#a clear example of how piracy can and is used to harm content creators

[archivlibrarianist]

"A day after the US Copyright Office dropped a bombshell pre-publication report challenging artificial intelligence firms' argument that all AI training should be considered fair use, the Trump administration fired the head of the Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter—sparking speculation that the controversial report hastened her removal.

"What the Copyright Office says about fair use

"[The report] comes after the Copyright Office parsed more than 10,000 comments debating whether creators should and could feasibly be compensated for the use of their works in AI training.

"'The stakes are high,' the office acknowledged, but ultimately, there must be an effective balance struck between the public interests in 'maintaining a thriving creative community' and 'allowing technological innovation to flourish.' Notably, the office concluded that the first and fourth factors of fair use—which assess the character of the use (and whether it is transformative) and how that use affects the market—are likely to hold the most weight in court.

"...To prevent both harms [harm to human copyright holders as well as developers of AI], the Copyright Office expects that some AI training will be deemed fair use, such as training viewed as transformative, because resulting models don't compete with creative works. Those uses threaten no market harm but rather solve a societal need, such as language models translating texts, moderating content, or correcting grammar. Or in the case of audio models, technology that helps producers clean up unwanted distortion might be fair use, where models that generate songs in the style of popular artists might not, the office opined.

"But while 'training a generative AI foundation model on a large and diverse dataset will often be transformative,' the office said that 'not every transformative use is a fair one,' especially if the AI model's function performs the same purpose as the copyrighted works they were trained on. Consider an example like chatbots regurgitating news articles, as is alleged in The New York Times' dispute with OpenAI over ChatGPT.

"'In such cases, unless the original work itself is being targeted for comment or parody, it is hard to see the use as transformative,' the Copyright Office said. One possible solution for AI firms hoping to preserve utility of their chatbots could be effective filters that 'prevent the generation of infringing content,' though."

So: the Copyright Office doesn't want AI to be trained on pirated works, and they got punished for such a statement.

[carriesthewind]

Anytime I see someone just wholeheartedly defend piracy for any and all books and whatnot, I wonder how they would feel if they spent some time and care making something, be it a scarf or a painting or even dinner etc., and have someone just walk by and make a comment about how good it looks so they’re just going to take it for themselves. Like personally I would be upset about that and I would have thought they would be too, but with the attitude they have against authors and artists wanting to get paid, I now have to assume they would actually thank the person who was stealing from them. Obviously copyright laws aren’t perfect and authors by and large should be treated better by publishers, but how is stealing, because that is what piracy is, going to help anyone? It’s just so dumb.

I don't know - I think some of it is almost certainly thoughtless, a knee-jerk reaction to not being able to access all the content one wants to. (And I don't even want to entirely dismiss that - media has a strong emotional effect on us. That's the point. To be affected by the idea that you can no longer access something that means so much to you - or that it was wrong to access something that affected you in the past - that is very human, if I don't necessarily condone the way people choose to react.) But I do think it's worth interrogating the analogy, because while I do think what the IA did with the "National Emergency Library" is theft, I don't think all forms of CDL, or even all forms of what would be considered piracy, are theft. And I think the analogy is slippery. There are plenty of published authors who can and do (and have loudly expressed) that they feel that fanfic is theft and have used similar analogies to describe it. (And again, I condone neither that view, not any actions taken to harass or abuse such authors for expressing feelings of hurt.)

Because intellectual property and ideas *are* different. That doesn't mean I disagree with the idea of copyright (though as I've tried to make clear, I don't agree with the current copyright regime that exists in practice). I actually think most people I've seen and interacted with agree that creators do retain some level of rights and ownership over their creation - for example, that's why plagiarism is upsetting to so many people, regardless of any financial gain by the plagiarist. (Though again, most doesn't mean everyone, and there are very different ways that individuals can see, and that different cultures have and continue to conceptualize, intellectual ownership.) And then of course there is the fact that most of the people reading this, and most if not all of the authors affected by the IA's actions live under capitalism. (And sorry for the multiple tangents here, but while I sympathize to some extent with arguments about how artists and authors using and enforcing the copyright regime re-enforces the harmful exploitation of both creation and creatives by the regime, I don't buy it. I see it in much the same way as I see arguments that public defenders and other indigent/free attorney services reinforce the current injustice system. It's not wrong, per se, but the people being ground beneath the wheel of the copyright/legal system have and will continue to be ground regardless of the actions of people mitigating the damage. Our entire social system needs far more reforms, and leaving people more vulnerable (which is what is advocated for) is not an effective strategy for reform, nor is it necessary to destroy the protections - meager though they may be - for those vulnerable to exploitation to the system in order to either destroy or reform the systems as a whole. But then again, I am biased on this point because of my perspective.)

Anyway, I hope this response makes sense. I am slightly intoxicated.