The general problem is that both the structure of copyright and the legacy media business model were predicated on copying being a capital-intensive process. If a printing press is expensive then reproduction is a good place to collect royalties, because you could go after that expensive piece of equipment if they don't pay. And if a printing press is expensive then a publisher who has one is offering a scarce service in a market with a high barrier to entry.
The internet made copying free and that pretty well devastated the publishing industry, more as a result of the second one than the first. If your product isn't scarce -- if your news reporting is in competition with every blog and social media post -- you're not getting the same margins you used to. But there's no plausible way the incumbents are going to convince people that reporters with a website instead of a printing press need to be excluded from the market so they can have less competition, and that by itself and nothing more means their traditional business model is gone. They're competing for readers and advertisers against Substack and Reddit and the cat's not going back in the bag.
Meanwhile copyright infringement got way easier and that's much more plausible to frame as a problem, so the companies want to sic their lawyers on it, except that the bag is here on the ground and the cat is still over there getting a million hits. There is no obviously good way to solve it (but plenty of bad ways to not solve it) and solving it still wouldn't put things back the way they were anyway.
So their lawyers are constantly under pressure to do something but none of their options are good or effective which means they're constantly demanding things that are oppressive or asinine or, like the anti-circumvention clause in the DMCA, own-goals that tech megacorps use against content creators to monopolize distribution channels. Which is why it's an epidemic. If you can see the target the pressure is on to pull the trigger even when all you have is a footgun.
>They disagree with search engines being fair use?
No, with LLMs being fair use. I'm not going to respond to the rest of your post which is a paranoid and pejorative screed based on the fallacy that copyright is predicated on copying being hard or intensive when that was never the case. Copying was always easy. Its the creative part that is hard and why copying was made illegal.
In which case you're responding to the wrong thread.
> Copying was always easy.
Compare the price of a physically printed book which is in the public domain to the median one that isn't. The prices are only a little lower because the printing and distribution costs are significant.
Now compare the price of ebooks in the public domain with ebooks still under copyright. The latter isn't 40% more or 75% more, it's a billion percent more. Infinitely more. Copying went from being a double-digit percentage of the price to being zero.
The general problem is that both the structure of copyright and the legacy media business model were predicated on copying being a capital-intensive process. If a printing press is expensive then reproduction is a good place to collect royalties, because you could go after that expensive piece of equipment if they don't pay. And if a printing press is expensive then a publisher who has one is offering a scarce service in a market with a high barrier to entry.
The internet made copying free and that pretty well devastated the publishing industry, more as a result of the second one than the first. If your product isn't scarce -- if your news reporting is in competition with every blog and social media post -- you're not getting the same margins you used to. But there's no plausible way the incumbents are going to convince people that reporters with a website instead of a printing press need to be excluded from the market so they can have less competition, and that by itself and nothing more means their traditional business model is gone. They're competing for readers and advertisers against Substack and Reddit and the cat's not going back in the bag.
Meanwhile copyright infringement got way easier and that's much more plausible to frame as a problem, so the companies want to sic their lawyers on it, except that the bag is here on the ground and the cat is still over there getting a million hits. There is no obviously good way to solve it (but plenty of bad ways to not solve it) and solving it still wouldn't put things back the way they were anyway.
So their lawyers are constantly under pressure to do something but none of their options are good or effective which means they're constantly demanding things that are oppressive or asinine or, like the anti-circumvention clause in the DMCA, own-goals that tech megacorps use against content creators to monopolize distribution channels. Which is why it's an epidemic. If you can see the target the pressure is on to pull the trigger even when all you have is a footgun.