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Comment by Bjorkbat | Hacker News Reader

Can't believe I'm actually rooting for the copyright cartels in this fight.

But that does make me think, that in a sane society with a functional legislature I wouldn't have to pick a dog in this fight. I'd have have enough faith in lawmakers and the political process to pursue a path towards copyright reform that reigns in abuses from both AI companies and megacorp rightsholders

Alas, for now I'm hoping that aforementioned megacorps sue OpenAI into a painful lesson.

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> Can't believe I'm actually rooting for the copyright cartels in this fight.

The same megacorps are suing Internet Archive for their collection of 78rpm records. These guys would rather see art orphaned and die.

Yup, we live in a pretty depressing world.

More generally the best we can hope for us to discourage concentrated power, both in government and corporate forms.

They're suing Internet Archive because IA scanned a bunch of copyrighted books to put online for free (e: without even attempting to get permission to do so) then refused to take them down when they got a C&D lol. IA is putting the whole project at risk so they can do literal copyright infringement with no consequences.

During covid, when everyone was told to stay at home and not do anything, the library offered library books.

And what they actually did is violate the requirement to have a physical copy of the book they were lending.

As I understand it, they did not offer anything new that wasn't available to loan prior.

I could be wrong. But if I'm not, I see no reason to lambast IA.

It's not lambasting to communicate what happened. IA got a C&D, refused to comply, and got sued for copyright infringement. The courts sided with the publishers when IA tried to claim it was fair use (technologists seem to have a pattern of stretching the definition of fair use). They've put their entire project at risk because they've repeatedly ignored the law here. That's just what happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-defends-its...

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