That genuinely may be so, but "this law i broke shouldn't exist" is not an advisable legal defense.
Also, what you call "rent seeking" others would call "return on investment". I do think there is a grey area here, "fair use" being one example, but i think summarily discounting distributors and publishers wholesale doesn't help your stance.
It may or may not succeed in courts, because our "justice" system is anything but. Even if it doesn't succeed in court, it's still a worthwhile stance and it may succeed in other ways. Especially if enough people who recognize where justice actually lies stand up to support those taking the risk to point it out.
The line between "rent seeking" and "return on investment" lies at the spot past which those who produced a work have been fairly compensated for their time and effort, past that, it's rent seeking. If you want a good metric, break the return down to an hourly wage for each participant in producing the work. Does it seem obscene? That's because it is.
Rent is not the basis of savings through investment, yield is; of which rent is one kind. Renting a movie at blockbuster made sense in the 90s as plastic shells of magstripe were a scarce good. Today, literally millions of devices could stream their entire lib for free via ad supported streaming apps.
We live in different times. Holding on to artificial constraints for old-times business model nostalgia will look so quaint in a few decades.
The courts are the most efficient way to repeal something you don’t like. There are hundreds of legislators, you need teams of lobbyists to influence them, and there’s no guarantee that they will take up your issue in their agenda. Furthermore, if you want to change one thing, everything gets thrown on the table as being liable to change. You may win in one area but lose in a lot of others, and sometimes you will lose in non-obvious ways.
The judges don’t want to rock the boat as much as politicians do. If they make a decision that makes precedent, it will be very focused and very specific. But, if you want to take an issue up in the courts, you need to sue, or be sued. Courts are not hypothetical in the way that legislatures are.
I think fair use is a perfectly valid legal defense. Grey area is one way to put it, another way to put it is a legal area lacking precedent. If it were not for fair use, copyright law would violate your right to free speech. Fair use let’s you use copyrighted material for criticism, parody, and education. Covid created a situation where people’s access to works was restricted, with the only reason being legal limitations (copyright law). IA sought to educate people irrespective of the limitation. I don’t know how IAs legal team is planning to defend their client, but fair use would provide a defense. This case could end up with a precedent that says that under exceptional circumstances, the scope of what activities are covered under fair is expanded.
It actually happens more often than you might think.
[1] https://www.rcfp.org/court-finds-right-jury-trial-copyright-...
Which they've largely already enjoyed many times over. I have precisely zero sympathy for the poor widdle publishing corporations.
/s
It puts the extreme absurdity of modern copyright law in context. 20 years is extreme. The modern "standard" is the entire life of the author + 70 years on top. This is indefensible.
Contrast with publishers, where it's the other way around.
Your argument would make sense if developers got paid per run of their code, instead of only for new code they write.
There is no end to the greed. Fuck 'em.
That depends entirely on the level of support for the defense, and is precisely the only way unjust laws ever change.
> i think summarily discounting distributors and publishers wholesale doesn't help your stance
I don't think anyone's discounting anyone here: there's a big difference between discounting and challenging.
Wrong. Ultra-vires laws can be challenged after the fact that they were broken. If the law in itself was invalid, that is a valid legal defence.
