this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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So glad people finally waking up to these things being power plays.
Republicans, Evangelical Christians, and now Techbros are all running on the same script which boils down to "rules for thee, not for me."
Being a hypocrite is simply showing others you have the power to be a hypocrite and all they can do is get mad and stomp their feet. It's why the right wing loves to "trigger liberals." It's not even about actual politics or religion anymore, it's just simply "might makes right."
These are expressions of power, plain and simple. They should always be viewed as such.
I mean, so many companies pirated tons of materials to train their LLMs and they are making way more money than the guys at the Pirate Bay ever did. It's almost like because the guys at the Pirate Bay were making small potatoes money that they were worth going after. It's almost like if you crime big enough, the world will just pat you on the back and say "good job" instead.
Meta was literally caught downloading Anna's Archive and the widely used by nearly every AI company books3 corpus was everything from private torrent tracker Bibliotik. Why do they get different treatment? They are leveraging the same pirated works to make money, which was the whole argument for throwing the Pirate Bay admins behind bars for laws that didn't actually exist in their home country, that they were profiting from piracy. The LLM companies just are making way more money so it's let go for some reason.
It's a power play, to show little people can't get away with it, but if you've got millions in venture capital at your back, you can do whatever the fuck you want and people will praise you for it.
I agree on the double standard. I also think there's an element of Cory Doctorow's point that "it's not a crime of we do it with an app."
Running an unlicensed taxi service or hotel business? No no we're not criminals, we're disrupting stagnant markets!
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/
It's basically a blanket pass for tech bros to bend and break laws
This is the real sick stuff, same with RealPage. They're just offering a service that could allow the businesses they serve to collude, but because they're just doing it through a third party service it's suddenly not collusion.
Doctorow pretty spot on as usual. I'm glad he's come a long way, because I actually kind of disliked his writing on Boing Boing in the early 2000's because he often got some simple facts wrong. He's much more thorough and rigorous now.
Saddest part of that article. We had someone trying to end this shit, and you brainwashed fuckers hated him for it.