this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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Programming
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I never really needed any justification, but ever since AI companies just take stuff illegally, and that openly, it has become my justification to just pirate the shit out of everything.
(Excluding indie games of developers I like).
This specifically isn't illegal though. They've only scraped public repos.
That depends on the license. Music is also available on Youtube without authentication requirements but I don't think you can just download those and do whatever you want with them.
Could be wrong, but the act of downloading music isn't what gets people in trouble, it's the uploading. When people torrent both happen, but afaik it's only the uploading portion that is actually bad.
When people torrent only a part of the file is being shared by all peers. Technically only the original seeder shared the whole thing and after a few seeders it’s a tiny portion of the file.
I think there's a difference between the laws for individuals and corporations. I don't think they're allowed to download either.
This depends, but not because of piracy. If you have to bypass DRM to download the music, you may be violating DMCA §1201 (even if you are otherwise allowed to use the music).
Edit: This obviously doesn't apply to GitHub, but might to YouTube.
Downloading is illegal.
Find me a repo on GitHub with a license that disallows cloning it. I'll wait.
Any repo without a license disallows reproducing it in any way, which includes cloning it for business purposes.
The only exception is that public repositories can be forked on GitHub as new GitHub repositories. Forking doesn't give you a license to use or reproduce the code, though.
Have you heard of a thing called copyright?
Wait, are we pro-copyright now?
Never
It should have been anyways. Like what the fuck were you all doing on the internet. Trying to sell your stupid art. Helping corporations steal data and build pay walls so you can earn $500/month selling your kitchy Garfield key chains. The internet should have always been about data replication and sharing. It's too late to put that cat back in the bag. It was suppose to be stopped 20 years ago. Now we have all this stuff ruining the world and bringing back nazis. But at least the lefty capitalist artist sold some key chains
I fought hard for net neutrality, a lot of us did. We don't matter.
Which goes to my point. You fought wrong. What i see is that the left is very likely manipulated by right wing interest groups way more than people want to admit. I think for decades now, they have targeted leftist online for issues we traditionally dominated and redirected people into areas that were very ineffective. Meanwhile they socially engineered the right side and MAGA to actually effective social engagement. After decades the left is just a dead in the water idea with people who no longer know how to use the internet correctly for social engineering and engagement. The only time the left rallies is when the effort is the most high effort, high energy, low reward movement people could possibly imagine.
The left in the past were intelligent intellectual building and innovating things. That is no longer the case. We're resting on the laurels of the best and looking around at lemmy should make it very obvious how true this is.
The sad reality i think people need to understand its the MAGA isn't winning just because of money. They're wining because they're putting effort in areas that the left don't even realize are important. They are playing chess and the left aren't even playing because competition makes the left feel anxious.
I have multiple people in my life on the right who spend all their time online posting and networking and planning. They will shit post all day. Between the 3 of them, they probably create tons of content. Let alone sharing and promoting others content.
People on the left I know will read an article. Can't be bothered to share or even upvote. Maybe they'll write a comment like "This sucks, Trump is stupid" and then they go look for star trek memes all day. Give this behavior 20 years for the kids today to grow up. The global cultural image of the left right now is a weak, gutless screaming loser who nobody wants to admit to being outside of small circles. Kids today hate the left. It's going to get so much worse.
I hope you're wrong, but not much hope :(
Me too.
My point here isn't to shit on the left just to shit on them. It's to at least get discussion if not find others who see it too. I think we're asleep. Maybe hoping if we just play the ethical long game that maybe it'll all return. In my mind we're standing on the beach watching the tide recede after an earthquake. Like most thing stuff is weird, but they're not really tracking that they need to start acting now if it isn't already too late.
My hope is people get a fire under there ass and first admit that we have fucked up and it's time to start firing up our own grass roots efforts. Download gimp. Get back on social media since we were never going to make a dent in their profits. Start using all these tools even AI to resist and present a front against these modern nazis. Play fucking dirty if we have to. People bitch about money but that money is only doing what we do for fun. Instead of obsessing about beans and moths, let's get back to being political and taking ground.
Lemmy could be a staging ground with the way it is built. Because when a site is a threat, they'll use every capitalist lever they can to squash it. They'll bring in moderation teams. They'll bring in ads. They'll bring in the tools we didn't resist. And if they do, we stand up a new instance without that shit. But we gotta do something to fire us up or it is only going to get worse.
Selling your shit and getting paid doesn't make you into a capitalist. At most you're an artisan, if you own your tools and you get paid for your final product rather than your labour hours.
To be a capitalist you necessarily need to own capital. In the example you picked you'd need to own a factory where you underpay people to and keep the surplus from all the keychains they produce.
And regardless of what you meant, you're absolutely barking at the wrong tree here, market consolidation and monopolies predate the internet, and they would have always had the final say in how we shape our infrastructure and share shit online under capitalism.
You would be a supporter of capitalist. The capitalist needed to take the internet away from the left. It was hostile to making capital. Early days people were much more aware of defending it against capitalist which like you said, people were tracking how capitalist ruined all other frontiers and left them dried out husks that stifled originality, creativity and actual innovation. Look at the leftovers from the early days. Websites from them were focused on free use and sharing information freely, gnu, Winamp, VLC, sites like reddit, digg, Wikipedia wouldn't exist with today's internet if they were created today. Capitalist took over.
I don't see how people selling keychains (physical items) helped corporations steal data.
Keychain just a stand in for anything. More like how someone making videos of making key chains used patent trolls to build tools to scan all the videos they can in order to find users they can take down. Just one example. The little lefty entrepreneur was used to beat the old school leftists into the dirty on behalf of the corporate interests. Now everything is owned by corporate and we lost the internet to racist nazis. There's a moment 20 years ago things could have been different that we'll never get back. Frontier was new and we needed to rally around the wagon to defend the frontier. Instead we sold out.
And now all the lefties are in the smallest corner of the internet and the rest of the internet and social media is owned by the capitalist and nazis. It all started by forgetting the roots and in favor of selling our key chains and trying to build a market rather than a collaborative space.
What's with the obsession with "lefties" vs nazis?? Sounds like somebody stayed on the propaganda carousel a bit too long.
You choose what parts of the internet you want to use, so who cares if 99% is profit oriented garbage, honestly.
People choose to publicly share their stuff for free, so of course it's gonna be taken advantage of. That's literally capitalism.
Yea it's so crazy. Lol
Everything is fine. Nazis are marching in streets again primarily driven by online recruitment. Billionaires are investing in removing leftist from digital spaces to facilitate this. But because I care, I'm obsessed.
I'll just choose to hang out here with the people who say they oppose this stuff but really, they're just what, posting about beans and moths while nazis take over the government, March in the street and feed children their content through multiple pipelines that are growing because there's fuck all resistance. After all the "resistance" is busy trying to decide which hole they want to hide in.