copyright system.

The first 5 years, you get total copyright, any commercial use has to be licensed explicitly, fair use remains largely as it is now. From year 6-10, fair use gets extended - you have to credit the creator, pay a 15% royalty direct to the creator, but otherwise you can use it for anything. Year 10-20, you must credit the creator, but otherwise the media is in the public domain.

We should be pushing for and incentivizing creative use of data, empowering as many people as possible to use it and riff on it and make the culture vibrant and active and free from centralizing, manipulative actors.

99% of commercial profits come from the first 5 years after any piece of media gets published - book, music, film, artwork, etc. Copyright should protect that, but after that 5 years, things open up so the price you pay in order to participate in the marketplace which the US fosters is that your content thereafter becomes available for use by anyone, and they have to pay a fair markup for the use. You don't get to deny anyone the use of the media. You'll get credited, paid, and then after 10 years, it's public domain + mandatory credits, kinda like an MIT license style. After 20 years, it's fully public domain.

Throw in things like "if you're not paid the royalty, you can sue for up to half of the total revenues generated by the offending work" or something appropriately scaled to prohibit casual abuses, but not totally explode someone's life over honest mistakes, and scale between the two extremes accordingly.

Things like Sony and Disney and Hollywood studios are evil. They're effectively data cartels and hoarders, rarely producing anything, gatekeeping access and socializing, imposing obscene contracts on naive artists and creators, exploiting everything and everyone they touch without returning concurrent value to society. They don't deserve consideration or protection under a sane copyright system, especially in a world with gigabit internet everywhere. Screw the MAFIAA and all the people responsible for things ending up like they have.

Until then, pirate everything. If you feel an ethical obligation to pay, then do the research and send some crypto or a $20 bill in the mail to the author or creator. All sorts of people have crypto wallets, these days.

It is also true that in the present, many developers are against copyright law, and in the past, many condemned the violation of the same copyright law because it protected artists and smaller companies. Not the same developers, necessarily, but many were and are on either side.

You'd really need to put some numbers on "many" for there to be a substantial observation here, because it could mean any figure in a huge range.

All this time it has been just simply anti-(mega)corporation. When mega corporations take one side, people's moral standard shift to the other side.