Using the term “freeware” is silly, but consider this:

Is the act of reading/watching something, equivalent to making a copy? Freedom of thought is an agreement much older than the 1990s, it has nothing to do with copyright, and all to do with secrecy. If something is made public, then it isn’t secret, so obviously anyone can read/watch it, be it with a wetware neural network, or an AI neural network. Making an exact copy is either plagiarism, or copyright infringement… but abstracting a style, then applying it to some other data, is “inspiration”.

Imagine a website with a licensing disclaimer like “you are allowed to read the content, but not to comprehend or express any thoughts based on it”. Nonsense, right?

There is leaked Windows source code online… Is that also freeware for me to train an OS-building model on?

Ooc: Hey you ! Take this laptop !

They’ve been waiting a while to use this stock image.

I wish Microsoft had anything worth taking for free

The sort of mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance that these subhuman c-suite employ to justify stealing everyone else’s data while demonizing sharing of their data, is just infuriating. If these scumbags were incarcerated for a day each for every time they showed this hypocrisy, they would all rot in the jails for their entire lifetime, perhaps more.