alt Hacker NewsSure, that’s the motte / bailey. Easy to point to living, starving writers who suffer grevious harm, in defense of perpetual copyright. Disney and others use literally this exact argument year after year.
I’m not even disagreeing. I’m just saying the shift in attitude about copyright in the tech space has been sudden, dramatic, and really funny. Remember “you wouldn’t steal a car”? Today’s anti-AI tech contingent are enthusiastically embracing that false equivalence that we all laughed at 20 years ago.
Having a static, immovable belief system about something like copyright that is unaffected by seismic shifts in the real world also doesn't seem very logical.
If like, Disney did a 180 overnight and bought rights from Google to scan every writer's saved work in Docs with some flimsy legal argument then a person saying "wait doesn't copyright actually protect that" would make sense. Even if you were previously upset about them suing schools for using 80 year art.