It's theft. But not all IP theft, or theft in general, is morally equivalent. A poor person stealing a loaf of bread or pirating a movie they couldn't afford is just. A corrupt elite stealing poor farmers' food or stealing content from small struggling creators is not.
I wish this argument would die. It's so comically false, and is just used to allow people to pave over their cognitive dissonance with the real misfortunes of a small minority.
I am a millennial and rode the wave of piracy as much as the next 2006 computer nerd. It was never, ever, about not being able to afford these things, and always about how much you could get for free. For every one person who genuinely couldn't afford a movie, there were at least 1000 who just wanted it free.
Speak for yourself. For many more it's about being unwilling to support the development of tech that strips users of their ability to control the devices that they ostensibly own.
I happily pay for my media when there's a way to do so,
without simultaneously supporting the emplacement of telescreens everywhere you look.
How do you expect open source alternatives to exist when they cannot enforce how you use their IP? Open source licenses exist and are enforced under IP law. This is part of the reason why AI companies have been pushing hard for IP reform because they to decimate IP laws for thee but not for me.
Under copyright laws, if HN's T's & C's didn't override it, anything I write and have written on HN is my IP. And the AI data hoarders used it to train their stuff.
Calling a HN comment “intellectual property” is like calling a table saw in your garage “capital”. There are specific regulatory contexts where it might be somewhat accurate, but it’s so different from the normal case that none of our normal intuitions about it apply.
For example, copyright makes it illegal to take an entire book and republish it with minor tweaks. But for something short like an HN comment this doesn’t apply; copyright always permits you to copy someone’s ideas, even when that requires using many of the same words.
I never advocated "stricter IP laws". I would however point out the contradiction between current IP laws being enforced against kids using BitTorrent while unenforced against billionaires and their AI ventures, despite them committing IP theft on a far grander scale.
