Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing copyrighted data

More users for my game! Wonderful. Every person playing, even for free, means more people talking about it if they like it. Give every digital thing away and get people sharing it with others. If a free game is popular a small subset that can afford it will pay you if you disclose, perhaps in the game, what your financial goals are and how far you are from them kindly, but without demand.

People should be proud they make anything in a crowded internet anyone feels worth copying and sharing. That attention can be monetized all sorts of ways if a creator is paying attention. Sell merch, or a funding campaign for new upgrades or extensions.

The pay what you want (or nothing) Humble Bundle model is a step in the right direction. Gets lots of exposure to indie devs who otherwise no one might trust to give any money to sight unseen otherwise.

That is going to happen. Not all countries have or enforce copyright laws even if you rely on those.

It would however be trivial for the author to go public proving the third party game used their code without attribution. Apple famously used openstreetmap data without crediting them and openstreetmap publicly shamed them until they corrected the mistake.

People should have attribution if they ask for it, but it also should not be legally enforced. Only socially and technically.

> Really? I genuinely don't understand how you can not see how it is a problem?!

Anyone in the connected world has likely benefited from software I have written or security bugs I have identified and helped get fixed. Some of that work took years with little to no pay.

If you can get my work to more people than I can, do it!

My experience is still easy enough to monetize enough on a contract basis to pay my bills, and that is plenty. Often people pay to prioritize what features I add to open source projects they benefit from. Paid or not, I am always happy knowing my work benefits as many people as possible, rather than having it benefit only those that can afford to pay for it. My ego is not so fragile as to demand my name be in everyone's faces all the time.

Our mission in life as humans should not be about maximizing dollar amounts in our bank accounts. It should be about maximizing the amount of value we can give back to society. If value can be copied and replicated to benefit a lot of people, that is amazing! Shame we cannot do that with food, but at least we can do it with information, media, etc.

You seem to be operating under the assumption I came to these views from an ivory tower.

I have been open sourcing all of the work I legally can since I was living in my car working on library computers. Yes. I stand by this for everyone.

I had no degree, no credentials, and the only reason I was able to make a career for myself as an uneducated vagrant is -because- my work was public and free, people often used it, and demonstrated my capabilities better than any degree could.

Plenty of peers have made careers for themselves the same way.

> Laws are here because reputation is not enough anymore in our world. Those who think that laws are unnecessary generally don't directly need them. Can you show some empathy and accept that some people need to be protected by more than reputation?

This -is- coming from a pace of empathy.

My meals as a kid sometimes came from food stamps and food pantries. Most of my early internet access came from abusing 30 day AOL trial dialup cds, and I had to wait in line 3 days for a $200 black friday sale laptop I could afford. I had to break a LOT of copyright laws to get unlimited access to information my local library did not have.

Laws work in a subset of countries, and a lot of countries straight up ignore them. That gives them a major advantage over us. They can pirate freely and openly to level up their skills and capabilities with no risk of legal consequences... and we cannot? Why should the poor in America not have the same free access to any digital goods the poor in other countries do?

> You mentioned Doctorow as an example, right? Do you even know what he thinks of BigTech abusing their power? He's totally for more regulations for those, not fewer.

My read of Cory Doctorow on these topics is that the copyright wars were a failed experiment. Copyright laws are almost mostly weaponized by big corporations to hurt individuals. We should regulate the shit out of corporations to protect the freedom and privacy of users and prevent monopolies. It is perfectly compatible to both anti-big-tech and also against the current IP law system.

https://gizmodo.com/cory-doctorow-copyright-laws-tech-antitr...

It is, because the quote you quoted is in reference to what I said above.

I explained real consequences of pirating. Companies have gone under, individuals have been driven to suicide. This HAS happened.

It's logically consistent that if we do that, but increase the scale, then the harm will be proportionally increased.

You might disagree. Personally, I don't understand how. Really, I don't. My fundamental understanding of humanity is that each innovation will be pushed to it's limits. To make the most money, to do it as fast as possible, and in turn to harm the most people, if it is harmful. It is not in the nature of humanity to do something half-way when there's no friction to doing more.

This reality of humanity permeates our culture and societies. That's why the US government has checks and balances. Could the US government remain a democracy without them? Of course. We may have an infinite stream of benevolent leaders.

From my perspective, that is naive. And, certainly, the founding fathers agreed with me. That is one example - but look around you, and you will see this mentality permeates everything we do as a species.