It doesn't matter what is legal. It matters what is right. Society is about balancing the needs of the individual vs the collective. I have a hard time equating individual rights with the NYT and I know my general views on scraping public data and who I was rooting for in the LinkedIn case.
I have an even harder time equating individual rights with the spending of $xx billion in Azure compute time and payment of a collective $0 to millions of individuals who involuntarily contribute training material to create a closed source, commercial service allowing a single company to compete with all the individuals currently employed to create similar work.
NYT just happens to be an entity that can afford to fight Microsoft in court.
I don't see a problem as long as there's taxation.
Look at SpaceX. They paid a collective $0 to the individuals who discovered all the physics and engineering knowledge. Without that knowledge they're nothing. But still, aren't we all glad that SpaceX exists?
In exchange for all the knowledge that SpaceX is privatizing, we get to tax them. "You took from us, so we get to take it back with tax."
I think the more important consideration isn't fairness it's prosperity. I don't want to ruin the gravy train with IP and copyright law. Let them take everything, then tax the end output in order to correct the balance and make things right.
> It's almost as if one of them is not like the other.
Use this newfound insight to take my comment in good faith, as per HN guidelines, and recognize that I am making a generalized analogy about the gap between law and ethics, and not making a direct comparison between copyright and slavery.
