You jest, but if conservatives have their way, you’ll soon have to verify your ID by uploading a video every time you visit the site (if not logged in). Even for non-adult content!

Because the reason for the ID isn’t to “protect the children” or anything like that. It’s about control. Conservatives want the power to decide what people get to see and ID verification systems are just a small part of that.

So… just like on Earth, the majority of the universe is full of wimps! And Black Holes are the universe’s version of, “suck it up, buttercup!”

New maximum age to run for office just dropped: 66

I’m in the camp of, “if it’s good, why should I care?” However, I’m all for transparency! Passing off AI-generated music as human-generated is fraud. Be honest!

There’s a LOT of grey areas though. If you’re a vocalist and you’re using an AI-generated background? How’s that any different from pressing “play” on a sequencer or even an audio file (of some sequenced or drum track)?

If you’re a lyricist, the actual music isn’t as important as the lyrics. Does it matter if they used AI to generate the music or should every lyricist be forced to pay someone to make the music for them or master an instrument (or sequencer)?

What if you’re trying to translate your music into a different language and use AI to translate it? Is that AI-generated music? You can give your whole damned song to AI and it’ll convert to a different language in-place without having to re-record it. It even uses your singer’s voice!

To me, it’s incredible technology and it’s enabling artists of all kinds to do cool things with their music. It seems rather paternalistic to suggest someone’s creativity doesn’t “count” if they didn’t sweat or spend years practicing to create it.

Yep! There’s really only ONE operating system that doesn’t do rsync over SSH. Can you guess which one? 😁

BTW: FolderSync does it on Android for free… https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.lite (only OK-ish GUI but it works).

What should be illegal is patents like this!

I just use rsync over ssh via a cron job 🤷

It’s been working fine for over 20 years on all my various PCs.

It created a lot of jobs. It just didn’t get the usual network effects of having a lot of people employed because they were all incentivized to stay working at these big tech firms.

The solution is to make it easier for said tech employees to form their own tech startups using local talent. That way they’re likely to break away from US tech and forge their own paths.

I don’t know what the situation in Ireland is for starting such business but clearly it isn’t in great shape. The government obviously focused on the big players at the expense of the small (local) ones.

As long as there’s some kind of power available inside the machine (e.g. an extra SATA power connector) it can just use that and wifi.

I suspect that the Valve engineers weren’t so short sighted though and probably have all the usual headers/connectors inside the thing that a normal PC would have. For example, a USB 3 header (the kind usually used for front-panel USB ports).

If anything, the device probably has at least one extra M.2 connector and a 1x or 4x PCI express connector. With those, anything is possible.

Even if the only power available is the CPU fan header you can always just use a splitter and pull power out of that.

Meh. As long as the lithium battery is as easy to replace as it was to perform other Steam Controller repairs, it shouldn’t be a big deal.

Think about how many AA batteries will end up in a landfill over the lifetime of the controller VS the typical lifetime of the lithium battery. The AA batteries lose every time.

Think of it like this: You can replace the battery once every two years (if the controller lasts that long in your sweaty ass hands 🤣) or you can replace the batteries every month… 24 times, adding 48-96 batteries to the landfill in that time.

You know they’re just buildings full of servers, right?

I mean, I’d rather have a data center than some toxic chemical factory or a busy warehouse in my neighborhood. Data centers just… sit there. They use a lot of power and some use a lot of water, but if your region doesn’t have power/water problems it’s not really much of an impact.

A nation’s supercomputing power used to be something people celebrated. Especially one owned and operated by a place like Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Someone got the wrong idea if they’re pushing for equatorial flights instead of equal rights.

There’s no legal distinction between what a search engine scraper does and what an AI scraper does. They’re literally the same exact fucking thing.

Google scrapes a site and puts it in their database.

An AI company scrapes a site and puts it in their database.

You’re trying to make a distinction based on what happens after the data has been collected and completely ignoring the fact that search engine scrapers and AI scrapers are performing the same activity.

In fact it’s everyone’s right to scrape the Internet! Go, scrape it! Whether it’s Google or AI companies or Joe Schmoe. Scraping is legal and a perfectly normal activity. Just because some AI scrapers are fucking up has no bearing on whether or not the activity of scraping is bad/good.

