If you support unions (DUers should) but still think it's OK to post AI slop, see the hundreds of Bluesky replies

[EarlG]

46. I'm not opposed to meaningful legislation that would stem the tide of copyrighted works online

SOPA wasn't that legislation, IMO.

DU's policy has always been that the rights of copyright holders should be respected, so if we get sent a legitimate DMCA takedown request from a copyright holder, we'll comply immediately. But we still get the occasional legal threat from firms trying to extort us by demanding that we pay a large licensing fee for an image that some DU member posted -- even though they did not upload the image to DU's servers (which is not possible) but merely hotlinked it from another site for discussion on DU.

If SOPA replaced the DMCA, we could be taken to court over each and every one of those instances -- whether we won or not would be irrelevant, because the time and expense involved in defending ourselves would put DU out of business. From an administrative point of view, we would have to filter and review every single post before it was allowed to be publicly posted, to ensure that no copyrighted content was included. That in and of itself would end most online communities. The solution to avoid being sued for allowing people to hotlink images would be to disable image linking. The solution to avoid being sued for allowing people to post short excerpts from copyrighted works would be to disallow any content reposting at all.

And then what would there be to talk about? Because there is still a fair use component here -- people are allowed a certain amount of freedom to post content for discussion, and the definition of fair use is still fuzzy. The DMCA means that we are obliged to respect the rights of copyright holders by removing their content if requested, but we won't get dragged into court every single time a copyright holder wants to test whether something is fair use or not. It protects sites like DU from egregious legal threats over content that we couldn't possibly police up front. Bear in mind that the legal threats I mentioned above -- the ones we are protected from thanks to the DMCA -- do not come in the form of legitimate DMCA takedown requests, but in the form of demands for thousands of dollars, along with threats that ten times as much money will be demanded if we don't pay up.

I believe that the best outcome is to protect the rights of copyright holders in a way that also allows people the freedom to discuss that copyrighted content online, without violating people's copyrights. Currently I believe the DMCA gets us closest to that goal -- closer than SOPA would have anyway. But I'm just a reasonably conscientious regular guy -- I'm not a billionaire Internet entrepreneur who has discovered that copyright laws can be ignored if you're too big to fail. The major issue with AI companies right now is that they do not seem to be interested in following any copyright law at all -- they think that the Internet is theirs for the taking, and their scraping and reuse of the entire Internet's content is essentially completely lawless at this point. As usual, it's the richest, most powerful people who are happy to flaunt the law on a massive scale -- and can easily afford lawyers and lobbyists that would potentially allow them to end-run something like SOPA, while small businesses like DU would get quickly crushed underfoot.

Anyway, sorry, not trying to have an argument -- just wanted to put my point of view across. For what it's worth, in a former life I used to be a professional musician, so it's not like I only see one side of the argument here.