I have no patience or sympathy for the Elseviers and Disneys of the world, and I agree the endless copyright extensions are terrible, but multiple things can be bad at once. Tearing down a bad system doesn't guarantee a better outcome will result. Even if we accept that those systems need drastic reform, the billions of authors, artists, musicians, programmers, and creators of all stripes still deserve more than just the pride and satisfaction of having made AI companies rich.

I'm also not arguing that siloing is good, only that it's a rational reaction. Creators are uncomfortable having their work used that way and have to protect themselves against scrapers driving up their hosting costs. Other businesses quite reasonably want a share of all the money flowing around. People got tired of the wolves eating their sheep, so they built barns and fences and trained dogs.

If we want to stop the siloing, we need to address the what's causing people to resort to it.

Which is all fine and dandy, but the scrapers aren't looting IP for the public good, they're looting it so they can make a profit. It's the class of people and organizations who were already benefitting from broken copyright ignoring the rules themselves, to the detriment of the countless individuals who kept our creativity going.

You know what will fix all this corporate greed overzealously enforcing intellectual property laws? An equal amount of corporate greed brazenly violating intellectual property laws!

To put it visually:

         selfless humans | corpo greed
                         |
  enforce IP    good ____|____ bad
  violate IP   better    |     bad

And apparently this draconian copyright law was no problem for decades when it protected the business interests of large corporations.

But now that it's individual creators that need protection suddenly copyright law needs to be reformed to serve the interests of large corporations once more. What a scam.

Besides the copyrights there is also the matter of the techbros DDOS'ing the entire web with unthrottled scrapers. Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for that but nobody shook a finger at the bros.

> Is it theft?

Well we certainly didn't get paid for it, and now our livelihoods are at stake. So yes.

you're basically saying "it's not theft, because now it's mine"

also,

> Someone's NYT bestselling novel? Those are mostly so cookie cutter it ain't hard to copy them without an AI.

lol then why weren't you a bestselling NYT novelist, had something better to do?

No, they are locking it behind their corporate walls. Sure, right now they are offering some of it for "free" (give us all your data) or "cheap" (give us all your data and pay some money too) but what happens when all other options are unavailable or difficult to access for most people? Suddenly it is the corporations that decide what is available, for how much, and what is right and what is wrong. They have shown time and again they will bait and switch at will, this is the ultimate run on everything - turn everyone who can think for themselves into zombies and then force them to use technology for everything and charge for it either directly or via endless adds or some mix of the two.

Trying to centralize all information and "intelligence" in one or two providers, charge for "intelligence" "like a utility", and divest citizens of their own skills and recourse to resources is not "expanding access to the commons" lol.

The AI companies doing their own scraping wouldn't be a problem if they'd to it in a reasonable way. But instead they hammer the same site over and over for data that hasn't been changed, or request the same data in different formats, or through interfaces that aren't efficient.

It was what's commonly called illegal piracy on a commercial basis and gigantic scale. That normally leads to hefty prison sentences. I've always been against this legal classification and think piracy should be allowed for non-commercial purposes or at least only be considered a very minor crime, but in the present example the piracy was clearly for commercial gains, a company using the illegally obtained material to create essential features of commercial products.

Agreements with publishers after the fact shouldn't even count, particularly since all copyright holders weren't consulted. I wouldn't have given my permission, for example.

It's important to stress that the media were not legally acquired by most US frontier AI companies if not all of them.

> Theft/stolen implies it's been taken and the owner deprived of it.

Nope! Theft of the proceeds.

The media may have been legally acquired, but it was done so by violating the intentions and purposes of the content creators.

In other words, people poured their time and attention into something hoping for a return, and got this, instead. And now this is obviating the venues by which creators hoped to receive their social/cultural dividend.

> the self-described 'left' is not going to convince me that corporate IP & knowledge restriction is actually a good thing

It just goes to show how fluid people's beliefs can be when they have identified a "bad guy". Everything they do is wrong, even when it aligns with their ethos.

> not going to convince me that corporate IP & knowledge restriction is actually a good thing and elsevier are the good guys.

multiple parties can be opposed to each other's goals with all of them still being "bad guys".

Weird to turn this into a left/right "thing" based on flimsy assumptions after an election that demonstrated opposition to AI cuts across the political spectrum despite what e/acc types in a bubble on X might believe.

Whenever people get their undies in a bundle about this argument I'm amazed at how oblivious of power differentials they are.

There is a difference between a story in which a robin hood liberated knowledge and freely, without any caveats or exchange, delivers it to the masses (think Aaron Swartz) and a story in which a power hungry empire systematically scoops up all the world's resources and decides to permit the masses access so long as they exchange (at a premium) other resources the empire needs to continually solidify its position.

If you don't see how these are different I don't know what to tell you. People making IP theft arguments are more disgruntled about the massive power imbalance between, say, a massive corporation, and a small time creator who can barely even earn a subsistence off their work in the first place, and the former taking from the latter in impunity.

The left rightly sees it as unfair because it is a power imbalance that leads to asymmetrical power of exchange. The companies get the power to continue to extract data from you, all you get is the privilege to then pay them for it.

The so called progressives have actually been the ones opposed to progress throughout history. If they had their way we would all be frozen in time, entitled to our 1960s education & career