8 ms·
Authors seek Meta's torrent client logs and seeding data in AI piracy probe
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hnburnsy 2y agoWonder if Meta is running a one way Usenet host. Much better than torrents.
- LtdJorge 2y agoThe first rule of Usenet is: you do not talk about Usenet
- geor9e 2y agoif it was meant to be kept secret it probably shouldnt have been put on the AOL home portal in 1994
- spokaneplumb 2y agoPeople breaking the first rule wasn’t enough for me to crack into the scene. The weird two-paid-services thing required to use it effectively—a search service of some kind, and your actual content provider—and the jankiness of the software and sites involved were enough to get me to give up, after spending some money but making no meaningful progress toward pirating anything. I started my piracy journey on Napster. I’ve done all the other biggies. I’ve done off-the-beaten-path stuff like IRC piracy channels. Private trackers. I have a soft spot for Windowmaker and was dumb enough to run Gentoo so long that I got kinda good at the “scary” deep parts of Linux sysadmin. I can deal with fiddliness and allegedly-ugly UI. Usenet piracy defeated me.
- hnburnsy 2y agoSorry, forgot.
- heroprotagonist 2y agoWhat's the lesson, hire contractors?
- kevingadd 2y agoIt's possible their friends in government will make this all go away if they ask nicely enough.
- pixelpoet 2y agoWould $1m suffice? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8j9e1x9z2xo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8j9e1x9z2xo
- edoceo 2y agoThat's the ante; gotta place the next wager.
- plagiarist 2y agoThe best ROI for the money is probably purchasing a SCOTUS justice.
- qingcharles 2y agoWhy not both?
- moshegramovsky 2y agoYeah I had a Facebook account until today. This whole thing copyright thing reminds me of when Mark Zuckerberg was mad that someone posted photos of the interior of his house or something.
- ben_w 2y agoThe lesson is "move fast and break things is much less fun when we have to pay for things we broke".
- FireBeyond 2y agoTry to use any of the big players training models and see how quickly they remember how much they value copyright.
- WhatsName 2y agoYou mean OpenAIs infamous "you shall not train on the output of our model" clause?
- Terr_ 2y agoIf that's contractually-enforceable in their terms-of-service... then I have my own terms-of-service proposal that I've been kicking around here for several weeks, a kind of GPL-inspired poison-pill: > If the Visitor uses copyrighted material from this site (Hereafter: Site-Content) to train a Generative AI System, in consideration the Visitor grants the Site Owner an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use and re-license any output or derivative works created from that trained Generative AI System. (Hereafter: Generated Content.) > If the Visitor re-trains their Generative AI System to remove use of the Site-Content, the Visitor is responsible for notifying the Site Owner of which Generated Content is no longer subject to the above consideration. The Visitor shall indemnify the Site-Owner for any usage or re-licensing of Generated Content that occurs prior to the Site-Owner receiving adequate notice. _________ IANAL, but in short: "If you exploit my work to generate stuff, then I get to use or give-away what you made too. If you later stop exploiting my work and forget to tell me, then that's your problem." Yes, we haven't managed to eradicate a two-tiered justice system where the wealthy and powerful get to break the rules... But still, it would be cool to develop some IP-lawyer-vetted approach like this for anyone to use, some boilerplate ToS and agree-button implementation guidelines.
- protocolture 2y agoI still dont think this has legs, precisely because of this case. They accessed the material through piracy. They never accepted a TOS. They will probably get away with acquiring the material however they liked because of fair use. The technicality is that they redistributed the material because of seeding, which is a no no. That said, you might find inspiration in Midjourneys TOS. Anyone paying less than a Business plan agrees that anyone else on the platform can sample your output and your prompt.
- rockemsockem 2y agoIt seemed obvious to me for a long time before modern LLM training that any sort of training of machine intelligence would have to rely on pirated content. There's just no other viable alternative for efficiently acquiring large quantities of text data. Buying millions of ebooks online would take a lot of effort, downloading data from publishers isn't a thing that can be done efficiently (assuming tech companies negotiated and threw money at them), the only efficient way to access large volumes of media is piracy. The media ecosystem doesn't allow anything else.
- the-rc 2y agoGoogle has scans from Google Books, as well as all the ebooks it sells on the Play Store.
- lemoncookiechip 2y agoWouldn't that still be piracy? They own the rights of distribution, but do they (or Amazon) have the rights to use said books for LLM training? And what rights would those even be?
- XorNot 2y agoLiterally no rights agreement covers LLMs. They cover reproduction of the work, but LLMs don't obviously do this i.e. that the model transiently runs an algorithm over the text is superficially no different to the use of any other classifier or scoring system like those already used by law firms looking to sue people for sharing torrents.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- thatcat 2y agodo those classifiers read copyrighted material? i thought they simply joined the swarm and seeded (reproduction with permission) youtube, etc classifiers definitely do read others material though.
- alex1138 2y agoHow do other LLMs like Claude deal with this?
