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Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
- r1chardnl 2y ago"If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research." - Wilson Mizner
- janlaureys 2y ago"Plagiarize, let no one else's work evade your eyes. Remember why the good lord made your eyes, so don't shade your eyes but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize !" ~ Me
- jfk13 2y agoGlad to see you didn't acknowledge your source! :-) (It's Tom Lehrer, for any who don't recognize it.)
- stevage 2y agoNo, it's Jan Laureys
- actionfromafar 2y ago- Lincoln. Fact-checked by Meta.
- edm0nd 2y agoI sung this in the style of System Of A Down for some reason
- okwhateverdude 2y agoAnd now I am infinitely disappointed that there don't seem to be any covers of Tom Lehrer tunes in the style of System of a Down.
- graemep 2y agoPlagiarism is claiming credit for work that is not yours: it is entirely different from a breach of copyright. You can breach copyright without plagiarism, and you can plagiarise without breaching copyright.
- tsumnia 2y ago"Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal" - Picasso
- motbus3 2y agoOh boy. I will need to thank Zuckerberg for let me downloading free books without being guilty
- Dead_Lemon 2y agoI wont be shocked it if turns out Meta has been using users Meta apps on their phones to pull this off. Like a giant bot net, just pull small amount of data, send home. Not enough for anyone to notice, but large enough user base to sum all the small segments together and download without Meta directly seeding anything back. Or just rented for a bunch of seedboxes anonymously
- poulpy123 2y agomy teenager self the trillion dollars company
- contravariant 2y agoWell, I guess it would be nice if we could have some precedent for the claim that downloading copyright protected information is not in itself a breach of copyright. It makes sense from the point of view that distribution is the act protected by copyright, not the mere act of copying. If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar, but then people might start wondering how keeping something from public domain for 90 years after the author's death could possibly be about protecting the rights of the author.
- latexr 2y agoAuthor rights wouldn’t be an accurate term. Copy rights do not necessarily belong to the author, even when they are alive. Distribution rights or “distrights” would make more sense for your argument.
- contravariant 2y agoWorks fine in Dutch law really, you just have to allow for the option that a company can be an author. A work could also have multiple authors. I prefer it to a name that's more accurate because it signals what the purpose of the law is, which I consider more important than its implementation. Now that I think of it that also works quite well when naming things in software. Don't name things after their implementation, when you can help it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- scotty79 2y agoThey are called "authorship rights" in Polish. While the right to distribute or make copies doesn't aleways belong to the author they always originate from author. And some are even non transferable or revocable, like the right to say "I, <my chosen name>, made this thing"
- hnbad 2y ago
- arboles 2y agoIf you download one book you're a criminal. If they download millions of books, that's just business.
- jcmp 2y agoyou are not. Thats their point
- close04 2y agoTheir point is that they are not.
- arboles 2y agoIt would set the precedent for everyone. The real difference is that they can beg the question and people like Aaron Schwartz couldn't.
- Mindwipe 2y agoAaron Schwartz's lawyer could have posed exactly the same claim. It wouldn't have succeeded, just like this won't. Lawyers will deploy any possible argument, just in case, even if it has a 0.1% chance of working because why wouldn't you?
- arboles 2y agoOn the off chance the defense succeeds I'm proven right, if the defense fails, I'm still proven right as the fine will only be a minor set back for Meta.
- goodpoint 2y agoNo, this is a case of "rules for thee but not for me".
- latexr 2y agoThat is definitely not their point. Their point is, quite simply, “don’t punish us, bro”. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the law in general or what it means for other people, they just want to make sure they specifically can do what they please without repercussion.
- isaacfrond 2y agoIt's certainly nice to see someone accused of bittorrenting with the bankroll to come up with a decent legal defense team.
- Mindwipe 2y agoThis isn't a decent defence, it's a losing desperate one.
- StevenWaterman 2y agoThe noun phrase was "legal defence team" not "legal defence". A decent team can put forward a poor defence
- guappa 2y agoThey can just bribe the president.
