>How come people are willing to download and install pirated software though?

You can just remove “priated” from that statement and come to the same conclusions. Considering the amount of bugs, backdoors and 0-day exploits distributed via official software I sometimes wonder why people execute proprietary, closed source programs at all.

An no, “reputable” companies mean nothing, just look at Microsoft clowning around with their signing keys.

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> It seems like that design is made with the idea of removing the screen from the controller, which isn’t bad

Yes, but what’s the point? What’s going to power the screen once it’s out? Pixie dust? What’s going to drive the display? Whoever made this is unaware that a tablet is more than just a screen?

From an outside perspective: The US can’t even agree that there’s a problem (yet). Most people will proudly defend the car dependent way of life. As soon as there is a consensus about needing to change, the process could start and then it will take 30 years. Clock hasn’t even started ticking yet, so yeah, lost cause for now.

> There are tools that are being used to attempt to detect if a piece of work is AI-generated. If those tools say something was, it’s then on you to prove that you hand-created it.

They don’t work. It’s total bunk.

>Even some artists are already having issues because things “look” AI-generated.

Exactly. See above. No one can (confidently) tell which is which. There’s just educated guessing.

> What is your take on this particularly in relation to the SAG-AFTRA strike over streaming residuals? Even if you want to pay for a creator’s work, most ways to consume content now mostly does not get to the creators of a work.

On general principal I always support workers rights to strike and applaud them for fighting for a higher wage.

My personal opinion in this particular case: Many writers in this industry very much overvalue their worth, especially considering the low-brow content they create (10 years or more of capeshit), how replaceable they are (barely any original idea in sight), the low general quality of their work (I’m not even watching this shit for free, you’d have to pay me) and the encroaching power of AI. I’ve never seen such a long-string of garbage writing coming from Hollywood (or maybe I’m just lucky having observed a golden age of TV) and I’ve not seen a similar decline in quality from other craftsmen (cinematography, acting, sound and music…) in the industry. Maybe writers can make some short-term gains, but unless they hone their craft to bring it above the level of what ChatGPT can create right now, they are going to lose their power struggle in the long run.

> I’m not even sure how renting or buying a title through a digital service like amazon or google is distributed to creators vs how much goes to the platform and copyright holder.

Often there are options. Speaking about music: A spotify subscription is most likely useless for supporting smaller artists, but buying their merch or stuff from bandcamp is a no-brainer if you have the money.

>Right now, AI-generated works aren’t copyrightable. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-generator-art-text-us-copyright-policy-1234661683/ This means you can not copyright the works produced by AI.

…

>So right now, common AI is producing works that are potentially copyright-infringing works and are unable to be copyrighted themselves.

This kind of judgement is pure symbolic politics, because it’s completely unenforceable and I’m confused why you didn’t mention it. No one can prove if a piece of art is AI made and no one has to admit it. So yes, AI art can be copyrighted, just not officially as AI art, but it certainly will be and likely already is as long as there’s a human ‘stand in’.

There’s a huge gulf of difference between a matter of fact and a matter of law.

>In what situations do you think is not OK to pirate something?

Never pay money for pirated content or ask someone to pay money for pirated content. Donations to keep a site running are borderline and iffy, depending on the implementation and transparency. As soon as you earn any kind of revenue or treat it as your ‘job’ it crosses into the unethical IMO.

Second point related to money: Pirating stuff you could easily pay for is probably bad, if the creator receives $0 from you. There might still be reasons to do so (not wanting to support DRM for example), but if you got the cash you better find a way to support the actual creators (merch, donations…). The smaller the author the heavier the moral responsibility to bring some money their way. This also weighs in the other direction: It’s probably accetpable or even good to not give more money to giant corporations that abuse intellectual property for their own gains and who shit on creators.

Half of a fuck-ton is still a lot. If they scale down their operational costs they can still run a very comfortable business for a long while on these kinds of numbers.

God bless the hackers, crackers, reverse engineers, and disrupters. Pray they help keep you free of too much pain.

That’s delusional. As soon as more and more parts of software are run remotely on proprietary hard- & software there will be nothing to hack or crack. Sure, someone could reverse engineer it, but there aren’t enough hobbyists in the world to rewrite all this software.

We see this more and more in gaming… it used to be the case that they just gave you the software to run your own game in multiplayer setups, nowadays, if they shut off the servers, the game is dead (unless, someone releases a very wonky, extremely buggy, barely usable, reverse engineered server with 10% of the features some time down the line)

transcoding is certianly not ideal, but some releases have obscenely high bitrates and if you’re more concerned about archival than max fidelity reducing size by a factor of 5-10x (h264->av1) is worth it for me.