For those curious, this account on Xitter claimed responsibility. Their stated reasons are indeed ridiculous, but I don’t at all have a hard time believing that people can be that misguided.
Chill out a bit, my comment could not have possibly given you the impression that I’m a supporter of capitalism if you had read it carefully. I began my comment by putting forward the capitalist argument for copyright - a steel-man argument - and ended it by debunking it.
Copyright is meant to foster and improve the commons and public domain
You said yourself that copyright establishes art as private property (or “intellectual property” if we’re being more precise). That does the opposite of fostering and improving the commons and public domain.
If copyright was not tradeable or transferable
Then it wouldn’t be copyright. Copyright is a capitalist construct, not a public good corrupted by capital.
At the root of this cognitive dissonance is who benefits and who doesn’t. Copyright law is selectively applied in a way that protects the powerful and exploits the powerless. In a capitalist economy copyright is meant to protect people’s livelihoods by ensuring they are compensated for their labor, but due to the power imbalance inherent to capitalism it is instead used only to protect the interests of capital. The fact that AI companies are granted full impunity to violate the copyright of millions is evidence that copyright law is ineffective at the task for which it was purportedly created.
Coming at this from an IT perspective, a lot of things that people “already know” seem to evaporate when it’s time to actually apply that knowledge. Keeping that in mind, I think a game like this helps to cement the idea in people’s heads in a more intuitive way. It bridges the gap between system 1 and system 2 thinking.