This is pretty clearly an instance of the right people (i.e. rich people) being allowed to pirate, and the poor people get in trouble for copyrighted music in the background of some video clip.
>Yeah... Laws exist only if they are applied equally, else they become something else.
This is bullshit and you know it. No one would ever want to go to the trouble, expense, and misery of enforcing laws where the so-called victims do not feel wronged and refuse to press complaints to the authorities. And so, copyright enforcement will only ever occur where the rightsholders wish to enforce it. The few lawsuits you see here and there aren't about genuine sentiment of being wrong, but of the rightsholders wanting their cuts. Backroom deals are already being drawn up, and everyone's cool with it.
This is the status quo. If you don't like it, suggest something better, but don't be naive that the law as it stands now could be applied sanely or pragmatically.
So if someone goes and pirates something on their own time on a whim, it's a criminal issue, but if 100 people correctively pirate a few orders of magnitude more stuff because their boss's boss's boss's boss told everyone to, it's just a licensing issue? Here's my suggestion: either throw out all the convictions that have ever occurred for software piracy and allow them to sue for reparations, or charge the people that are making those backroom deals for extortion and obstruction of justice. Either it should be a crime for everyone or no one; being rich enough to bribe your way out of it isn't just, and it's preposterous to claim otherwise.
YouTube routinely demonetizes and suspends people for"copyright violations" with no recourse. Including people for using their own material.
SciHub is banned and blocked in several countries, there are default rulings against it in the US etc. Oh, and White House called it "one of the most flagrant notorious market sites in the world".
But when you're an AI company with billions of dollars? Well, your doing it for the good of humanity or something, and of course everything you do is fair use etc.
The big copyright cartels are the only copyright holders out there. The people you refer to think they hold copyright on some work or another, but unless another plebe infringes on them, they'll never get a remedy for that.
You think I'm wrong, but if you wrote a song (for instance) and some jackass restaurant was playing it as muzak, ASCAP takes the license money for that. They don't send you a cut. I'd say you have second class rights, but you don't even really have those.
Criminal piracy is commercial piracy, which not even the people suing AI companies are accusing them of doing. Note the very first line in your court opinion:
> After selling 100 "bootleg" DVDs
But that's a fair point. I probably should have specified.
I couldn't quickly find a definition of "commercial piracy", so I will assume it doesn't have a specific technical meaning.
Facebook is a commercial company, so if you're working for Facebook doing piracy, that would be commercial piracy.
If I go by piracy as "the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright", and if Facebook is infringing on copyright in using these books (which the article alleges), then it follows that Facebook is engaging in piracy.
So it looks like Facebook is partaking in piracy of a commercial flavor.
I don't know why distributing bootlegs to people on the street would be worse than distributing PDFs within a company, but let's say it it. We are talking about 100s of cases vs millions. Is distributing on the street really 10000 times worse?
It would have to be even more than that. Because millions of copyright infringement within a company apparently has no punishment, but 100's on the street has prison. So, if you go by the punishment, 100's on the street is way worse.
Seems you keep repeating the same stance all over thread, without a single explanation why your opinion should be a valid one.
Not really a fruitful discussion and not a way to change anyone's opinions (maybe apart from the idea that copyright owners push their rather despised agenda via artificial accounts also on HN), care to improve this?
On summary judgment too, which means the plaintiffs really had no case. Not surprising because it's the most obvious fair use ever under transformative work. So obvious that I have a hard time taking arguments to the contrary seriously and just assume they are driven by bitterness. Not that anything I have ever heard on that side actually rises to the level of an argument. Your opinion, and everyone else on this thread that agrees with you, falls under your own statement:
> Seems you keep repeating the same stance all over thread, without a single explanation why your opinion should be a valid one.
Except it -wasn’t- designed that way. Citizens United made that change, prioritizing capital over people and creating the incentive alignment that precipitated a soft coup that we are witnessing the results of now, both in the USA and abroad. The ability for corporations to act as political agents is what landed us in this timeline.
The hypocrisy really grinds my gears.