As far as the ethics of piracy, my stance is that
The current model where we are essentially paying for someone to hit copy and paste is inherently broken and we need to move to a model based on commissions/grants etc where the artists are being paid to make the works, ideally through public funds.

As far as the current reality around the AI companies, that Arthas stand was one gamestop had a license to display in their store provided by Blizzard to promote their game. The copyrighted material you “trained on” was provided for piblic access. These companies aren’t training off of publicly available information, as I was saying, they’re torrenting the full copyrighted material in the exact same way a traditional pirate would, The only difference is what they’re doing with it afterwards.

Edit: I don’t know if there’s evidence of Midjourney’s developers doing it specifically but Meta absolutely has so it’s a pretty safe assumption.

Terrible idea man. Can you imagine Trump being in charge of funding all of the arts? I don’t want any government with that sort of power over creative endeavor.

The current system works. You’re not paying for someone to hit copy paste, you’re paying for access to the idea that is physically embodied in the content if that makes sense. The creator decides whether you pay for that or not, and how much to pay. But many pirates don’t want to pay, don’t want to watch ad; in summary they simply believe that they are entitled to the work of the creative, which to me is absurd and outrageous.

But yeah that’s what I meant about AI training. If there are Shrek images out there that Disney willingly published and I trained an AI on it there should be no issue because it would be no different than me looking at Shrek and then making a drawing of it.

Yes but looking at publicly available shrek images is not what’s happening here, this is downloading every shrek movie

Would it not then be better to buy a shady key to financially hurt the company?

• 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)

Drama. A business partner of the creators used an illegal loophole to obtain a majority stake of the company and then fired the actual creators because they where considered to volatile.

The universe of Disco Elysium is Kurvitz paracosm which he has been creating since his teens. Its a part of their identity that they are now barred from expressing.

Its a bit like if you told Tolkien halfway trough writing lotr that he is fired as the author and can never write anything about middle earth again.

Would it not then be better to buy a shady key to financially hurt the company?

You should totally play the game, but make sure that you pirate it so your money doesn't go to the thief who stole the rights from the creators.

"Piracy" isn't piracy.

It depends. Pirating a specific thing created by someone I think is not good. Ask almost any creator on the Web.

While using motives, aesthetics, characters, universes ... is usually something that shouldn't be subject to IP law, but in fact is, because the law is not written with any creators in mind, it's intended to create convenient conditions for big businesses.

It depends.

It doesn't

Piracy is a sea ship attack. "Unauthorized copying" is the term you seek. Copying doesn't involve attacks, killing, or even robbing, but piracy -- does. And no, it isn't just some terminology casus. Law strictly differentiate killing, raping, robbing and unauthorized copying.

No, I don't talk stupid shit. It is important.

It's important propaganda-wise, because it supports a subconscious association between unauthorized copy and and capturing a vessel with its crew. I agree.

What I meant is - unauthorized copying is sometimes too morally very similar to a robbery. There are people, not living very rich, who depend on it happening more rarely. Of course they are being robbed by intermediaries always and by us sometimes, but they still feel it.

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.