Also my personal opinion about copyright _in the FOSS domain_ is that I simply dont care. Copyleft as the GNU folks like to call it is just using the copyright laws to achieves certain free software objectives. If that doesnt work anymore there will be another fix
The BSD licences are not copyleft, or indeed part of the GNU copyright regime.
Copyright is dead.
I remember hearing that in 1996 too.
It took a while for the DMCA to happen after Napster. But it indeed happened, and we all know the saying about history repeating itself.
By the time they came for Napster technology had already moved on. I can still download entire albums and movies in minutes 2 decades later. Heck, Usenet is still a bastion of piracy and that's been around for 46 years.
Yeah, but you cannot do so legally; you can't build a business of it. The AI companies are trying to build a business, not download movies for their kids to watch during school holidays!
The 90s young people are familiar with are... way different from the 90s I remember. Their understanding of it is like... if someone asked to AI-gen the decade.
I suppose my point still stands if you are willing to stretch back to Usenet, BBSs, etc. as an inflection point in mass copyright infringement.
There's only two ways for copyright to go, either by being tightened up or by being loosened.
When has copyright protections ever loosened? We've got hundreds of years of copyright laws in multiple different jurisdictions, and I can't think of when they were, for all practical purposes, loosened.
If they are loosened, then sure, the AI companies win big here. If they are tightened, AI itself becomes almost useless (derivative of current works).
You may not care, but if the OS you prefer to run is the defendant in a copyright case, that's likely to impact you in a negative way.
"Those that do not learn history" and so forth.
I mean, it's not like the BSDs stagnated and lost ground to Linux because of copyright lawsuits... oh, wait!