- PontifexMinimus 2y agoMaybe Trump will legalise internet-based copying. After all, the main people hurt would be Hollywood, which is run by people supporting the Democrats. And it would be popular with many voters (not an issue for Trump but it is for Republicans).
- rs186 2y agoThat seems an oversimplification. Counter example: ownership of Amazon MGM Studios and its parent Amazon.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoSelling streaming media is a side business for Amazon (and Apple), an add on as a way to move Amazon Prime and Apple One subscriptions. They would probably benefit by handicapping Netflix/Disney/WBD/etc.
- 2y ago
- selamtux 2y agoAaron Swartz didn't seed or distribute articles too
- mandmandam 2y agoI don't think that what Aaron did was* wrong. Meta's wholescale theft, however, is pretty hard to defend, and Meta knew it. That's why they went to some lengths to hide it. Similarly, that OpenAI whistleblower, the one whose family was calling for a murder investigation, might be alive today if it wasn't pretty well known that stealing the work of thousands/millions of people to make a for-profit imitation machine isn't exactly cool or legal. Edit: egregious typo.
- InsideOutSanta 2y agoWhat Aaron did was not wrong. He intended to make journal articles publicly available. They should be, as many are publicly funded, and academic publishers like Elsevier do not pay for these articles. Scientists provide them to journals. Universities, libraries, and we then have to buy back access.
- w4rh4wk5 2y ago+1 public money, public research
- mandmandam 2y agoYeah agreed, I was typing pre-caffeination :/
- drawkward 2y agoTrump solved the problem by just removing the funding! Checkmate, Libs! /s
- weberer 2y agoSwartz killed himself before the trial actually took place. Its entirely possible that the court would have ruled in his favor.
- selamtux 2y agoby the way they say "we didn't seed after the download" but what about while downloading in progress?
- sheepdestroyer 2y agoIn any case it's really easy to configure a BitTorrent client to never seed. It would be dumb not to when torrenting for work.
- dspillett 2y agoThe claim is that they "took precautions not to 'seed' any downloaded files" - that probably means blocking all upload actions which is possible with many torrent clients. They may also have used a custom hacked client that didn't even connect to other nodes that didn't claim to have 100% already.
- itiduenacvylipt 2y ago[dead]
- throw310822 2y agoIn fairness, I don't think Meta would have (had) any trouble paying the fair price of every book they downloaded (the price of exactly one copy) if that had been possible to do at scale.
- ashu1461 2y agoPaying the price of one copy does not imply that you can use it for training, right ?
- throw310822 2y agoThat's what I do all the time, when I buy a copy of a book and read it.
- pyrale 2y agoSince there is no such thing as training rights, they would have a reasonable claim.
- amelius 2y agoI think it is more reasonable for content owners to say what can and cannot be done with their data. After all, content is what make AI possible, and content owners could easily start their own LLM if they wanted to since a lot of it is open source now.
- ashu1461 2y agoSo openai announced once that it will cover its' clients legal costs for copyright infringement suits, wonder how it works. Either they are very cautious about where they are training or seeding the data from or there is a loophole.
- noirscape 2y agoIt's a bluff, OpenAI and Microsoft both have an carveout in that guarantee that effectively says "if we think you deliberately did copyright infringement with our tools, we won't help you". And of course, conveniently, if you get a copyright infringement lawsuit, they can just point to that. A company promising legal defense is only worth the paper it's written on and there's always carveouts like that, with the likelihood of them being used probably being equal to the risk the company takes on with that promise. US Copyright lawsuits having pretty extreme fines makes them fairly likely to get used.
- guappa 2y agoProbably "after the fact", meaning you first go bankrupt so they don't have to pay you.
- zigman1 2y agoDid at least their competitors seed?
- yyyk 2y agoPirating used to be the worst. The law is awfully flexible when large companies want it to be.
- abenga 2y agoThe law doesn't punish those who break it. It punishes those who can't afford expensive legal teams and those who hurt people who can afford expensive legal teams.
