https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
Funky quote:
> Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.
Society underestimates the chasm that exists between an idea and raising sufficient capital to act on those ideas.
Plenty of people have ideas.
We only really see those that successfully cross it.
Small things EULA breaches, consumer licenses being used commercially for example.
This is a narrative that gets passed around in certain circles to justify stealing content.
In this context, stealing is often used as a pejorative term to make piracy sound worse than it is. Except for mass distribution, piracy is often regarded as a civil wrong, and not a crime.
Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to make money on Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your Shopify website. The original creators don't get payment, and someone's profiting off their work.
Try doing that yourself and you'd get a knock on the door real quick.
Also mostly this would be a civil lawsuit for "damages".
The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That’s when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing over seven million pirated books
Now places like Flea markets have been known to have a counterfeit DVD or two.
And there is more than one way to compare to non-digital content.
Regular books and periodicals can be sold out and/or out-of-print, but digital versions do not have these same exact limitations.
A great deal of the time though, just the opposite occurs, and a surplus is printed that no one will ever read, and which will eventually be disposed of.
Newspapers are mainly in the extreme category where almost always a significant number of surplus copies are intentionally printed.
It's all part of the same publication, a huge portion of which no one has ever rightfully expected for every copy to earn anything at all, much less a return on every single copy making it back to the original creator.
Which is one reason why so much material is supported by ads. Even if you didn't pay a high enough price to cover the cost of printing, it was all paid for well before it got into your hands.
Digital copies which are going unread are something like that kind of surplus. If you save it from the bin you should be able to do whatever you want with it either way, scan it how you see fit.
You just can't say you wrote it. That's what copyright is supposed to be for.
Like at the flea market, when two different vendors are selling the same items but one has legitimately purchased them wholesale and the other vendor obtained theirs as the spoils of a stolen 18-wheeler.
How do you know which ones are the pirated items?
You can tell because the original owners of the pirated cargo suffered a definite loss, and have none of it remaining any more.
OTOH, with things like fake Nikes at the flea market, you can be confident they are counterfeit whether they were stolen from anybody in any way or not.