The problem is that without copyright all a big company has to do is steal the work of smaller unknown artists and profit from it big time. The smaller artist then has zero recourse to get any money because their avenue for profit is ruined. Copyright allows them to sue the person who stole their work and get the profits from that.
This is a complete oversimplification of everythin.
- Yes, downloading music for free is theft. Creators do deserve to be paid for their work.
- Youtube ignores fair use, which is wrong. But they run the platform, they can do what they like. ContentID is the worst idea they ever came up with. But again, they are just trying to avoid being sued over and over and over again, so I kinda understand their position. It sucks, but again, they have the right to do what they like with their own platform.
- I would argue that using information for the training of an AI is fair use. The information is just used to set weights that the AI then uses to generate text. The actual text is not stored in any database anywhere. So whether Microsoft does it, or I do it, it is the same. I can train a LLM on data as well. I just don’t have tthe money for the very expensive hardware to do it.
I think robert@frankel.com would be much more professional.
It really depends on what part of the fediverse you are in. Mastodon is not too different from twitter that a boomer with a familiarity with twitter shouldn’t have too much trouble with a mastodon instance. The biggest thing to wrap your head around is the fact that not everything is run by a single company. So you have to find a server that you like, and then sign up on that server.
What do you define as a big corporation? And why exactly should we abolish them?