Individual humans copying corporate products vs corporations copying the work of individual humans they didn't pay.

The confusion is that “copyright infringement is not theft” really was about being against corporate abuse of individuals. It's still the same situation here.

So it’s okay to infringe on copyright against a group of people getting paid by a corporation. But not individual artists and you should definitely not break open source copyright rules?

"group of people getting paid by a corporation" they are not involved at all. Corporations are their own person's, remember.

It's almost like the real problem is asymmetry and abuse of power.

Who is being “abused” by you not having access to other people’s content in the way you want?

I think we miscommunicated somewhere. I was being sarcastic when I said cooperations were people. If we had a model of capitalism dominated by collective employee ownership I think your ethical argument might work. We don't.

"copyright infringement is not theft" is not an especially common view among artists or musicians, since copyright infringement threatens their livelihood. I don't think there's anything inconsistent about this. Yes, techies tend to hold the opposite view.

Personally, I think "copyright infringement is not theft" but I also think that using artists' work without their permission for profit is never OK, and that's what's happening here.

> I don't think there's anything inconsistent about this.

It amounts to saying that anything that benefits me is good and anything to my detriment is bad. Sure, there's a consistency to that. However, if that's the foundation of one's positions, it leads to all manner of other logical inconsistencies and hypocrisies.

Copyright should not exist, but artists do need support somehow and doing away with copyright without other radical changes to economy/society leaves them high and dry. Copyright not existing should pair with other forms of support such as UBI or worker councilization, instead of ridding it while clutching capitalist pearls and ultimately only accelerating capitalism at their expense

But it's not even copyright. Copyright does not protect general styles. It protects specific works, or specific designs (e.g. Mickey Mouse). It doesn't allow someone to claim ownership over a general concept like "a painting of a knight with a castle and a dragon in the background".

Are there any documented cases where copyright law didn't seem to offer sufficient protection against something that really did seem like copyright infringement but done using AI tooling? I started looking for some a few weeks ago because of this debate and still haven't seen anything conclusive.

The problem with "AI" here is that it copies like no other. It copies everything and learns everything like a master because it is fed off a us.