zlacker

>>at1as+(OP)
In the past, many developers were against copyright law because they saw it as a way for big corps to stifle competition and curb creativity in order to increase their profits. A lot of people right now invoke the violation of the same copyright law because the tide has changed and now companies, by ignoring copyright law, are hurting artists/smaller companies and/or not contributing back or unlawfully closing the code in the case of GPL.

I don't see any kind of hypocritical stance here honestly. All this time the criticism of the enforcement of copyright law or now the lack of it just reflects the fact that some people are genuinely concerned that bad actors(big corps) are using the law to damage society in order to pursue their own interests.

>>lp4v4n+9w
Correct, and for some reason America has gotten to an "over legalization" state where every concept has to filter through a legal system in order to be good / bad. I think that's where the matter comes from. Pedantic legalists insist that everyone couch their ideas in a rigid set of legal statutes.

"But you just said that an individual should be able to use copyrighted works. Therefore you should have no qualms with a legal individual (corp) utilizing every copyrighted work in the world to destroy society, as nothing they are doing is illegal under your rubric."

The reality is most humans operate from a more natural and intuitive sense. A single artist who made a song shouldn't be destroyed by the big corp that is stealing it for their own profit (e.g. Elastic vs. Amazon). But its hard to interpret this in the strict legalist sense, because in the US, law is setup to make corps/people, money/speech, art/product, all hard to distinguish, and generally doesn't give much affordance to "what the law reasonably meant" when challenged by corporations (but it does seem to be applied quite conservatively for individuals).

For example, data protection laws tend to be applied quite loosely to corps with slaps on the wrist and stern words. For individuals, accessing data you shouldn't can mean the rest of your life in prison. People feel this is unfair, but the legalists will use a bunch of reasoning to excuse the clear immorality.

Its definitely "using the intellect and words to override correct human moral intuitions."