I say this as a massive AI critic: Disney does not have a legitimate grievance here.

AI training data is scraping. Scraping is — and must continue to be — fair use. As Cory Doctorow (fellow AI critic) says: Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

I want generative AI firms to get taken down. But I want them to be taken down for the right reasons.

Their products are toxic to communication and collaboration.

They are the embodiment of a pathology that sees humanity — what they might call inefficiency, disagreement, incoherence, emotionality, bias, chaos, disobedience — as a problem, and technology as the answer.

Dismantle them on the basis of what their poison does to public discourse, shared knowledge, connection to each other, mental well-being, fair competition, privacy, labor dignity, and personal identity.

Not because they didn’t pay the fucking Mickey Mouse toll.

It's quite illustrative of DE's universe's relevance to our world though.

(I'm more partial to SW KotORII: TSL, even if DE feels more like my life, even I wonder if Harry's ex is too not just a blindingly bright and quite f-ckable picture, but also a murderer ; too autistic to look for authors' contacts to ask them about it.)

Barred from expressing with monetizing it, you certainly mean? Otherwise most of fan fiction would have to be censored, having IP owners not willing competition.

And even then it's in question, there are plenty of crowdfunded and later paid for indie games set in Harry Potter universe. Those I'm thinking about are NSFW though.

Remember when stealing on sea was piracy? Always has been.

Copyright infringement is different.

It’s important propaganda-wise, because

Exactly

copying is sometimes too morally very similar to a robbery

Never. Robbery involves violence plus moving something of value from the victim to the robber. Your moral compass is broken already by the propaganda you mentioned earlier.

You may think that copying is "bad" in some cases but it never "armed violent values extortion" bad. Never.

Fanfiction and non monetised use is not at all exempt from these laws but rather tolerated by the copyright holder. Something tells me this one wont tolerate if the og creator posts anything and they may know enough background canon to know its them.

A real irony to the plot of the game is that the business partner wanted to reign in the freedom of the creators. Not impossible they deemed it to political.

I am not sure about those games you mentioning but its possible they are tolerated because a combination of plausible deniability (wizard uk boarding school isnt that orginal) and not wanting it to gain any more publicity. Disney did the same thing ignoring Micky mouse porn.

Fanfiction and non monetised use is not at all exempt from these laws but rather tolerated by the copyright holder.

Should fix that in law, based on the commonality of such use.

IP companies use every such opening, we should too.

combination of plausible deniability (wizard uk boarding school isnt that orginal)

Except they even use character names from HP.

Publicity - maybe, would be funny.

Yes. Piracy in the sense of stealing from ships in international waters is different from piracy in the sense of copyright infringement. Thanks for that.

I would personally argue that fixing the law means getting rid of the notion of intellectual property all together.

In my own reasoning someone copying me is the highest form of flattery and i would still have an edge understanding the properties of own idea better then the copycat does.

Its a huge limiter on human progress and absolutely non sensical in situations where multiple people just happen to have a similar idea. As it stands now an employee could invent the cure to cancer, the employer claiming it and then putting it in a vault to never use and bar anyone from creating it.

Naturally such idea of abolishing copyright receives lots of criticism from many people because we would have to solve other problems that copyright now aims to fix but i don't think that justifies the damage it does.

A copy is not theft.

Intellectual property is thought monopoly. See Disco Elysium for a particularly sad case of it.

Are you saying that the mere action of scraping is fair use, or that absolutely anything you do with the data you scrape is also fair use?

I'd say that scraping as a verb implies an element of intent. It's about compiling information about a body of work, not simply making a copy, and therefore if you can accurately call it "scraping" then it's always fair use. (Accuse me of "No True Scotsman" if you would like.)

But since it involves making a copy (even if only a temporary one) of licensed material, there's the potential that you're doing one thing with that copy which is fair use, and another thing with the copy that isn't fair use.

Take archive.org for example:

It doesn't only contain information about the work, but also a copy (or copies, plural) of the work itself. You could argue (and many have) that archive.org only claims to be about preserving an accurate history of a piece of content, but functionally mostly serves as a way to distribute unlicensed copies of that content.

I don't personally think that's a justified accusation, because I think they do everything in their power to be as fair as possible, and there's a massive public benefit to having a service like this. But it does illustrate how you could easily have a scenario where the stated purpose is fair use but the actual implementation is not, and the infringing material was "scraped" in the first place.

But in the case of gen AI, I think it's pretty clear that the residual data from the source content is much closer to a linguistic analysis than to an internet archive. So it's firmly in the fair use category, in my opinion.

Edit: And to be clear, when I say it's fair use, I only mean in the strict sense of following copyright law. I don't mean that it is (or should be) clear of all other legal considerations.

I would personally argue that fixing the law means getting rid of the notion of intellectual property all together.

In my own reasoning someone copying me is the highest form of flattery and i would still have an edge understanding the properties of own idea better then the copycat does.

Its a huge limiter on human progress and absolutely non sensical in situations where multiple people just happen to have a similar idea. As it stands now an employee could invent the cure to cancer, the employer claiming it and then putting it in a vault to never use and bar anyone from creating it.

Naturally such idea of abolishing copyright receives lots of criticism from many people because we would have to solve other problems that copyright now aims to fix but i don't think that justifies the damage it does.

Oh so when Big companies do it, it's OK. But it's stealing when an OpenSource AI gives that same power back to the people.

"if you can accurately call it "scraping" then it's always fair use."

I think you make some compelling points overall, but fair use has always been more complex than this. The intent is taken into account when evaluating whether something is fair use, but so is the actual impact — "fair use" is a designation applied to the overall situation, not to any singular factors (so a stated purpose can't be fair use)

It's not actually a very fun game to play, reading the lore or watching a video of someone else play is sufficient.

Are you saying that the mere action of scraping is fair use, or that absolutely anything you do with the data you scrape is also fair use?

• Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
• The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
• The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

Just a moment...

(htxt.co.za)

Oh so when Big companies do it, it's OK. But it's stealing when an OpenSource AI gives that same power back to the people.

I'd say that scraping as a verb implies an element of intent. It's about compiling information about a body of work, not simply making a copy, and therefore if you can accurately call it "scraping" then it's always fair use. (Accuse me of "No True Scotsman" if you would like.)

But since it involves making a copy (even if only a temporary one) of licensed material, there's the potential that you're doing one thing with that copy which is fair use, and another thing with the copy that isn't fair use.

Take archive.org for example:

It doesn't only contain information about the work, but also a copy (or copies, plural) of the work itself. You could argue (and many have) that archive.org only claims to be about preserving an accurate history of a piece of content, but functionally mostly serves as a way to distribute unlicensed copies of that content.

I don't personally think that's a justified accusation, because I think they do everything in their power to be as fair as possible, and there's a massive public benefit to having a service like this. But it does illustrate how you could easily have a scenario where the stated purpose is fair use but the actual implementation is not, and the infringing material was "scraped" in the first place.

But in the case of gen AI, I think it's pretty clear that the residual data from the source content is much closer to a linguistic analysis than to an internet archive. So it's firmly in the fair use category, in my opinion.

Edit: And to be clear, when I say it's fair use, I only mean in the strict sense of following copyright law. I don't mean that it is (or should be) clear of all other legal considerations.