Uriel238 [all pronouns]

Once again the ownership class pirates freely while disparaging the common folk for violating copyright.

It’s almost if it’s not a real law, rather something by which to disparage the proletariat.

Clarification: The Mouse as in Disney Corporation not as in the thing you use to move your pointer.

More crime is committed in the making of media than in pirating it.

Also more wrongdoing against society and the public that the justice department couldn’t be bothered with (so doesn’t count as crime).

Pirate it all or don’t watch it.

Note that with rare exceptions, creators are not supported by your purchases. Rather the studios, labels and publishers wh cheat creators are.

If you want to support the creators, pay them directly, or go to one of their performances / signings / functions. But still pirate their work.

Public domain and abandonware and forgotten media are regarded by the media companies as a threat to their business model, since it is possible you can be entertained by them rather than their own for-cost offerings. It is no longer enough for them to control what you consume media, but insist on controlling whether you consume.

And the courts regard them as persons and members of the public as not. We don’t count as invested parties.

According to the US and the EU we common folk don’t figure.

It is now more ethical to pirate (or simply not consume it at all) than it is to obtain legitimate licenses.

I’m sure AGI is far off and AGI is impossible is exactly what AGI wants us to think.

Newton’s Long John Silver was a solid enough performance to warrant a sequel / spin-off, so TTAPD would be like a day to honor Bela Lugosi’s Dracula or even James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader.

These people have absolutely made their mark on American culture.

Black Friday, the shopping day is a gimmick taking advantage of an already popular shopping day. Not necessarily the most popular or most profitable or even the worst day for shopper shennanigans and violence. But then, it’s difficult for capitalist phenomena to not be turned into gimmicks used to market more sales.

Since the publishers are also trying to suppress out-of-print media, abandonware and public domain material (also fair use) and the courts are favoring the publishers over the good of the public, we know it’s no longer about promoting science and useful arts or building a robust public domain.

The companies and courts alike are breaking the social contract, hence the trmporary monopolies enstated by the agencies of the same state are invalid. Piracy is no longer a valid crime since the state licenses are no longer valid.

(They will still enforce the will of the state — ICE does a lot of raids to enforce commercial interests when it’s not massacring refugees— but that doesn’t legitimize the will of the state. It only shows they are willing tyrants glad to use violence to oppress.)

We have nothing to lose but our chains!

Unhiding extensions is one of the first things I do when setting up windows, but it will still hide the .lnk extension on shortcuts, so it’s still a vector for phishing attacks (specifically, tricking the user to do something that runs malicious code).

Experienced pirates will get into the habit of taking precautions against malware attacks and will distrust downloads until they are sufficiently vetted,

That’s okay. Countless musicians lost their jobs with talkies and the rise of recording.

ETA I’d rather see recording industry moguls lose their job from obsolescence than actual musicians.

Please do.

I’m glad to not watch content that is enshittified by ads… or is enshittified by poor development.

Death to IP. Full stop.

Actually it does. It involves making use of a copy that is not the original. Fair use is about experiencing media for sake of dialog (criticism or parody) or for edification. That means someone is reading the book or watching the movie, or using it for transformative art or science.

AI training should qualify for fair use.

Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.

It’s even more okay when the bourgeoisie does it in the interest of potential profit gain.

Saved. Thank you.

There are too many instances of classical-age commenters dealing with the same exact bullshit we deal with now.

It doesn’t speak well to our capacity to learn and improve.

Here in the states, a lot of the Republican party campaigns as Reagan and [George H. W.] Bush conservatives or OG conservatives, and I have to remind them that those conservatives and MAGAs (Christian nationalists, white power) are the exact same thing.

The policies of Reagan accelerated our path to the precipice of one-party autocracy. What they pushed as policy then figures largely in how we got here, with the last vestiges of US democracy tilting off the precipice into one-party autocracy.

Old fiscal responsibility / family values Republicans just wished they had another mile or two to plummet and the cold rocks below weren’t looming so close.

To toss in another metaphor, they didn’t just buy a ticket to ride, they used their railroad shares to vote on where to lay the rails, and where the line ends.

GPT 4 can lie to reach a goal or serve an agenda.

I doubt most of its hallucinated outputs are deliberate, but it can choose to use deception as a logical step.

One can only hope. Copyright has, for a long time been wrongdoing against the public by denying it a robust public domain. We should have free access to ideas less than a century old.

This reveals, nonetheless, even European government is about control, not governance, enforcement of established hierarchy, not civil rights for all.

Here in the US, there are no progressive legislative bodies. The Democratic party treats its progressive members as the red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table.