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Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/fuck/_ai@lemmy.world/t/3317969
Court records show that NVIDIA executives allegedly authorized the use of millions of pirated books from Anna's Archive to fuel its AI training.
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this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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I actually don't understand your reasoning here... What have you made in your life that leads you to think that copyright should be limited at all? Have you never written a story? Composed or recorded a song? Drawn a picture or taken a photograph? Written some computer code?
I've done all of these things, and I don't see any logic in the idea that I shouldn't have exclusive legal rights over a work that I've created throughout my lifetime, at the very least. I write a song and I only get 15 years to perform and sell it? I paint an illustration and I only get 15 years to prevent other people from drop-shipping t-shirts and posters of it on Amazon?
Copyright exists, in theory, to protect the original creators of works. Whether it does a good job of that or not is a secondary point. It seems that you're essentially arguing that artists should have less rights, power and value simply to justify piracy. No offense, but this strikes me as the argument of a consumer trying to justify piracy, with zero consideration of protecting writers, artists, musicians, and other creators of "intellectual property".
Indeed, one solution to corporations getting away with breaking the law is to make the law more lax for everyone. But another (much more preferable) solution is to simply enforce the laws equally and take action to protect creators.
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
The research has been done, and speaks for itself.
Unfortunately this "research" is merely the subjective opinion of a "open data activist" who, to my knowledge, has not created anything, and is based on a flawed and entitled premise that the world is owed "access" to the creations of artists. I invite you to use your own brain, and reach your own conclusions:
The answers to these questions are obvious.
There is no need to optimize copyright laws to balance the the rights of creators with the accessibility of media, because copyright exists simply to protect creators to own and control their own creations, which other people are in no way entitled to. "Access" isn't a factor, or at least it shouldn't be within the lifetime of the original creator.
It "must be" democratic? ethical? human-centered?
Guess what? It's none of those things... And the only way to even begin to force it to be any of those things is creating robust copyright laws that protect creators from exploitation of the technology-controlling elite oligarchs who have monopolized money, power, and the means of production (if you can even call generously generative AI "production", instead of mere theft.)
So again, I'll ask you, "what have you made in your life that leads you to think copyright should be limited to 15 years?"
The answer for someone like Rufus Pollock seems to be "I've created nothing, I just want access to other people's things", probably only so that he and other highly privileged tech bros can further engineer a society where they can use people's data for their own benefit.
We don't need some 20 year old joke of a research paper from Cambridge to judge what we are seeing with our own eyes right here and now. If you need a concrete example of where forced "open data" (as in, "we've pirated every song ever and hosted them on Anna's Archive so big tech can use them to train a model to rip off musicians who are already working 2-3 jobs to make ends meet") has failed, it has been the abuse and exploitation of copyrighted works on the part of generative AI companies in a system that has only served to make the rich richer and the poor, including the creative class, poorer.
Pollock isn't entitled to "access" to the things I create, nor is Altman entitled to train his over-valued company's for-profit product off of them. Fuck that.
The increasingly broke creative proletariat are being ripped the fuck off by the disgustingly wealthy techno-oligarch bourgeoisie, all because generative AI training seems to barely be a gray area in existing copyright laws--showing once and for all that giving these people even a single inch of "access" to our work will end in nothing but rampant exploitation.
He's a doctor of economics, he has a PhD. He's not exactly a tech bro by any stretch.
The paper I linked is literally an example of him making something. Unless you somehow erroneously think that research papers aren't entitled to copyright protection, which, surprise, you're wrong.
This isn't even worth replying to. Get your head out of your ass, man. Plenty of people who make things that are copyrightable promote shortening and amending copyright, including author Cory Doctorow, the man who coined the term "enshittification."
I'll quote Mark Hosler of the band Negativland, who made a shitload of art. Negativland was also instrumental in designing early Creative Commons licenses.
"If you really want to keep control of your art, keep it in your house, don't share it with anyone, don't share it with the world."
These are all nothing more than arguments from authority. There are too many more creative people on the other side of the issue to even bother trying to list them.
The number of artists who release their creations into CC0 or public domain is not even a drop in the bucket. Good for them, that's a valid and maybe noble choice to relinquish their copyright--but it is a personal choice, not a law, nor should it be.
I've also written GPL code for years. That's my choice. I don't even regret it, despite knowing that it's being exploited. I'm not going to pretend that entitles me to the code that other people write. I'm not going to try to mandate that laws force everything to be GPL. It also doesn't mean that my code can be freely scraped and abused by AI companies.
Because that's really conducive to living in a capitalist society where the only way to make art is to have money, and the only way to have money is to sell your time, isn't it?
Sounds like a pretty shitty deal to me for artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, designers, etc.
Copyright exists, at least in theory, to prevent us from living in such a world.
I reject all of that. It's a false dichotomy to tell artists that they have to either "keep their art in their house" or share it openly with an entire world of rich assholes like Altman, Musk, Zuck, Huang, who seek to exploit it for their own gain.
Personally I think you're the one who needs to get his head out of his ass and stop worshiping the words of other people as if they were gospel. I don't dwell on the every word of my favorite musicians. You're so busy looking up to people that you're not looking at the world around you as it is, right now, in 2026.
Look at the rampant, flagrant and shameless exploitation of the creative class by the pompous, rich, powerful, tech-bro elites who feel endless entitlement to everything that they can see. Are we just gonna pretend like this comment isn't attached to an article about how the richest company in the world purchased a massive trove of copyrighted works to train their AI? Are we gonna pretend like Anthropic, Google, X, and OpenAI haven't all done the exact same thing?
Sorry. I can't subscribe to that.
I care much more about art and artists than I care about tech or "open culture" on the internet.
At any rate, today's my birthday and I'm trying not to waste my time getting all worked up... Your opinion is valid and we probably aren't going to change each other's minds on this, so it's hardly worth continuing this conversation. I don't dislike you, I just disagree. Have a good one.
Too late, you've done nothing but rant in this thread. Get over yourself.