Imo it’s not about you accessing things you want for free. If your family purchased a disc copy of the goonies before you were born and you watched it as a kid, your accessing of that content you wanted for free has no moral bearing. The core question is what impact does your consumption have, and I don’t think that participating in the streaming landscape is making things any better for anyone but their ceos.
The comment I was responding to certainly seemed to be advocating uninhibited free access via torrents, but your point is reasonable. I don't think streaming is a great way to support artists either, though I do think it's better than nothing.
I just don’t think streaming is really working for anybody. Artists are being given less and less creative control as time goes on as each streaming company attempts to optimize itself in a largely fixed market. It’s working the same way cable used to work. I think a disruption is in order, but last time disruption started with people moving to nascent torrent sites.
I guess the way I’d put it is that if you can only get some particular show through one company, that company gets to treat you shitty, cause where else are you gonna go. Torrenting, even just widespread knowledge of torrenting, gives the customer more leverage.
But is torrenting better than buying music e.g. through bandcamp or directly from the artist's label? I do a combination of streaming for exploratory listening and buying to support artists. And live shows when I can. I'm not trying to suggest I'm holier than thou, but I really don't think torrents are the answer to this equation. However I strongly agree that the current system isn't working for artists and needs disruption.
Also if you pirate everything you're not incentivizing people to make things in a more ethical manner. I've mostly cancelled my streaming services (I'll get different ones for a month at a time for specific shows) but I still pay for Dropout.tv (when they turned a profit they paid out a dividend to actors) and Patreon for YouTube creators that have high quality content.
I think the point is, using Spotify is already essentially listening to your artists without supporting them. You might as well do that without supporting a company that is harming them.
A whole lot of people in the tech scene got really mad when Huawei was using obviously stolen Cisco designs and code for their switches. Didn’t humanity benefit from having cheaper access to switches because they didn’t have to pay for Cisco’s sunk costs? A whole lot of people got mad when Microsoft reportedly ganked open source code for things like DNS. Didn’t humanity benefit from one of the world’s most popular server OSs having more reliable name resolution?
Oh, but corporations were the primary beneficiaries, right?
Well, corporations are the primary beneficiaries of this too from a financial perspective. A vanishingly small percentage of people will run, let alone train these models themselves— it’s almost exclusively used to make commercial services that directly compete against the people that made the initial ” data“. But, the vanishingly small percentage of people that directly utilize this stuff for non-commercial use frequent echo chambers like this that make them think more regular people benefit directly. And the companies that are competing directly with creatives and intellectuals using their stolen work employ a whole lot of people here, directly or not.
The distinction between a reason and a justification gets pretty difficult to distinguish the closer you are to the group benefiting from injustice.
> I’d completely disagree, because China was the beneficiary and it destroyed North American jobs.
a) The whole point of commercial NN services is to replace human labor, and jobs are paid labor. Literally the entire point of LLMs is to destroy jobs; this isn't hypothetical-- US companies have openly talked about having fired people and not filled roles because they either have increased or hope to increase efficiency with LLMs. And that's in tech where there's a chance more jobs will be created as a result-- the situation is far worse in creative fields. I personally know quite a few north American creative workers that have lost their jobs because the studios they work for have replaced almost the entire department with image generators that the remaining workers use to spray-and-pray concept art and game assets. Comparatively, the argument that they will create more jobs-- even as many jobs-- as they destroy is pure speculation.
b) Considering you're willing to have in-group protectionism in the form of nationalism, I'm guessing you're willing to extend that to industry, so creative workers don't count? Is it only American tech jobs that count or are you against American LLMs that replace any American workers, also?
> China needs to respect the American trademark system!
Trademarks? I assume you're talking about the patent system rather than logos... and legally they don't, actually. The US doesn't respect Chinese patents, either. How many times have you heard of a US company stopping doing something because a Chinese company patented it first? Do you really think we just invent everything first over here?
The observation being made here is that copyright law serves to protect the interests of large companies, not the public, so violating copyright law is, in and of itself, not unethical.
Whereas i agree that the current regime of "licensing" is not good, I simultaneously find it incredibly selfish to believe that one has the right to any content one likes.
"Own nothing" is bad, but so is "access and share anything." Both positions are too extreme.
I try to buy/rent/legitimately stream all the media I consume. But I've run into issues where I would "buy" a license to a movie, and suddenly I don't have access to a movie. I'm sure it was for some publishing licensing legal reason, but the fact remains that they kept my money I paid for the movie and I don't have what I paid for.
I wouldn't say I have a fundamental right to any content, but certainly I have a right to content I paid for.
Who even thinks that ethical consumption exists under any system? Any of your consumption denies it to others. Some consumption is a necessity of course. We wouldn't speak of something absurd like "ethical breathing".
