> Whether it's using the output of AI models or downloading a book on Anna's Archive, you are ultimately robbing the creator of profits.

You're correct in the above, or at least I'm willing to accept the premise for the purposes of this argument.

However, it's not that simple when it comes to the morality of the actions since there are secondary effects.

You can't just make a blanket statement like "stealing is immoral", for example, when there are circumstances where stealing is absolutely the moral imperative (e.g. the food is held by barons who charge unaffordable prices and the populace is starving to death).

Or, to make an example closer to the topic, what about the stealing of scientific papers? There's a strong arguments to be made that millions of people have been helped through that theft. And yes, the gatekeepers of that knowledge have been harmed.

And it's like that with AA and AI (and their code) as well. People consider the secondary effects and whether or not the greatest good is served.

And, of course, "greater good" is gray.

I agree that it's not grey at all, but because they're both so obviously good (particularly labs releasing open weight models). It's great that there are organizations making it ~free for anyone in the world to obtain information instantly. On the contrary, our policy of restricting something that naturally can be duplicated an unlimited number of times for free is obviously morally bad. People should be incentivized to create new ideas, not rent old ones for a century.

Of course on a related note, most work that's interesting to me was created by people who are dead anyway, so they don't mind.

Anyway, are you sure most people that support AA don't also support e.g. Deepseek and Qwen's efforts?

Propaganda to what end? Are you referring to anything in particular?

Is your angle merely that shadow library hosts should be operating their services entirely for free (to the point of refusing payment) or is there something we're missing here?

> But most of those authors wouldn't be putting the work in to making that information/literature in the first place if they know they aren't going to get paid.

My understanding is that the number of authors that can make a full-time job of writing is a rounding error compared to the population of authors. I believe that people should be paid for their work, but I don't think the current copyright regime is actually very effective at paying authors for their work. So I value copyright enforcement proportionately less based on that observation.

Meanwhile, on the flip side of the coin, copyright rulings are causing companies like Atheropic to destroy books as they scan them, creating a rising sense of panic around knowledge scarcity. This panic is a direct result of the scarcity of the copyright intended to create in the first place. It's entirely artificial.

I've been saying this for 25 years, but copyright is essentially broken.

> authors deserve to get paid for their work

I don't really agree

Information itself should be free, authors deserve the right to monetise other ways (merch, physical media, exhibitions/shows, etc.) but society should pay artists and creators to do their thing[0]

Not everything needs to be a business, and I think art is one of those things

[0] I don't know much about it but maybe Ireland's Basic Income for the Arts scheme is a model. I think some other European countries do similar-ish things, too

Personally I would say copyright should last somewhere less than 10 years. On the basis that business decisions about whether to fund a book/film/whatever today isn't based on earnings 10 years from now.

So I would say it is morally acceptable to download stuff older than that. Torrents offer brand new things, so I wouldn't say they are morally good. I don't think they're morally worse than those locking up old media though.