I am not a lawyer, but my understand is the truth of legal systems is that they are a gray area of interpretation and precedent. In a strict definition of copyright, copying a file from a server into the cache in your ram is a copy that theoretically could be ruled an unauthorized copy. This being obviously a ridiculous idea, but I believe if you streamed content from a website this is the only way they could fine you for copyright violation. Generally with the networks you mentioned, the distribution is prohibited, and most being peer to peer systems they cite you for that.

The more charitable take on why they are not the same is; anything on the open web is assumed to give the right to copy to a closed ‘local’ system and use for your own system, as that is fundamental to web browsing. Further in the same way you can make a local copy of a movie to cut it up and use in a review, and that is fair use as a transformative work, you can make copy of the open web content and make a transformative work for it.

At least that’s how I would argue it, if I was paid to be OpenAI’s legal puppet. All of that is to tiptoe around the reality that the legal system is a tool of the rich. So the law becomes firm for the purpose of piracy of a movie, but long and difficult for the purpose of a large companies profits.

I think the core of the fair use argument is that the AI models that are being trained are transformative products of the original works.

Might be a hot take here but I basically agree. I still believe it was theft and that the realities of the legal framework we had don’t really stand up to the evolving problems, but under the current laws there is really no justification for saying that, taking the input of a bunch of images and giving the output of a set of statistical correlations of pixels based on descriptions, isn’t transformation.

How certain are we that this guy didn’t just say “Make me a linkedin post including images with an insightful take on how I’m definitely better a coding than others.”

Where else would it come from? 🤷‍♂️

I am aware of private trackers. I guess to me, even in the space of “it’s neat to think about” something like Loops and built on activity pub makes more sense.

Now if we imagined folks offering home hardware or ‘seed boxes’ to help an instance out, that I could see being useful tech, but constantly uploading from your phone seems a bit silly.

Ah okay, that was my understanding as well. I was curious if anyone had tried making an ad.

When you say there was a push, do you mean there was a time when they did have ads, or do you mean the community push with the twitter troubles?

I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.

I think instanced makes the most sense, and even that would be a hard ask if popularity every spikes.

I think the fact that Peertube which I think of as more a PC interface, where bandwidth and power consumption are less an issue, but still chooses to limit the peer connections to active watching speaks to how discordant the idea is with what people expect from streaming media.

I would happily use a desktop app as you described, so if it ever exists, let me know 😁

Is there any discovery or list of other instances?

I think people would be pretty quickly upset by the batter and storage drain from this. I have to imagine if picking an instance is a barrier to mastodon, most folks are not interested enough to learn the mechanics of why likes suddenly use system resources, and see it as a failing of the app.

Not really. There is a right wing podcast with a rotating host of fascists and Newsom as the only guest where they just dog walk him.

Huh?