We learned this lesson in the 90s: If you don’t want someone scraping your stuff don’t put it on the fucking Internet!

A VCR spits out copyrighted material because the user put it there (by inserting a cassette). Just like how an AI can spit out something that resembles copyrighted works when a user asks it to do so.

It’s not a perfect analogy but it fits. Especially from a legal perspective.

Many of the AI companies have been downloading content through means other than scraping, such as bittorrent, to access and compile copyrighted data that is not publicly scrape-able. That includes Meta, OpenAI, and Google.

Anthropic is the only company to have admitted publicly to doing this. They were sued and settled out of court. Google and OpenAI have had no such accusations as far as I’m aware. Furthermore, Google had the gigantic book scanning project where it was determined in court that the act of scanning as many fucking books as you want is perfectly legal (fair use). Read all about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.

In late 2013, after the class action status was challenged, the District Court granted summary judgment in favor of Google, dismissing the lawsuit and affirming the Google Books project met all legal requirements for fair use. The Second Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the District Court’s summary judgment in October 2015, ruling Google’s “project provides a public service without violating intellectual property law.” The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently denied a petition to hear the case.

You say:

That is also false. Just because you don’t understand the legal distinction between scraping content to summarize in order to direct people to a site (there was already a lawsuit against Google that established this, as well as its boundaries), versus scraping content to generate a replacement that obviates the original content, doesn’t mean the law doesn’t understand it.

There is no such legal distinction. Scraping content is legal no matter WTF you plan to do with it. This has been settled in court many, many times. Here’s some court cases for you to learn the actual legality of scraping and storing of said scraped data:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn (recent!)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_v._United_States — This one is really relevant because it reaffirmed the concept of, “if you put it on the Internet, anyone can download it; that’s fair use… Regardless of intent”… just because you put up some acceptable use policy that says, “you may not scrape this”—or use it to train AI—is irrelevant. You have to read the full ruling to get all those details though (sorry).
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_v._Arriba_Soft_Corp. and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Amazon.com,_Inc. ­— These are the big court cases that determined that what search engines do “is transformative” and therefore, fair use. The courts ruled that summarizing (thumbnails or generating text) what you scrape is fair use. By extension, one can assume that what an AI does with the scraped data is the same thing. Remember: At the heart of every AI model is a random number generator. They’re not “plagiarism machines” as many would like to believe. They’re random word prediction engines.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_v._Google,_Inc. — This is the court case that ruled—very specifically!—that caching the entire copyrighted works in your database is perfectly legal.

To summarize all this: You are 100% wrong. I have cited my sources. I was there (“3000 years ago…”) when all this went down. Pepperidge Farm remembers.

You say:

And none of this matters, because AI companies aren’t just reading content, they’re taking it and using it for commercial purposes.

This is a common misconception of copyright law: Remember Napster? They were sued and argued in court that because users don’t profit from sharing songs with their friends, it is legal. The court rejected this argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%26M_Records,_Inc._v._Napster,_Inc. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thomas-Rasset and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_%26_Row_v._Nation_Enterprises and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Geophysical_Union_v._Texaco,_Inc. where the courts all ruled the same way.

You say:

Perhaps you are unaware, but (at least in the US) while it is legal for you to view a video on YouTube, if you download it for offline use that would constitute copyright infringement if the owner objects. The video being public does not grant anyone and everyone the right to use it however they wish. Ditto for something like making an mp3 of a song on Spotify using Audacity.

Downloading a Youtube video for offline use is legal… Depending on the purpose. This is one of those very, very nuanced areas of copyright law where fair use intersects with the DMCA and also intersects with the CFAA. The DMCA states, “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” Since Youtube videos have some technical measures to prevent copying (depending on the resolution and platform!), it is illegal to circumvent them. However, The Librarian of Congress can grant exceptions to this rule and has done so for many situations. For example, archiving (https://www.arl.org/news/librarian-of-congress-expands-dmca-exemption-for-text-and-data-mining/) which is just plain wacky, IMHO.