- guappa 2y agoI think they should be fined more for torrenting and not seeding :D
- lubujackson 2y agoMeta's rep continues to degrade - first they steal from copyright holders, but then they admit to leeching? Not even a 1:1 ratio?! /kickban
- easterncalculus 2y agoSeriously though, where is that magnet link? That's the only question on my mind when these articles come up.
- janetmissed 2y agoannas archive has a whole section on torrenting
- bcraven 2y ago>This torrent list is the “ultimate unified list” of releases by Anna’s Archive, Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, and others. By seeding these torrents, you help preserve humanity’s knowledge and culture. These torrents represent the vast majority of human knowledge that can be mirrored in bulk. >These torrents are not meant for downloading individual books. They are meant for long-term preservation. With these torrents you can set up a full mirror of Anna’s Archive, using our source code and metadata (which can be generated or downloaded as ElasticSearch and MariaDB databases). We also have full lists of torrents, as JSON. https://annas-archive.org/torrents https://annas-archive.org/torrents
- man4 2y ago[dead]
- vednig 2y agoThis lawsuit may have impact on legality of open AI models like LLAMA 3, if outcome makes it illegal this may prevent businesses utilizing these models directly in their project.
- brendoelfrendo 2y agoSo not only did they pirate all those books, they were also jerks about it? Meta's seeding ratio would've gotten them kicked off of most private trackers back in the day.
- fetzu 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 2y agoIf this was 15-20 years ago, arguably at the peak of P2P filesharing, I suspect most people would side with Meta.
- apexalpha 2y agoIn the Netherlands this is still the law. Downloading is fine, uploading is not. We used to have a sort of national library of every single media on Usenet back in the day.
- actionfromafar 2y agoMaybe Meta has a "trading desk" in the Netherlands. :-)
- aithrowawaycomm 2y ago11 years ago the EU made the Netherlands change their position: https://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-finally-becomes-illegal-in-the-netherlands/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-fi... AFAIK this is still the case - the Netherlands is more poorly-enforced than other EU countries, but it's still illegal to download pirated material.
- apexalpha 2y agoWeird, TIL. This has never been enforced though.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoIt certainly has! https://stichtingbrein.nl/largest-ever-criminal-action-against-digital-piracy-in-the-netherlands/ https://stichtingbrein.nl/largest-ever-criminal-action-again... https://piracymonitor.org/netherlands-odido-is-ordered-to-block-torrentgalaxy-on-request-by-brein/ https://piracymonitor.org/netherlands-odido-is-ordered-to-bl... https://piracymonitor.org/netherlands-brein-reports-two-piracy-settlements-against-individuals-during-july/ https://piracymonitor.org/netherlands-brein-reports-two-pira...
- blogabegonija 2y agoWe have TV culture not recognizing the Internet culture.
- pulkitsh1234 2y agoI am curious, where did the other companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, et al) get their training data from? Why is only Meta under fire for this?
- anal_reactor 2y ago[flagged]
- drawkward 2y agoAmerica is a country of religious assholes. The pilgrims were kicked out of England because of their weird-ass insistence on founding their own churches, so they moved to the Netherlands, which at the time were a refuge for many English religious separatists. However, religious freedom was not enough! No, they wanted to found their own Godly country and evangelize to the natives of America, and also reap the economic benefits of an "uncivilized" land. America: -Selfish assholes? check! -Weirdly religious? check! -Entrepreneurial? check!
- codelion 2y agoYeah, the difficulty of tracking is a huge factor. Plus, with torrenting, the "making available" part is pretty blatant. With Usenet or direct downloads, it's a grayer area unless you're running the server. I've always wondered about the legal nuances of just passively receiving copyrighted data – like if a misconfigured server pushes something to you without you requesting it.
- Rhapso 2y agoUnless they actively modified a bittorrent client, even leeches upload and share some chunks.
- itiduenacvylipt 2y agoIt's not hard. I've done it.
- Rhapso 2y agoRight, but did they? It being easy doesn't mean data scientists moving fast and breaking things bothered while they were already doing something illegal.
