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0 pointsgrowse10mo ago0 comments

> Worse, they’re using it for massive commercial gain, without paying a dime upstream to the supply chain that made it possible. If there is any purpose of copyright at all, it’s to prevent making money from someone’s else’s intellectual work.

This makes no sense. If I buy and read a book on software engineering, and then use that knowledge to start a career, do I owe the author a percentage of my lifetime earnings?

Of course not. And yet I've made money with the help of someone else's intellectual work.

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klabb310mo ago

> If I buy and read a book on software engineering

You're comparing that you as an individual purchase one copy of a book to a multi-billion dollar company systematically ingesting them for profit without any compensation, let alone proportional?

> do I owe the author a percentage of my lifetime earnings?

No, but you are a human being. You have a completely different set of rights from a corporation, or a machine. For very good reason.

growseOP10mo ago

Does copyright law apply differently to humans Vs organisations?

> without any compensation,

Didn't Anthropic buy the books?

lurkshark10mo ago

If you pirate a book on software engineering and then use that knowledge to start a career, do you owe the author the royalties they would be paid had you bought the book?

If the career you start isn't software engineering directly but instead re-teaching the information you learned from that book to millions of paying students, is the regular royalty payment for the book still fair?

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