I've seen some people praising this mass layoff as being better and less ghoulish than most others, but that's pure marketing. The severance package being more generous than it had to be is purely a marketing expense, like any other marketing expense. We should be both 1. glad for those affected that they're not being screwed harder than they had to be while also being 2. clear-eyed that Dorsey is doing that to do a bit of reputation laundering. A tactic to try to get people to think of him as being less ghoulish than we should properly regard him as. Just as his scapegoating AI (it's not AI) and his remarkably human and non-robotic announcement are designed purely to make him look good and discourage us from thinking he is a ghoul. But don't be fooled. He's a ghoul.

The existence of countless freemium businesses disproves the validity of that take on its face.

I would say more, but I already wrote a more detailed response to a similar point here.

That's a pretty contrived hypothetical that AFAIK has never been litigated before.

Regardless, I don't see a problem with people doing that being legal. I'm not sure many other people would have a problem with it either.

That take is oft-repeated, but I just don't buy it. Never have.

File sharing being legal does not make it impossible for authors in any medium to make money. Anyone who believes that simply lacks imagination.

More than that, by now after decades of seeing new business models evolve with the internet, it's fair to say that to subscribe to that take lacks more than imagination â" it lacks observation. Many modern content creators incorporate the reality that file sharing is widespread and inevitable into their business models. The most obvious examples are the countless successful freemium businesses.

If we did legalize file sharing, the result would be 1. little would change because most of the people who would freeload already were freeloading and 2. we'd see even more creative business models emerge to ensure creators continue getting paid now that nobody would be in denial anymore about the existence of a large, inevitable group of freeloaders in all aspects of content consumption.

Free at the point of consumption and creators getting paid are not mutually exclusive. Putting these two things in tension and creating artificial scarcity because for one side to win, the other side must lose is fallacious, zero-sum thinking. We can do better than that as a society, and I hope some day we will.

We all have strong opinions about rms. Some of his ideas are wacky. Some of his ideas are brilliant. I think this is one of his more insightful takes.

Copyright law has a distinction between commercial for-profit infringement, which is regarded as a criminal offense vs. noncommercial infringement which is regarded as a civil offense.

I think this distinction is useful, but it's one degree too severe. For-profit infringement should be the civil offense, and noncommercial infringement (consumer copying) should be fully legal, just as rms is saying.

Why? Because copyright wasn't created to allow authors to impose a toll on every individual consumption of every individual work, otherwise libraries wouldn't have been widespread alongside early copyright laws.

Instead, copyright law was created to make sure the author of a work was the only one who had any right to make any profit at all off of their work.

People often forget this, but the origin of copyright law is important to remember. The Statute of Anne was passed to address the growing problem of people making and selling copies of books they were not the author of, an activity which became much more common once the printing press was invented. The law was passed with the intention of protecting London's publishing business from this unfair competition and in the centuries that followed, other countries passed similar laws. Notably absent from this law: a ban on libraries or noncommercial sharing of books.

That's why file sharing should be legal, and business models should adapt to the decades-old reality that file sharing is widespread and inevitable. Some businesses have adapted rather well. While it's unfortunate that DRM is widespread, things like streaming services aren't that bad an adaptation. They just need a bit more adapting to truly embrace the 21st century.

Also, as a fun aside, one thing that baffles me is if for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense, as described above, then why aren't the major AI companies who commit mass copyright infringement with a profit motive in the training and development of their models being held criminally liable for their actions? The courts are currently twisting themselves into pretzels to try to invent some kind of fair use exception for them out of whole cloth because it feels wrong to charge them all with criminal behavior. But the truth is the law is not being interpreted in good faith, in part because the law itself is horrifyingly outdated and needs to be updated and modernized.

But the modernization we need is simple: Reduce for-profit infringement to a civil offense and reduce noncommercial infringement to being legal. We don't need to tinker with copyright terms, we don't need a vast expansion of the public domain, none of that. Just make file sharing legal.