> and they would definitely not give it back for free.

...not like they are doing it for free now either.

open-weight is an economic war strategy of trying to undermine your competitors and prevent it from rising prices, thus preventing profit, driving them out of business.

> I put "stolen" in quotation marks because it's still unclear if we can call that stealing

It never was stealing: you can't steal a book by copying it. You can however commit copyright infringement.

This blatant disregard of licenses and copyright is clearly infringing on the authors ability to make a profit from their work, which was the whole point of copyright.

They knew it too, which is why they said nothing about the pirating and infringing until they got too big to fail.

So now we are left discussing and wasting time on what technically counts as infringing, pirating, stealing and whatnot.

All the while the small authors who can't possibly lawyer up against the literal biggest corporations on earth will just have to shut up.

Yet, somehow they had deals with Disney and other big names, proving that they did actually feel they need approval.

Their actions are two-faced, thus proving malice. Now we can go back to pointless technicalities.