Heh, blast from the past here from the "information wants to be free" and "you wouldn't download a car" days. Sometimes HN feels unrecognizable with how much the comments I read are pro- intellectual property.
But these days, I do wonder how much 90s / early 2000s time was any better or if all of us who had experienced them are just getting older and nostalgic for our youth.
> Sometimes HN feels unrecognizable with how much the comments I read are pro- intellectual property.
How so? Many people just rightfully care mainly about the cultural exploitation aspect and the impact on society. Under that lens you can be anti-copyright when it is used by corporations to exploit individuals and pro-copyright or at least pro-equal enforcement when it is ignored by corporations to exploit individuals.
To be clear, I was never actually really one of the pro-piracy types. Honestly, I think very few people are really all that high-falutin' principled anyway. It really is hard when it's free to reproduce; you having something isn't preventing someone else from having it as well.
The one clear straight line I can draw is: people are pro- or anti-IP when it benefits them.
If you're a broke student, you were anti-IP (and convincing yourself you were really just sticking it to the record companies, not the musicians). If you were an indie musician who benefited from name recognition you could afford to be anti-IP to get your name out there. If you were a well-known musician back then, you were relatively pro-IP, to get your royalties.
These days, if you're a struggling artist you're pro-IP and screw the AI companies for crawling your work. If you're a small business plumber scrambling to make ends meet and AI helps you make business cards and flyers, you're anti-IP. (At least as far as AI and its training goes - if someone tries to use your brand, you're back to pro-IP.)
Anyway, since there's no physical basis, IP is a weird legal restriction solely there to benefit certain groups, and whether you support it (or should support it) or not depends on context and which groups you're in at the moment.
This nuanced take is appreciated less and less as HN grows.
AI changed the perception of the "information wants to be free" idea.
In a sense, AI companies did a lot to "free" the information, they took everything they could, including pirated data, and put them all into a model, which you can then query to get something similar to "not free" information, but clean of copyright.
But now that information is actually free (or at least, freer than before) people realize that it didn't come out of nowhere. People worked to produce that content, and many of them are people like you and me, not billionaires and faceless corporations, and it is affecting them and their ability to produce more content.
That part didn't change, what changed was that before, piracy was a rebellious act, done by poor teenagers, something easy to sympathize with. Now, it is done by trillion (!) dollar companies on an industrial scale, not much sympathy to give here.
It would probably be easier to reconcile if the AI itself was free, but it isn't, the AI is completely locked down, and that just makes it pure hypocritical theft.
Can you objectively think about what was/wasn't better? Aside from download speeds, I don't think piracy is any easier or harder today than it was back then. As a negative for back then, I think the threat of legal action against regular folks downloading stuff loomed larger. I think today groups focus more on quality/file size than time to market.
Overall, I think piracy is in a healthier state today.
Maybe the threat of serious legal action was stronger back then but I think the threat of light legal action is stronger now. They've streamlined the processes for getting your ISP to ban you (largely by copyright troll companies buying up all the ISPs).
In Germany, if you download a public torrent, there is a brief legal process which always ends with 100-2000€ being deducted from your bank account and given to the copyright holder. Not that it could end with that - it does end with that, every time. First your ISP sends you an email forwarded from the copyright holder demanding that you pay an amount of money or you'll be sued for a larger amount of money. You either pay immediately, or you accept getting sued, you lose the lawsuit, and you pay a larger amount of money. If you don't pay that, the court calls your bank and subtracts an even larger amount of money directly from your account. If you don't have a bank account, bailiffs show up at your house to seize property to sell. One of these things always happens. There is zero wiggle room.
The US isn't quite as strict as the notoriously strict Germany, but it has been trending in that direction.
What law is this exactly? I've done a quick web search, but couldn't find anything describing quite this. Most sources suggested the law outlaws distributing (i.e. uploading) copywritten material, not downloading. This seems like it would be similar to US law...
Maybe I should have mentioned the threat of criminal charges, or defined piracy as downloading (but it seems like you understood it this way too as you mentioned "downloading a public torrent"). Rights holders do make sure there are news stories every so often about lawsuits around some act related to piracy, but of course regular people can be bullied in the courts, whether they are truly liable or not.
When downloading a torrent you usually also start seeding (distributing).
Torrenting involves uploading.
Upload limits: You can limit your global upload speed to 0 KB/s in your client settings. This effectively stops your client from sharing anything, including in-progress pieces, while the download happens. It's not "playing fair" but there is nothing in the torrent protocol which requires every user to participate in seeding.