"When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply." Well, yes, obviously they have to, or risk not existing anymore.

Also, "fan ports" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. They're assets extracted from commercial games, uploaded with whatever license the person who extracted and packaged them chooses.

From their argument, if they truly think copyright should be abolished, an LLM capable of remixing that work into whatever you want would be a good thing, right? Ultimately this would empower the end-users of the models.

There's an argument to be made that these models trained on the world's knowledge shouldn't be locked behind closed models controlled only by big corps, but in this case it's good that anyone can download data and train such a model, right?

I can't speak for roblox intentions, and I am well aware of their history. But so far they seem to have published at least some of their model work to HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/Roblox/

What nuance am I missing?

> Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment

And the same thing is happening here? They’re hosting copyrighted materials and have also not suffered catastrophic punishment.

"It's OK if I do it, but not if someone more successful than me does it" is still blatant hypocrisy.

Indeed. And they're not even pretending to keep an arms-length distance from their users' infringement; they're openly promoting it,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MidugiRfHaY ("Ripping Encrypted Unreal Engine Models" | Open3DLab)

(Found via a sidebar ad on their webpage).

According to the timestamp, that was uploaded less than 24 hours ago.

I'm not familiar with their site; I assume it's user-uploaded? In that case, it's the same challenge that every user-generated content site has, balancing openness with policing IP violations.

The game at the moment is capture as much content as possible.

.. why not? They need models, models are free, so they grab them. They have time to sort them out later.

To train their LLM

[dead]

There's more with different licenses. If you scroll through the pages, there are a lot of assets ripped from games, with a variety of licenses CC-by-NC, or just "beerware":

https://open3dlab.com/project/0a4538ba-00df-4f6d-b3e3-14d978...

Scroll through the site, there are A LOT of assets from games, packaged by users. It's a nice subtrefuge, in practice it is a place to get ripped assets and the platform washes it's hands.

Again, I don't have any particularly strong issue with this, just with the pearl clutching regarding roblox downloading the data.

Just remember, the morals of someone making an argument have no bearing on whether an argument is sound.

If the purpose of every argument is to prevail, then sure, invoking morals in any discussion can seem like a tactic. Moral hypocrisy can be particularly exhausting.

If the invocation of morals is always evidence of manipulation, though, then any ethical position can be easily dismissed.

Moral hypocrisy is cynical. But that doesn’t erase the value of morals and ethics. Morality, sincerity, and rhetorical effectiveness are still very different things