Whether or not it should be so, individual pirates are routinely taken to court, jailed, given insanely harsh punishments in an attempt to make them an example/deterrent, etc.

"Should piracy be illegal?" is a different question than, "given that the court has decided piracy is illegal, should this law be enforced equally?"

It is not hypocrisy to say that, if piracy is theft is a crime, corporations do not get to do it either. Especially not at many times the scale achieved by the owner and operator of a pirate streaming service.

The alternative is letting corporations be above the law. At that point, the law ceases to be a system of justice and instead becomes only a tool of oppression.

While you might view it as hypocrisy, keep in mind that users of HN are not one hive mind all having the same position, you you should expect a diversity of ideas and voices. Even an individual human routinely holds contradictory beliefs or principles simultaneously.

Is there a way to split the difference in that one is a profit driven (questionably, maybe, at this point) paid service basing itself on the consumption of that copyrighted information, whilst the other had no profit incentive whatsoever and was also a private individual?

There's also the fact that the copyright owners in this case are pushing for trial, whilst in the Aaron Swartz situation, JSTOR was not.

Just in having written that out I've convinced myself they're not really comparable cases, where I kinda thought they were after reading your comment.

It's not actually difficult to see how this works.

"Piracy" means "doing stuff some particular IP rightsholders (or sometimes, upstream/downstream stakeholders) don't like". The fact that a behavior is "piracy", like the fact that a behavior is permitted by a copyright license, doesn't tell us anything about whether that behavior is pro-social.

One key strand of Aaron Swartz' life work was the expansion, strengthening, and maintenance of the commons of intangible and intellectual goods (a "creative commons", if you will!). The "piracy" he was engaged in before he was harassed and threatened into suicide was an attempt to reclaim for direct and free use by the public the output of collectively funded public research. You can argue that he was operating outside the rules of the system, and that this is anti-social in some sense, but I think the fact that Swartz was also actively involved in copyright reform projects gives him a stronger case that what he was working on was a kind of protest or direct action designed to accompany and further broader reform efforts, not just thoughtless chaos or showboating.

What the frontier labs have done with these copyrighted works is create something for themselves that they then lease the use of to the rest of us for a profit. The same characteristics that make their task "transformative" in the eyes of the courts are the ones that make it opaque to us, that stop it from being part of the commons.

I could say more but I'm tired of typing on my phone on a holiday and, frankly, it feels obvious enough.

God I hope not.

We (the collective "we" of all humanity) clearly lost massively when we let a handful of billionares get richer by saying they got to control all sharing, remixing, performing, using or expanding upon any music, art, or other media.

Not that it's any real justice for Swartz or the countless others who've had their lives ruined by copyright laws or for file-sharing, but it's a tiny step in the right direction if we drastically expand fair-use and rethink if we really want a society where the 0.01% control music, film and art.

Those aren't equal, however.

Aaron Swartz was murdered by a company that prints scientific journals that paywall papers paid for with US government grants; his "crime" was using the access granted to him by MIT, legally. At no point did he break any laws nor the license granted to him by the paywall service.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta all _knowingly_ pirated Copyrighted works en masse, knowing they did not have a license to do so, and then distributed those works, again, knowing they did not have a license to do so.

I do not think anyone should be murdered by the state, but the difference between Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman is one of them did it to fix a great injustice, the other did it as a fly-by-night get rich scheme.

Notice the one that did things legally got murdered, while the criminal continues to walk the streets.