OooOoh Noooo! Our money!
That’s not what has happened. Microsoft and Epic don’t want their IP used without they have been paid. They do not agree that training on Ai is theft, they agree on using their IP publicly without their consent is theft.
Correction: They think distributing their IP without permission is a violation of their copyrights (which is true).
“Theft” is not a thing when it comes to copyright. Every time someone uses “theft” to describe copyright infringement, the MPAA, RIAA, Microsoft, EPIC, Sony, and Disney all have a little orgasm and layoff another worker that created that IP.
That’s splitting the hairs. If someone uses an IP without permission, then it is theft.
Listen: Theft is a legal term, just like copyright. When someone steals something (theft), the owner of that thing doesn’t have it anymore. When someone violates copyright the owner still has the thing and can continue to make as many copies of it as they like.
In the 80s, 90s, and 2000s the RIAA and MPAA had vast marketing campaigns trying to re-brand copyright violation as “theft”. Copyright existed for centuries before Congress decided to pass The Sound Recording Act of 1971 and the Copyright Act of 1976 which was the first time (ever) that copying something without permission could be prosecuted as a criminal offense (instead of civil).
The “Piracy is Theft” thing is literally from one of their advertising campaigns! They invented it and it’s nothing but pro-corporate propaganda. Do not think for one second that anyone stands to lose significant amounts of money from piracy other than corporations and even that’s debatable.
Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. -Gabe Newell, founder of Valve Software (Steam)
Individuals have been copying stuff since forever and nobody cared until some bean counter invented the disproven concept of “one pirated thing == one lost sale.” We all know that’s not how it works! That entire concept is another form of “Hollywood Accounting”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
So no. Fuck no. It’s not “splitting hairs.”