- BonoboIO 2y agoYou don’t talk about the fight club … Everyone uses „pirated“ content, but some are better at hiding it and/or not talking about it. There is no other way to do it.
- visarga 2y agoMore recently they train on a mix of synthetic and organic text, like the Phi-4 and o1 / o3 models. Original copyrighted text can be safely replaced with synthetic standins.
- BonoboIO 2y agoI think this works only to a certain degree, they will still use as much data as they can use to train the models. Synthetic data will not replace original data like books. Synthetic data works very good for math.
- bhouston 2y agoI am not sure you have to use torrent to pirate books. Pdfdrive is likely mich more effective than torrents. Torrents are best for large assets or those that are highly policed by copyright authorities but for smaller things torrents have little benefits.
- Marsymars 2y agoA publisher's entire library of books is a large asset.
- crtasm 2y agoI think if you're downloading hundreds of thousands to millions of books you'll be dealing with some pretty large archives. edit: books3.tar.gz alone is 37GB and claimed to have 197,000 titles in plain text.
- protocolture 2y agoThey have an email from a meta employee seeking clarification because it "felt wrong" to torrent the books.
- loeg 2y ago> “By downloading through the bit torrent protocol, Meta knew it was facilitating further copyright infringement by acting as a distribution point for other users of pirated books,” the amended complaint notes. > “Put another way, by opting to use a bit torrent system to download LibGen’s voluminous collection of pirated books, Meta ‘seeded’ pirated books to other users worldwide.” It is possible to (ab)use the bittorrent ecosystem and download without sharing at all. I don't know if this is what Meta did, or not.
- butterandguns 2y agoHypothetically you could just not seed.
- loeg 2y agoRight, that's what I'm talking about. I.e. https://github.com/pmoor/bitthief https://github.com/pmoor/bitthief and similar.
- cactusplant7374 2y agoThat is probably exactly what they did if they were smart about it.
- qingcharles 2y agoI was (partly) responsible for obtaining recordings for a Very Large Online Streaming Service(tm). Sometimes the studios would send us trucks filled with CDs. Sometimes they didn't have any easily accessible copies of the albums and would tell us to just "get it however..." which often involved SoulSeek, Limewire, etc. We were not smart about it. We just found the stuff and hit download. To the point where there were days the corp Internet was saturated from too many P2P clients running.
- wongarsu 2y agoHowever since this is a civil case they don't have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Meta seeded torrents. If they did use torrents the presumption would be that they used a regular bittorrent client with regular settings, and it would be on Meta to show they didn't do that.
- casey2 2y agoAs long as they seed it's fine by me
- crmd 2y agoI am trying to imagine the legal contortions required for the US Supreme Court to relieve Meta of copyright infringement liability for participating in a bit torrent cloud (and thereby facilitating "piracy" by others) in this case, while upholding liability for ordinary people using bit torrent. Would love if any lawyers here can speculate.
- brookst 2y agoNot a lawyer, but I could see an argument that Meta’s use is transformative whereas just pirating to watch something is not. Not asserting that myself, just saying it seems a possible avenue.
- wongarsu 2y agoThe issue with bittorrent isn't so much that you are acquiring material but that you are also distributing it. There are cases where downloading copyrighted material is legal. But distributing it without consent never is, and is generally punished much worse.
- alternatetwo 2y agoYou can turn off uploading in some torrent clients, such as Transmission.
- protocolture 2y agoThats the argument they are using before they were likely seeding. If anything, and the seeding can be proven, there will be a lot of entities seeking restitution. Its a technicality but its better than breaking fair use to appease authors.
- philistine 2y agoThe use might (might!) be transformative, but the work is copyrighted. How Meta copied it is an issue. Is the way they acquired it illegal? After all, Google Books did not acquire their books through torrents. They got physical books.
- kazinator 2y agoThe mind boggles. Are the plaintiffs jumping to the conclusion that Meta must have used BitTorrent, based on the idea that whenever someone pirates anything anywhere using the Internet, it's always done with BitTorrent? Or is there actual evidence for this?
- Maskawanian 2y agoThere was employee communication that expressed it being odd to use a torrent client on company computers. [1] [1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/when-mark-zuckerberg-told-meta-employees-to-use-torrent-to-/articleshow/117127892.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/whe...
- qingcharles 2y agoThere were comments published somewhere in the early days where it was specifically mentioned they used one of the big torrent files. That's where the authors got their idea from, I guess.
