No, but why should we accept they get away with it? Also Microsoft has definitely sued people for pirating windows and now collaborates with OpenAI and uses their ai trained on stolen materials.

Well, it's kinda converging, because Napster and Microsoft have teamed up to build a multimodal interactive video agent through a simple proxy API (this is a direct quote from Napster's blog post)

https://www.napster.com/blog/napster-heads-to-microsoft-buil...

Not at leaf level, but if you trace the trunk, pretty sure you end up on the same one.

Morally speaking, one of the issues of modern society is the idea that knowledge should be free which was partially started by the file sharing movement, which didn't really move society in the right direction imo.

Free means the same as worthless, which inherently isn't true - since information takes time to consume in some form, and your time isn't worthless. Therefore even if you could listen to all songs theoretically for free, you would need to spend an inordinate time doing that.

When I was a kid, getting a CD from your favourite band was a major expense, getting a video game even more so. But it formed a sort of emotional attachment (and not even just for me), my friends talked about how 'band X''s new album was amazing or a stinker. Since there were multiple bands making similar kinds of music, choosing to be a fan of one but not the other carried real monetary weight.

Nowadays you just fish out a song you think you would like out of the endless sea of Spotify, no different from prompting an LLM. No, Spotify didn't make me enjoy music more.

Same applies for Steam & videogames.

Therefore I think the ritualistic act of paying money to get access to something does have a purpose. It inherently establishes the value of information to you, makes it an investment that you need to recoup by using it. I'm sure most musicians would trade a million fans who might check them out if they're in town, to ones who think their music changed their perspective in life.

Also the process of creating a song that vaguely appeals to millions is different from making one that speaks to a thousand.

This is a fundamental issue of modern capitalistic society, similar to the Marxist idea of 'alienation' - once something is cheap to get, you don't appreciate the effort that went into making it. And if your customers don't care about the thing they get, producers won't make an effor to make it good either.

And once nobody cares, people even forget what a quality product is like.

Does ones world view get upgraded to oil paint if one acknowledges that it's the same class of people - and in many cases literally the same people, PE firms and family offices - profiting from 2000s era record industry profits and on the hook for / in line to profit from Open AI, Anthropic and the rest if they IPO?

However, there is irony in a subscription to pirated material.

Came here to post this, got beaten by someone putting it far more succinctly than I would have.

I mean if you cite a copyrighted book verbatim. You are held liable. So should a company producing copyrighted work.

For instance a image/video generating model.

I mean, I don't seem to get to say, "Oh I want this but I can't buy it so I'll just steal it LOL", so why should AI companies?

> These arguments always boil down to "it's fine when I do it, but wrong when a company does."

The problem is that it is enforced exactly the opposite. People have been hit with fines and jail time for pirating and seeding, without even doing so for commercial gain. But when massive tech companies pirate training data for their AI and build a product from that that, nobody goes to jail. Where is the sense in that?

I'm 100% happy with either viewpoint.

1) AI companies all get sued out of existence.

2) AI companies can train networks with piracy, those networks don't fall under copyright, so give me a copy to do what I want with.