>companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves

really not the same entities here

> companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever

One's world cannot be so drawn in crayon that "companies" is a useful level of detail with something like that. There's no irony in two totally different companies (one of which was actually an industry body, the RIAA) doing two totally different things.

Napster was a company. Pretty sure that company didn’t tell you that.

> We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.

We don't. People engaging in piracy have their lives ruined, companies engaging in piracy pay a tiny fraction of their revenues out to authors who can't legally outgun them.

(Sorry, I just wanted to air the juxtaposition as clearly as possible, I sense we are actually in agreement)

> I don’t believe any of these companies have paid for all the books they have trained on.

Did you miss the "book burning" hysteria from a couple weeks ago? These companies have been trying to digitize copyrighted materials legally, in which copyright law demands destruction of the original, and people shit on them even harder.

It's clearly not a problem for these companies to buy the books they need for training, and they have been doing that in crazy high volumes. Lots of good training materials simply cannot be legally purchased though, and should those parts of human knowledge just be ignored?

> Also, companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves.

So whose viewpoint is right here? Is downloading theft or not? These arguments always boil down to "it's fine when I do it, but wrong when a company does."