Sony will pirate from anyone who isn't Sony. Same with Time-Warner. Same with Columbia. Same with every studio, every label, every publishing house.
Absolutely no-one in the industry takes piracy seriously until it's their own stuff being pirated by someone else.
Moreover, they all are used to Hollywood accounting, in which lawyers try to justify not paying someone for work whenever they can.
Hollywood. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.
Have you played Pokémon and PalWorld? One is a pit-fighter-trainer where the other is a base-builder. Or does the capturing of creatures and the similar art style make them too much alike?
In a truly competitive capitalist market there should be room enough for both. But Nintendo wants their players to be obligated to own only Nintendo approved products.
About as special as an arrow on the screen that points towards your destination (Sega, Crazy Taxi ). Not saying that's particularly special either. The US Patent Office has allowed for some pretty broad-reaching patents, which fuels our patent-troll problem, as well as giving large companies legal grounds to interfere with each other's innovation.
IP law has become so far removed from serving its original intent (according to the Constitution of the United States) we'd be bette4 off with no IP protections rather than the licensing system we have. Not that anyone is near doing something to fix it, or unfuck the courts that are unable to rule consistently about it.
Common cheap field drug tests commonly react to (yield substance-positive results) to other substances such as powdered sugar, human ashes, some foodstuffs and plastics.
Normally an additional sample is supposed to be sent to a lab for more specific results, but the courts in most states accept the field tests as definitive. A positive result is definitely probable cause, which allows officers to search your vehicle or home and take your money and solvent assets, as per asset forfeiture.
But yes, you can expect common substances to be grounds for a drug trafficking charge. Is an execution summary (id est, on sight)?
For everyone's edification, Geigner's take on Techdirt. I suspect this won't be the last TD article on this trainwreck-in-the-making.
The first XKCD that comes to mind
Ellision sounds like the kind of guy that wants an unstoppable army of robot swarms.
Representative Jamie Raskin recently brought up the term neo-monarchy.
We the public have to keep making better ad blockers that better detect ads and prevent them from being displayed (or in some cases, activating their malware payload).
YouTube is trying to either detect ad blockers and deny service, or change the insertion paradigm so that ads cannot be blocked. We cannot let them succeed doing either.
This presents a good demonstration of what we can expect Alphabet / Google / Youtube to do if ever it should win its war on adblockers, or convince people to watch YouTube without vetting. Any time it promises to compromise and make a tolerable user experience, it will ratchet up advertisement plugs until it becomes intolerable.
This is why we can't relent, ever.
Now I sail the high seas myself, but I don't think Paramount Studios would buy anyone's defence they were only pirating their movies so they can learn the general content so they can produce their own knockoff.
However, Paramount, itself, does pirate content specifically to learn its content so it can produce its own knockoff. As do all the other major studios.
No one engages in IP enforcement in good faith, or respects the IP of others if they can find benefit in circumventing it.
That's part of the problem. None of the key stakeholders (other than the biggest stakeholder, the public) are interested in preserving the interests of the creators, artists and developers, rather are interested in boosting their own profit gains.
Which makes this not about big companies stealing from human art but from IP property of their own kin.
Yes, Generative AI very much does borrow liberally from the work of human creatives. But those artists mostly signed away their rights long ago to their publishing house masters. Since the ownership class controlled the presses, those contracts were far from fair.
Artists, today, routinely see their art stolen by their own publishing houses at length, and it's embittering and soul-crushing. We've seen Hollywood accounting come into play throughout the last century. Famous actors are notoriously cheated out of residuals. (With the rise of the internet, and prior to that a few smart agents, we've seen a small but growing number of — usually pirate-friendly — exceptions.)
The artists were screwed long before AI ever came around.
Instead this fight is about IP-holding companies slugging it out with big computing companies, a kaiju match that is likely to leave Tokyo (that is, the rest of us, creators and consumers alike) in ruin. But we're already in squalor, anyway.
The opening scene to Apollo 13 (1995) features a party in Houston with NASA dudes as they gather around the television and Walter Cronkite announces as Neil Armstrong takes his first step on the moon. ( On YouTube )
I was not at that party, but I was at a party in Houston with NASA dudes as we watched the very first moon landing. My dad was a mission control guy with the black horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt and black tie, but Apollo 12, not 11 (Neil Armstrong) or 13 (the one that blew up and barely made it home).
I couldn't walk yet, and I got that the space man on the screen was super important, but at the time I was missing a whole lot of context. The blanks would fill in with time, since the US was super proud of that moment. It's my very first memory.
Can't say you're wrong, however the forseeable future is less than two centuries, and our failure to navigate our way out of capitalism towards something more mutualistic figures largely into our imminent doom.
For-profit tooling tends to get usability right
Until enshittification happens and the photo-editer that's turned into the shorthand slang for editing a picture is suddenly an unaffordable subscription.
If we crowdsource such tools, or otherwise make them FOSS then they dont fall into that trap. Even one that sells out can be split off back into a FOSS project.