It doesn't. You can download anything you want, distribution is what is illegal and criminal.

The original copyright law was created to protect authors from publishers. The current law is an abomination and should be removed.

It's never the grandkids. The Beatles sold the rights to their songs.

Thank you, I tried to condense it and may have condensed a little too hard aha

You're probably right, but saying we should abolish it altogether is insane. There's a good reason we have these laws.

Downloading is still infringement. Distribution is worse, but I don't think it's a criminal matter, still just civil.

I identify as an AI company ️

AI really shows the absurdity of intellectual property as a concept, the very way we learn, every idea we can have, every mental image we can create is the sum of copying and adapting the things we perceive and ideas that have predated our own, you can see this from the earliest forms of art where simple shapes and patterns were transmuted and adapted into increasingly complex ones or through the influence of old innovations into new ones, for example the influence of automatons on weaving looms with punched pegs and their influence on babbage machines and eventually computers. IP is ontological incoherent for this reason you cannot "own" an idea so much as you can own the water of one part of a stream

Maybe in some weird countries.

There are no good reasons.

If AI companies can pirate, so can individuals.

I don't disagree with you, but AI companies shouldn't get an exclusive free pass.

Oh yes, I am not saying that at all. I am still very unsure on my views of AI from a precautionary standpoint and I think that its commercial use will lead to more harm than good but if these things are the closest analogs we have to looking at how humans learn and create it shows IP is ridiculous- I mean we do not even need them to see this, if an idea was purely and solely one person's property the idea of someone from the sentinel island (assuming they have not left and learnt oncology) inventing the cure for brain cancer is as likely as a team of oncologists at Oxford doing it.

So then anyone who uses a computer to make music would be in violation?

Or is it some amount of computer generated content? How many notes? If its not a sample of a song, how does one know how much of those notes are attributed to which artist being stolen from?

What if I have someone else listen to a song and they generate a few bars of a song for me? Is it different that a computer listened and then generated output?

To me it sounds like artists were open to some types of violations but not others. If an AI model listened to the radio most of these issues go away unless we are saying that humans who listen to music and write similar songs are OK but people who write music using computers who calculate the statistically most common song are breaking the law.

A company that makes negative income every quarter forever, and whose latest edition costs a magnitude more power and is worse than the previous, is worth between $150 Bn and $300 Bn. Many other competing companies equally overvalued.

These are businesses who are only valuable because people keep investing in them. A Ponzi Scheme.

Is the ai doing anything that isn’t already allowed for humans. The thing is, generative ai doesn’t copy someone’s art. It’s more akin to learning from someone’s art and creating you own art with that influence. Given that we want to continue allowing hunans access to art for learning, what’s the logical difference to an ai doing the same?

Did this already play out at Reddit? Ai was one of the reasons I left but I believe it’s a different scenario. I freely contributed my content to Reddit for the purposes of building an interactive community, but they changed the terms without my consent. I did NOT contribute my content so they could make money selling it for ai training

The only logical distinction I see with s ai aren’t human: an exception for humans does not apply to non-humans even if the activity is similar

Most of us make fun of the stupid everyday masses for supporting laws that only benefit people who are vastly richer than they'll ever be. But I'm almost guaranteed to get douchevoted for pointing out that the vast majority of musicians never get famous, never get recording contracts, but make their living day to day playing little gigs wherever they can find them. They don't materially suffer if AI includes patterns from their creations in its output, because they don't get any revenue streams from it to begin with. Realistically they're the people most of us should identify with, but instead we rally behind the likes of Paul McCartney and Elton John as if they represent us. McCartney's a billionaire and Elton's more than halfway there - they both own recording companies ffs. If you're going to do simple meme-brained thinking and put black or white hats on people, at least get the hats right.

AI has been around for many years, and a lot has happened in that time. It's had periods of high and low interest, and during its lows, it's been dubbed AI winter.

And the current AI spring is just old people buying into bullshit marketing and putting all their money in a Ponze Scheme.

Throughout history, many things have been spent on useless things, but saying that AI is a Ponze scheme is, I feel, the same as saying that the Apollo program is a Ponze scheme or that government-funded research is another Ponze scheme.

PS: There were people who were against the Apollo program because they considered it an unnecessary expense, although today the Apollo program is more remembered.