3. Download it off a torrent site, wait to get threatened by the copyright owner, show them proof that you purchased the product. If they sue you anyway, counter-sue both the copyright owner and Sony for conspiracy to defraud. Ask for seven figures on account of their vexatious litigation.

At this point in history I can't understand why anyone is still using HP printers. Brother is right there.

"She's got huge tracts of land!"

Wait....is that, is that...Sir Lancelot I see in the distance, running towards our castle....?

... expect the solution to be no more movies "sales," just rentals with a fixed time limit, either "until [date master license expires/is up for renewal]" or "some number of weeks/years".

Another solution will be to shift to a "library access" model, which is already common. At least that will be understandable by the general public: Most people know that brick-and-mortar public libraries retire old books to make way for newer ones.

As for existing complaints, the best hope consumers have is that some law firm will successfully argue that the fine print is too buried to create an enforceable contract, then reach a settlement that gives consumers some partial credit depending on how long they had access to their purchase, with vanishingly-low credit if the purchase was more than a few years ago.

You know the definition of a woman don't you?

A life support unit for a cunt.

Unfortunately, the pleasurable part of that equation always comes with the other unpredictable part.

When it comes to AI, I expect there will be many years between any credible, widely-recognized claim of sentience and the time when more than a few countries recognize "human rights" for them, if it happens at all.

Having sentience is not required for most people to say "this person/entity deserves human rights," and such rights are routinely granted to non-sentient individuals or entities:

We rightfully give legal human rights to people with medical conditions that render them not self-aware and not intelligent in any meaningful way (e.g. newborns with severe anencephaly, who may only have a brain stem and may only live a few minutes), because they part of a larger class (people) who by definition are supposed to have human rights.

We give limited "person rights" to corporations and other legal entities, but they only exist as legal fiction.

We do not give "basic human rights" to primates, dogs, dolphins, octopuses, and other animals even though there are examples of each that are arguably smarter and more self-aware than a typical 4 year old child. Even in the USA, dogs - "Man's best friend" - are routinely killed (albeit humanely) in some animal shelters for no reason other than the shelter they are in is too full.

In some countries and periods of history, we don't even give "basic human rights" to all healthy adults (e.g. repressed political minorities, children, the ill, the elderly, slaves, women, etc.).

In short, being sentient doesn't mean you get legally-protected human rights, and you (rightfully) may get legally-protected human rights even if you, as an individual, are not self-aware and show no signs of being intelligent.

Nah...I'd rather have a DOG....

They have personality, and actual affection.

...Take a jumbo across the water...

Like to see America...

Wouldn't a simple belt clip do, like they have on pocket knives?

Hmm.....somehow I'm seeing the future.....with iPhones and other cell phones, coming with a belt clip on them, and now they are classified at "wearables".....no?

And thus the beginning of shifting the entire government bureaucracy to AI?

You can't stop the LLM if it's published... but you can sue the company that scraped data it was not legally entitled to scrape, and the legal sanctions should involve destruction of the collected archive of training data and all copies of the resulting LLM as well as a financial penalty that is sufficiently large to dissuade future repetitions of the offense.

"But that would harm our bottom line" is not an acceptable defense against this. Don't steal. It's easy.

Of course, stealing's easier if you're a megacorp who can buy politicians and pay settlements out of the corporate equivalent of pocket change.

Realistically, open source software that has a decent number of maintainers means that the quality is good and bugs get fixed, including security bugs. But what that also means is that when problems get fixed in the open source repo, those changes have to be pulled into the source code that companies are building into their products. The more they diverge from the open source version, the harder that becomes. So while a company theoretically could do what you are describing, the reality tends to be tht companies contribute the vast majority of their changes, keeping private only the parts that are specific to their custom integrations with their product.

For example, LLVM is under a permissive license, and some of the biggest contributors are companies like Apple. They use it in their proprietary products (Xcode). But they are basically using it as a library and giving back their changes. What they're not doing is giving back the tools that they wrap around it. But the original core functionality is still out there, still open, and still being maintained.

The GPL doesn't actually prevent that from happening. It just means that the code gets rewritten instead of being copied. It makes the closed-source app ever so slightly more expensive to develop and ever so slightly later to hit the market. If the closed-source app is better than the Free Software app, it will still dominate the market unless someone is prepared to throw resources into making the Free Software app equally capable, and the market will still determine the winners and losers.

Well, they do say the Universe is expanding... now we know why - Galactic Sugar is everywhere.

My past dealings (mine and others) have lead me to think of PayPal as a criminal enterprise,

I've seen a lot of hate thrown at PayPal over the years.....and not quite sure why?

I've used it a LONG time for eBay payments, sending money to friends and the odd small merchant.

I wouldn't say I've used it a TON, but some.....and never had any problems.

What problems have ya'll had that you dislike them so badly? Genuinely curious....