IP law is too complicated to explain to the average moron (by which I am including government representatives as well as voters), so for 25 years we’ve just left it up to a few academics and nerds but mostly multi billion dollar corporation’s lawyers to ‘figure out’.
I wrote papers on the need for reform of the DMCA back during the GFC era, nobody fucking cared.
Now, we are at the point where Nvidia tried to pay Annas Archive for 500TB of pirated textual works to train their models on, and somehow, only Annas Archive seems to be in any actual legal danger at the moment.
Piracy is essentially explicitly legal with a meaningless ‘cost of doing business’ fine if you are a multi billion dollar corp, but if you don’t directly profit from it, well then that is illegal and you could go to jail for the rest of your life, or be suicided, one way or another, like Aaron Schwartz.
We need either a corporate death penalty or we need laws that throw the executives of companies that do shit like this in jail for 20 years, and also divest them of all of their wealth, thats the fine now, its all your money and your shit.
But of course, that won’t happen without killing about 5,000 people, the corpos who have a chokehold on the US government.
Many many people wouldn‘t even own a digital device if not for free copyrighted content in the naïve 00s. The jolly roger flew in the way of today‘s inescable powers. It turned white long ago.
Yep.
IP law is too complicated to explain to the average moron (by which I am including government representatives as well as voters), so for 25 years we’ve just left it up to a few academics and nerds but mostly multi billion dollar corporation’s lawyers to ‘figure out’.
I wrote papers on the need for reform of the DMCA back during the GFC era, nobody fucking cared.
Now, we are at the point where Nvidia tried to pay Annas Archive for 500TB of pirated textual works to train their models on, and somehow, only Annas Archive seems to be in any actual legal danger at the moment.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/nvidia-accused-of-trying-to-cut-a-deal-with-annas-archive-for-high-speed-access-to-the-massive-pirated-book-haul-allegedly-chased-stolen-data-to-fuel-its-llms
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Nvidia-Court-documents-reveal-correspondence-regarding-pirated-dataset-11148122.html
https://dataconomy.com/2026/01/20/claim-nvidia-green-lit-pirated-book-downloads-for-ai-training/
Piracy is essentially explicitly legal with a meaningless ‘cost of doing business’ fine if you are a multi billion dollar corp, but if you don’t directly profit from it, well then that is illegal and you could go to jail for the rest of your life, or be suicided, one way or another, like Aaron Schwartz.
See also:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-staff-torrented-nearly-82tb-of-pirated-books-for-ai-training-court-records-reveal-copyright-violations
https://torrentfreak.com/meta-torrented-over-81-tb-of-data-through-annas-archive-despite-few-seeders-250206/
We need either a corporate death penalty or we need laws that throw the executives of companies that do shit like this in jail for 20 years, and also divest them of all of their wealth, thats the fine now, its all your money and your shit.
But of course, that won’t happen without killing about 5,000 people, the corpos who have a chokehold on the US government.
Many many people wouldn‘t even own a digital device if not for free copyrighted content in the naïve 00s. The jolly roger flew in the way of today‘s inescable powers. It turned white long ago.