[rstuart4133]

> If courts wanted to act, they needed to act years ago.

My own view is copyright law is a mess. When technology changes what happens is all the interested parties (read: people wanting to make the public pay for their copyrighted material, the people paying the money don't get a seat at this table) get together in a room and hammer out a compromise. The compromise is always a whole pile of band-aids stuck onto the old version, which was of course mostly a whole pile of band-aids stuck on the previous version.

It's always been that way. When the printing press way first used to make serious money, Queens Elizabeth offered to pass laws regulating their use but was told her help wasn't required. I suspect the thinking her idea of the "help" was censorship. So the first version of copyright was "no thank you". But then the publishers discovered they were terrible at selecting books that would sell, and so they published a lot of lemons. The occasional success had to pay for all the bad ones. But without copyright, other publishers can just cherry pick the successful ones without all the expensive investment in the bad ones, which in the end meant no one made any money. So they begged for the very first band-aid - a new copyright law, and got copyright and censorship. It's band-aids all the way down.

This has happened over and over again - radio, TV, cassettes, CDs, movie theatres, all caused huge disruption, much hand wringing, lots of pontificating about how existing law should be applied to the newcomers, which just like now the newcomers mostly ignored.

If you look at copyright law, with its provisions like 70 years after the author's death, the Disney extension, it should be regarded as a standing joke at this point. The biggest part of the joke is the justification handed out to the people who pay for all these copyrighted works. It's all for our benefit. It's there to ensure the publishers supply us with a large variety of works to enjoy. It has a grain of truth to it. Back when copyright was 14 years, it was a pretty big grain. Now it's so small, it's a joke.

I have no sympathy for any of them.

[spwa4]

> If you look at copyright law, with its provisions like 70 years after the author's death, the Disney extension, ...

Sure but once again we have to conclude that "justice" according to the outcome US (and European) courts produced means YOU AND I get charged $30000 per copyright violation they catch you. Yet, it is apparently also entirely just, according to judges, that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Alibaba, META, ... don't get charged anything for violating copyright on a scale so large it's difficult to even imagine.

So why would anyone follow the law or opinions of courts, congress, ... unless physically forced? As opposed to finding any creative way out of it? Obviously the outcome courts explicitly chose does not follow either mine, or US courts' own version of justice. They are just a way to guarantee big company and state profits using violence, and literally nothing more.