Regardless, if Youtube didn’t put an anti-circumvention mechanism into their videos it would be perfectly legal to download the videos. Just like it’s legal to record TV shows with a VCR. This was ruled in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios (already cited). There’s no reason why it wouldn’t still apply to Youtube videos. The fact that no one has been sued for doing this since then (that I could find) seems to indicate that this is a very settled thing.

You say:

no one is arguing that it is theft, they are arguing that it is copyright infringement, which is what all of us are also subject to under the DMCA. So we’re actually arguing that AI companies should be held to the same standard that we are.

No. Fuck no. A shittton of people are saying it’s “theft”. Have you been on the Internet recently? LOL! I see it every damned day and I’m sick of it. I repeat myself that, “it’s not theft, it’s copyright infringement” and I get downvoted for “being pedantic”. Like it’s not a very fucking important distinction!

…but also: What an AI model does isn’t copyright infringement (usually). You ask it to generate an image or some text and it just does what you ask it to do. The fact that it’s possible for it to infringe copyright shouldn’t matter because it’s just a tool like a Xerox machine/copier. It has already been ruled fair use for an AI company to train their models with copyrighted works (great summary of that here: https://www.debevoise.com/insights/publications/2025/06/anthropic-and-meta-decisions-on-fair-use ). Despite these TWO court rulings, people are still saying that training AI models is both “theft” and somehow “illegal”. We’re already past that.

AI models are terrible copyright violators! Everything they generate—at best—can only ever be, “kinda sorta like” a copyrighted work. You can get closer and closer if you get clever with prompts and tell the model to generate say, 10000 images of the same thing. Then you can look at your prayers to the RNG gods and say, “Aha! Look! This image looks very very similar to Indiana Jones!”

You say:

Also, note that AI companies have argued in court (in the case brought by Steven King et al) that their use of copyrighted material shouldn’t fall under DMCA at all (i.e. arguing that it’s not about Fair Use), because their argument is that AI training is not the ‘intended use’ of the source material, so this is not eating into that commercial use. That argument leaves copyright infringement liability intact for the rest of us, while solely exempting them from liability. No thanks.

Luckily, them arguing they’re apart and separate from Fair Use also means that this can be rejected without affecting Fair Use! Double-win!

Where TF did you see this? I did some searching and I cannot see anything suggesting that the AI companies have rejected any kind of DMCA protection.

If you believe AI companies should NOT be allowed to train AI with copyrighted works you should stop using Internet search engines. Because the same rules that allow Google to train their search with everyone’s copyrighted websites are what allow the AI companies to train their models.

Every day, Google and others download huge swaths of the Internet directly into their servers and nobody bats an eye. An AI company does the same thing and now people say that’s copyright infringement.

What the fuck! I don’t get it. It’s the exact same thing. Why is an AI company doing that any different‽

It’d be one thing if people were bitching about just the output of AI models but they’re not. They’re bitching about the ingress step!

The day we ban ingress of copyrighted works into whatever TF people want is the day the Internet stops working.

My comment right here is copyrighted. So is yours! I didn’t ask your permission before my Lemmy client downloaded it. I don’t need to ask your permission to use your comment however TF I want until I distribute it. That’s how the law works. That’s how it’s always worked.

The DMCA also protects the sites that host Lemmy instances from copyright lawsuits. Because without that, they’d be guilty of distribution of copyrighted works without the owner’s permission every damned day.

People who hate AI are supporting an argument that the movie and music studios made in the 90s: That “downloading is theft.” It is not! In fact, because that is not theft, we’re all able to enjoy the Internet every day.

Ever since the Berne convention, literally everything is copyrighted. Everything.

That “blank tape charge” was only implemented in Canada. Not the US.

Your VCR is hooked up to your TV (coaxial into the VCR and from the VCR into the TV). Just before the broadcast starts, you press the record button (which was often mechanically linked to the play button). When it’s done, you press stop. Then you rewind and can play it back later.

The end user is sort of passively recording it. The broadcast happens regardless of the user’s or the VCR’s presence.

This is how the software works:

You obviously never used a VCR to record a live broadcast before. When people were using a VCR to record things, that’s what they were doing 99% of the time. Nobody had two VCRs hooked up to each other to copy tapes. That was a super rare situation that you’d typically only find in professional studios.