Motivation, consequences and fairness of how rules are applied are all relevant to the ethics of a particular action.
Meta is systematically abusing copyright law for personal profit, appropriating the labor of hundreds of thousands of authors to line their own pockets without contributing anything back. That free-riding is anti-social behavior, a betrayal of the social contract. A society that permits that without censure isn't going to keep having people create for very long: who is going to create just so billionaires can get richer, with nothing in it for them?
Especially not when the same billionaires sue people for violating copyright of _their_ software. Hypocrisy in service of exploitation and greed is especially noxious.
At the same time, copyright laws are written to benefit those billionaires, keeping our mythology in private hands long past our lifetimes. Put copyright back to thirty years, strip all business methods and software patents (which should never have been a thing in the first place): then Meta will have plenty of content for their LLMs _and_ it's software will start coming out of copyright ten years from now, making an actual contribution to human knowledge instead of just pillaging it.
The central tenet of conservativism is that there is a group the law protects but does not bind and a group the law binds but does not protect. This is what Meta is doing.
They could have gone and lobbied to loosen copyright legislation. Heck, they could have gone through a DMCA exception process, which doesn't even take a new law. Instead, they figure they are powerful enough that society doesn't apply to them.
Meta is systematically abusing copyright law for personal profit, appropriating the labor of hundreds of thousands of authors to line their own pockets without contributing anything back. That free-riding is anti-social behavior, a betrayal of the social contract. A society that permits that without censure isn't going to keep having people create for very long: who is going to create just so billionaires can get richer, with nothing in it for them?
Especially not when the same billionaires sue people for violating copyright of _their_ software. Hypocrisy in service of exploitation and greed is especially noxious.
At the same time, copyright laws are written to benefit those billionaires, keeping our mythology in private hands long past our lifetimes. Put copyright back to thirty years, strip all business methods and software patents (which should never have been a thing in the first place): then Meta will have plenty of content for their LLMs _and_ it's software will start coming out of copyright ten years from now, making an actual contribution to human knowledge instead of just pillaging it.
The central tenet of conservativism is that there is a group the law protects but does not bind and a group the law binds but does not protect. This is what Meta is doing.
They could have gone and lobbied to loosen copyright legislation. Heck, they could have gone through a DMCA exception process, which doesn't even take a new law. Instead, they figure they are powerful enough that society doesn't apply to them.
If we let them, we're suckers.