> The registries should charge companies, and pay maintainers

They already centralize packages, centralizing money flows is bound to cause more issues. By the way, npm is owned by GitHub, and GitHub is owned by Microsoft. "Your payment for your leftpad package has been transferred to your Microsoft Wallet". No thanks.

I just think there's a fundamental disconnect between the goals here. If I write free software, I don't write it to get paid, I write it to benefit others. If someone takes my work without also contributing back, I will get upset. The solution is not to give me money, that's not the spirit. We should not force people to pay for OSS but we should force them to give back to the community.

That's why copyleft licences like GPL are superior. People licence their work under BSD-style licences that are the equivalent of putting a box of stuff on the side of the road with a "free, help yourself" sign and then get upset when people do. BSD-style licences take away as many rights from users and authors as they can. GPL-style licences give as many rights to the users as they can. That's basically completely opposite philosophies. Use the right licence folks.

> we should not allow everyone access to unlimited intelligence

Who's we ? Who's going to decides who has access to "unlimited intelligence" ? An AI ? Why would the AI be better than a human ?

> One with no off switch.

Whe're not living in the Matrix, such a thing is not possible. If it were it would be a likelier candidate for the Fermi paradox than what you're proposing.

They explicitly say that they use your "content" to improve their models. Considering they practically have infinite compute at their disposal, why is it surprising that they would look for juicy data in there to make them look good ? When they ingested basically the entirety of human knowledge without regard to the rights of others, when they burn books by the thousands, when their relentless barrage of bots have rendered the Web borderline unusable, why would they stop at that line ?

"If a farmer packs a few apples in a container (sales packaging) and sells it under its own name or trademark to a retailer or consumer in the same Member State, the farmer is a producer [for the purpose of EPR obligations]"

And :

"If the farmer sells the packed apples under its own name or trademark in another Member State, the farmer is only the producer if the recipient is the end user of the apples."

And :

"If the farmer is a micro-enterprise, which is often the case, and the supplier of the apple container is established in the same Member State, such supplier becomes the producer"

That last exemption is quite restrictive, it can be a problem. I can attest that a French manufacturer of antistatic packaging refused to sell to me as a micro enterprise when I was selling electronics kits a long time ago and I had to buy them from China. Some states might not even have packaging manufacturers. So the concerns from the article are founded.

  void TrackFaceTotal::setDistance(float dist, bool isImperial);
  void TrackFaceOverview::setPace(float pace);

  bool     unitsImperial;

Sure that's simplistic, but human behavior is not that complex, there are a few basic needs and wants that drive everything. In that specific case, those currently in a dominating position (Anthropic, the US) want to put hurdles (regulations) to make it more difficult for others to catch up, and everyone else want to join forces to overtake them.