- russellbeattie 2y agoSo here's a related thought... Google is currently being sued by journalist Jill Leovy for illegally downloading and using her book "Ghettoside" to train Google's LLMs [1]. However, her book is currently stored, indexed and available as a snippet on Google Books [2]. That use case has been established in the courts to be fair use. Additionally, Google has made deals with publishers and the Author's Guild as well. So many questions! Did Google use its own book database to train Gemini? Even if they got the book file in an illegal way, does the fact that they already have it legally negate the issue? Does resolving all the legal issues related to Google Books immunize them from these sorts of suits? Legally, is training an LLM the same as indexing and providing snippets? I wonder if OpenAI, Meta and the rest will be able to use Google Books as a precedent? Could Google license its model to other companies to immunize them? Google's decade-long Books battle could produce major dividends in the AI space. But I'm not a lawyer. 1. https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/LeovyvGoogleLLCDocketNo523cv03440NDCalJul112023CourtDocket/2 https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/LeovyvG... 2. https://books.google.com/books?id=bZXtAQAAQBAJ https://books.google.com/books?id=bZXtAQAAQBAJ
- dang 2y agoRecent and related. Others? Zuckerberg appeared to know Llama trained on Libgen - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759546 - Jan 2025 (73 comments) Zuckerberg approved training Llama on LibGen [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42673628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42673628 - Jan 2025 (191 comments) Zuckerberg Approved AI Training on Pirated Books, Filings Say - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651007 - Jan 2025 (54 comments)
- glitchc 2y agoI see a silver lining here: If Meta and/or Google's lawyers can successfully demonstrate in court that piracy does not cause harm, it would nullify copyright infringement laws, making piracy legal for everyone.
- spencerflem 2y agoThis would be poetic, but not gonna happen. It will be legal for big corps but not you and me
- hresvelgr 2y agoYou know, I actually don't think so. Gabe Newell famously said piracy is a distribution problem, so a court would likely have to acknowledge inadequate distribution methods hampering AI development. This gives great precedence for consumer piracy, especially for old media that isn't sold anymore. It may not be a criminal offence if best efforts aren't being made by the original copyright holders to distribute.
- spencerflem 2y agoTheir argument will be that piracy only applies to humans IMO. They're just doing what Google has been allowed to do for decades.
- Der_Einzige 2y agoYup. As a full on IP abolitionist, I'm super excited by this. Information wants to be free. LLM providers training on things that folks don't want them to is a feature, not a bug. The tears of those mad about this are delicious and will ultimately be drowned out in the rain. Luddites and Copyright Trolls should be annihilated from the body politic with extreme prejudice.
- spencerflem 2y agowtf
- 2y ago
- visarga 2y agoHas anyone thought about orphaned books? Training on orphaned books might open them up to be reintegrated into culture instead of dying off unused and forgotten. Copyright kills works by making them irreproducible when the authors are not to be found.
- bawolff 2y agoIf you need the logs, doesn't that prove the point that the AI is not a derrivative work? Like if you can't figure out which works were used to create the AI just by looking, its hard to argue that they "copied" the work. Copyright is not a general prohibition on using the copyrighted work only the creativity contained within.
- samsin 2y agoClaiming that Meta distributed pirated works is still a copyright claim, but you're correct that it's seemingly irrelevant to the fair use argument (which the article acknowledges).
- Earw0rm 2y agoNo. Because you can't tell by inspecting the weights, and it can be hard to tell AIUI if the capability to generate the output is present, but suppressed by a safety mechanism, or doesn't exist at all.
- NBJack 2y agoDefine "figure out" and "looking" for a LLM, a bundle of pseudo-nerual pathways driven by parameters we number in the billions for sufficiently large models.
- _Algernon_ 2y agoI asked chatgpt about a design pattern the other day and it plagiarized a paragraph verbatim without attribution even from a textbook Im also reading (Design Patterns) It isn't difficult to show copyright infringement in these models. The assumption should be that copyright infringement has occured until proven otherwise. Just the fact that they are indiscriminately web scraping proves that. Just because it is publicly and (monetarily) freely available doesn't mean it isnt copyrighted.
- Crestwave 2y agoThis is why the "AI learns from materials just like a human does so it's not copyright infringement" argument always bothered me. A person won't recite full pages of word-for-word copies [1] from their head when you ask them something. When I first tried Copilot, I asked it to write a simple algorithm like FizzBuzz and it ripped off a random repo verbatim, complete with Korean comments and typos. Image models will also happily generate near-identical [2] copies (usually with some added noise) of copyrighted images with the right prompt. [1] https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2020/12/20/lmmem/ https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2020/12/20/lmmem/ [2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/06/uh_oh_attackers_can_extract/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/06/uh_oh_attackers_can_e...
- isitnowisit 2y agoWhat happens if I input 10 news headlines from different news sources into an AI prompt and publish and sell the resulting AI output. Is this copyright infringement?
- svl7 2y agoWhile Meta's use of copyrighted material might actually fall under fair use I wonder about the implications of having to use the whole source material for training purposes... Let's say I quote some key parts of a copyrighted book in an way that complies with fair use for a work of mine. In order to find the quoted parts I have to read the whole book first. To read the book first I need to acquire it. If it was simply pirated, wouldn't that technically be the main issue, not the fair use part in their service? I am an absolute layman when it comes to the subject of law and just thinking loudly. It seems to me that admitting using pirated works could be more problematic on itself, regardless of the resulting fair use when it is clear that the whole content had to be consumed / processed to get to the result.
- buyucu 2y agoI look forward to the showdown between big tech and big copyright.