I can only imagine you already cut out a lot of material :)
The way I see it, the original problem, which stands the test of time, is when copies are made and/or sold by somebody who is taking credit for the original work without giving credit to the actual creator.
Anything less needs to be much more realistically reflected as very minor by comparison.
I think this is part of a recurring pattern in tech of pushing boundaries around copyright.
In the last few years, we had Google scanning books, Google threatening to shut down News in Canada rather than pay publishers, LLMs summarizing articles on social platforms, crawlers bypassing paywalls, and so on.
Each time, the industry frames it as their interpretation of the current law, which were usually not written with these specific future use cases in mind.
In my view the current discussion regarding Gen AI is similar.
i still dont see why google should pay news publishers for each reader google sends to the publisher. like the publisher is getting that view already and can monetize it how they see fit
The Canadian and Australian news link taxes are a naked hand out to powerfully connected individuals like Rupert Murdoch. They're completely incoherent as policy without that fact.
Big Tech spinelessly folded when they should have just banned news links instead. Google has no obligation to index or link to extortionist news media at all. Watch Murdoch U-turn in ten seconds when no one can find his trash online.
In general, there's far too much compliance with protectionist mandates from corrupt foreign governments. One silver lining of the mostly dark cloud of deglobalisation is the fact that US businesses should no longer care what Australian or Turkish or Russian laws say at all, if they're not in those markets.
I think the problem is that “transformation” has never been clearly defined in copyright law, and that ambiguity is exactly what AI companies lean on in their defense.
At a human scale, those boundaries get clarified through litigation on a case by case basis once an infringement becomes large or obvious enough. But there has always been a gray area around when a derivative work crosses the line into infringement.
And AI didn’t create that ambiguity, it just pushed it to a more extreme scale
> Personally I feel that the excessive duration of copyright just weakens authors arguments against AI.
That excess exists precisely because of the industry’s clout. For decades, rightsholders successfully lobbied Congress to extend copyright term again and again. That process appears to have finally plateaued, which is why early Mickey Mouse has now entered the public domain.
And notably, since the rise of AI, the government has not been especially quick or eager to step in and defend rightsholders.
> Basically a rage bait. If the law was bad, does it make it okay to violate it? In fact Anthropic is literally paying $1.5B on the copyright settlement, that indicates its completely a settled issue that AI companies have been violating this law. Some have been caught and fined, others are been lucky or that influence over the government.
Yes, but they were found not liable for copying the books they purchased. They were found liable for the books they torrented.
The former is something publishers still want to address
I'm a very casual and very occasional gamer, so I can't deeply about this topic. But, is gaming in a dire state?
Platform exclusives seem to be rare (outside of Nintendo). I have an xbox (which I'm told is the wrong console), but I can play nearly everything a PS5 can. Most major titles seem to be very cross platform (PC, Xbox, PS5, and sometimes Nintendo). If anything, they stagger release dates, not access.
Steam's market share has held relatively steady at 75%. And in fairness, it does not seem like Epic is trying at all to improve their product, so I'm not sure they're deserving of more right now. GoG continues to have ts cult following (I had never heard of it until recently, but now see references to it frequently).
And it seems to be easier to game on Linux (and even Mac) than in the past few years.
I have no way of verifying this, but Perplexity states that ~5% of Steam games are exclusives. Have they exerted monopolistic pressure on the market in other ways?
The hardware itself used to be exclusive. We used to marvel at what the Cell processor, N64 MIPS, etc. could do, but now PS and XBox are just commodities that we could say is equivalent to a 58XX + 20XX. Even the Switch 1 became a commodity at the end of its life, if we count emulation.
Personally, I would define the lack of exclusives outside of Nintendo's shrinking sphere as a monoculture. At the same time, I don't have a verdict on whether this is good or not. On one hand, everyone on the globe can theoretically play anything now, as opposed to what countries some American and Japanese companies can find on a map, but on the other hand, this monoculture has also completely erased our ability to truly own or trade games. Gamers now need to periodically assess if they need to upgrade hardware, and it has directly connected this hobby with the turbulence of the global economy.
On an emotional level, the erosion of console boundaries has made the world feel smaller, and that makes me inexplicably sad. Imagine if your local playwrights or board game makers feel like they need to put their works on a global marketplace, tailored to the tastes of the biggest markets.
Of course, I too have a lot of blind spots. For example, I have no idea what games are brewing on Roblox or itch.io nowadays, some of which might be on a top 10 play-hours chart if we could aggregate all platforms together. When I see one of them like Juice World/Galaxy leak out of their containers, I'm filled with joy that there's still a pocket of this world that I haven't explored.
Engage with or amplify content you agree with. Create content of your own that represents your values or ideas. If you want, try to persuade others where you think they're wrong.
Overall, if you can feel good about what you've put out there, that's enough. You'll field comments like this no matter what it is.
Tech nostalgia is driven, in part, by a lack of excitement about what current companies are offering. It wasn't really present when we were all excited about Apple, etc.
That nostalgia signals there's a market for alternatives, which we've seen some companies serve, and expect others to enter. This will provide us with more choices apart from "Apple" vs. "Google" end-to-end ecosystems.
Tech is also fun because we have some new categories for the first time, perhaps since mobile. VR isn't popular per se, but I consider it mature. Ray Ban Metas are also a new category (consider an emerging AR application — or more of a glorified camera device, for now). A first person point of view for videos is very different than what's captured by a smartphone; I feel like I'm "there" when I watch travel videos I've taken with them, much more than when I watch what's taken with my phone.
The only personal statement I'm making is that tech seems primed to be fun again (though we probably have to anchor our expectations around a local maxima)
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