Cory Doctorow speaks to this in his Reverse Centaur book. Recommended reading for sure!

Considering AI has proven copyright doesn't exist, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

It’s a complicated thing, but I’d suggest even as is ArXiv is better than the current publisher model.

I agree

Sure, hence like ArXiv, and refined, appeals should be part of the refinement. Absolutely needs decentralizing, as long as citations keep happening, impact can be worked out, though padding that with AI slop is a risk and another threat that publisher are unlikely to spend to counter. It's a complicated thing, but I'd suggest even as is ArXiv is better than the current publisher model.

ArXiv is not without problems though. It is too centralized. I’ve heard of people getting kicked off the platform for some arbitrary reason, or due to some administrative error, and they have very little recourse. Given how important the platform has become to promote one’s research career, this is a bad place to be.

It's a simple solution, the company (Crunchyroll) that bought the other company (Funimation) buys its assets, which includes its servers. So it can rebrand the company, it can rebrand the digital copies to have the Crunchyroll splash screen rather than the Funimation one, but it should still be offering them, since Funimation's customers are now Crunchyroll's, and Crunchyroll has an obligation. Because they bought that. They bought the assets and liabilities.

You often hear the phrase, "if buying is not owning, then pirating is not theft," and it usually comes across as "an eye for an eye". But it's really not. So let me share my understanding of the phrase. To steal (commit theft), you take something with the purpose of depriving the owner of its value. In the case of copyright, the value is its ability to be sold. Yes, you only made a copy, but by making a copy, you deprived the owner of a sale. Even if you couldn't afford it, that doesn't really matter to them. Now here's the thing: if they aren't making sales, you haven't deprived them of anything. They can't just replace "sale" with "rental" when you've spent purchase money. It's been understood for decades that rentals are temporary and only cost a couple bucks. Ownership costs more, and guarantees you the right to play it as much as you want. They can't say "we're converting your purchase to a rental" very easily, so instead they want to change the lifetime of the product.

But anyway, anime has been a racket since day one. The prices to own are ridiculously high, because they want to push people to their streaming service. They never wanted you to own anime, only ever rent it. So if you paid the price to own, they need to support that, or buy you out. Take what it cost to buy the DVD or Blu-ray, adjust for inflation, and compensate the user. That's at the very least.

All that said, they are not likely to win a DMCA exemption under the current US administration, unless the Chump is really mad at Japan. But his string pullers and handlers are smarter than that; they know an exemption for anime can extend to other animation (like Disney, and you don't fuck with the mouse) or media in general, and Hollywood would not like that.

I'm all for media being free. I read the sidebar, nodding the whole time. I just don't think it'll happen. Case in point: Fallout 3. This game came out in 2008 on Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. On Windows, it used the short-lived Games for Windows Live, which was Xbox Live for Windows, for both DRM, and for online play. The game did not feature online play. It did feature paid downloadable content, but the Game of the Year Edition did not, as it included all of the paid expansions. So there was no reason for GFWL to be a requirement for the game, and yet it was. GFWL shut down, and becuase the Windows version was not as popular as the one for consoles, it was never updated to remove GFWL. The only way to play the game then was to crack it so it bypassed GFWL. Nobody ever got in trouble for doing this, but it was a DMCA violation to do so.

When GOG released the game, they asked Bethesda for permission to take GFWL out. Bethesda agreed, so now you could legally play the game if you bought it again. Not ideal, but it was a legal path. They were pestered to update the one on Steam, but every time, they just said no. They didn't come right out and say you can just crack it, but that was the understanding, that it was fine if you owned the game. But they weren't gonna help you do it.

Eventually, they did update Fallout 3 on Steam, but they also made some changes to the game itself. I think they just made it more compatible with more recent versions of Windows. They didn't change the actual game in any meaningful way. Aside from some bug fixes, and obviously the DLC, the only meaningful change I remember was, in the original version of the game, synths were called androids. These are robots who look human and think they're human. They came from the Boston area, from an organisation called the Institute. This would be a major part of Fallout 4, but until that game came out, it was just lore. Well, as they were developing Fallout 4, when they settled on the name "synth," they updated Fallout 3 to reflect it — this is when eagle-eyed (or should I say, hawk-eyed, referring to my handle) realised what Fallout 4 would be about. Because otherwise, why change the word? But that was well before the GFWL thing. When GFWL went down, Bethesda considered Fallout 3 to be finished and would not release updates to it for more than 10 years, maybe closer to 15. Fallout fans can tell you it is very recent that Fallout 3 got updated, but I don't recall exactly when. I wanna say it was around the time Starfield came out, and that was September 2023.

So, an American company made their game effectively illegal to play, and no one challenged the DMCA over it. Maybe they should have. Most of us just ignored it. I don't think it was really enforceable outside the US? But I'm not really sure. Guess it depends on your country's relationship to the US. But it's also beside the point.

Always was meme.

But publishers cottoned on to enshittification (or extortion) decades before tech bros (although they have more levers to twiddle).

Things like arXiv.org need to be embraced, refined, handle peer review and made relevant to academic careers. Cut the bloodsuckers out.

The training is a performance, and that's restricted by copyright. The ai isn't reading the material itself.

I read the title as anti-circumccision laws at least twice.

i guess you are not old enough to have seen the old commercials lol

Yes, that's copyright infringement, not theft

... and then write cheap copies without any penalties whatsoever, right?

Billions of them? ok

don't you have to steal them to copy them

No, you can go into the library and take pictures / scans of the pages without the books ever leaving the library.

If someone still has their belongings after a “theft” it’s not theft.

What they are doing is violating the artists (and much more heinous things), but calling it theft isn’t accurate, has undesirable side effects, and doesn’t solve the problem of stopping them doing what they’re doing.

Don't you have to steal them to copy them? The fact that no one knew they were stealing them to copy, means the owners didn't know, couldn't opt out or protect them. Just because it's not a law yet, doesn't make it okay.

Why are you interpreting this as defending them?

Why are you not? You wrote the defense out.

Did you copy them or keep them?

Why are you interpreting this as defending them?

If I ran into a university and stole all of their teaching aids, books and art to "train my university students, that's still fucking theft. Why tf would you stick up for them in any way?

It’s not theft. It’s plagiarism. They’re different.

Your second point is a valid problem with what they did (but doing something that is wrong doesn’t mean it is theft).

It's not fair use and it's theft. The artists and creators had no way of opting out because most didn't know about it.

I hate “AI” as much as the next guy, but that seems a bit harsh. They are making a very specific point, and it seems well argued to me.

That’s not to say that infringement is necessarily okay. But it’s a distinct issue from “theft.”

…

Fair use isn’t infringement. And if it is infringement, it’s not “theft.” And even if a use competes with you, competition doesn’t make it illegal. Indeed, the “effect of the use upon the potential market” is just one of four factors, and it isn’t supposed to let ordinary competition swallow the entire fair use analysis. That these employees (who are not, themselves, copyright experts) said random things does not change the actual underlying analysis of fair use. Or, at least, it shouldn’t.

Eat shit tech dirt.

What it does is that it moves the license management from a physical thing you own and can trade for, to an account-based digital license that is centrally managed by the platform owners.

What happens when the platform reaches its end of life, or if an account is stolen, has a different outcome based on physical vs digital.

Ok so like...you agree then. We don't own anything EXCEPT the physical part of the media..so, we own physical media..so taking away the ability to purchase said physical media is..and say it with me..bad, right? A reason to be upset? Yeah?

They sold disc drive ps5s at a markup, I have no idea how this is allowed mid generation.