- waltercool 2y ago[dead]
- stevage 2y ago> Evidence instead shows that Meta "took precautions not to 'seed' any downloaded files," Meta's filing said. Seeding refers to sharing a torrented file after the download completes, and because there's allegedly no proof of such "seeding," Meta insisted that authors cannot prove Meta shared the pirated books with anyone during the torrenting process. Are they actually claiming only that they didn't share after the torrent completed? Or is the journalist just confused? My understanding with bittorrent is that normally during download you are also uploading. "Seeding" is just what the uploading part is called when you're not also downloading. I think it is possible to download without doing any uploading at all, but I feel like the onus of proof should be on them to show that they actually did that.
- rozab 2y agoI think it's possible with the optimistic unchoking feature of BT but it would be slow and rely on generous clients. But at the end of the day I don't think Meta care enough. They see themselves as being above the law and likely didn't seed 'more than necessary' only because it didn't benefit them.
- d1sxeyes 2y agoBut that’s not quite how the law works. Meta’s response here is “you have no evidence of any wrongdoing”. The fact we’re even discussing this shows that there’s at least some doubt that Meta could be successfully prosecuted for downloading alone. With regards to uploading, legally speaking, it sounds like they’re right. Generally, the presumption of innocence means that whoever’s doing the accusing carries the burden of proof, and without any evidence that Meta did anything wrong, it also sets a worrying precedent that Meta would proactively have to prove their innocence in the face of no evidence to the contrary.
- itiduenacvylipt 2y ago[dead]
- mft_ 2y agoYou're right that torrent clients typically share during downloading, although one might limit this by limiting the upload bandwidth. However, while we have no idea the lengths that Meta went to (or not), I suspect they have the engineering chops to fork and tweak their own 'download-only' torrent client.
- DrScientist 2y agoIn the end it's it about the money? ie the loss to the copyright holder. One of the reasons people sharing were gone after is you could aggregate the loss to one lawsuit - the person sharing was responsible for every lost sale - rather than chasing the thousands of individual lost sales, one at once, for each download. Not sure that actually made the best sense from a legal perspective as the sharer wasn't necessarily benefiting - but it was pushed for practical reasons. In this case I'm assuming Meta downloaded as many pirated books as it could get it's hands on in order to avoid paying for them. Seems common sense what they did is/should be illegal.
- AlienRobot 2y agoTorrenting without seeding is a new low even for Meta.
- api 2y agoWe'll see if small scale piracy is bad but massive scale corporate piracy is fine.
- hsuduebc2 2y agoCorporate advocating for internet piracy, even better for torrents surely was not on my 2025 bingo card.
- karlkloss 2y agoSo I'm allowed to torrent all the games and apps for their VR headsets? Good that they clarified this.
- tripplyons 2y agoOnly if you leech it, I guess.
- sheepdestroyer 2y agoThe Open(Closed)AIs of the world have millions of dollars to spend on IP datasets. Arguing that copyright forbids training AI models without paying authors is the moat that would prevent any hope that small labs, individuals, and open source communities can ever compete with these huge corpos. The books and other artworks they are arguing over didn't come generated spontaneously from nowhere, and it's disingenuous to refuse sharing them to inform what is basically the worlds next currency : Intelligence. Doing so is just saying that knowledge and intelligence must belong to rich corpos only and never be democratized. This is unexpected but Meta is basically being the good guy by giving away their research papers and models weight resulting from millions of $ of training. The alternative to open source AI is everyone's subjugation to the oligarchists in charge of Intelligence. Copyrights holders who argue against free training of open source models from their work are morally and ethically wrong here.
- xyst 2y agoSemantic details aside (I was just downloading/leeching, bro!1! I pinky promise). Clearly a PR campaign. It’s abhorrent that a multibillion dollar company is not just pirating the content for personal use (? wtf how can a for profit company download it for _personal_ use ?) but also _profits_ on the pirated content by using it for training material. The whole “corporations” are people ruling is fucking stupid, and truly shows how much this country bends to the billionaire class
- anilakar 2y agoDisclaimer: not American. Copyright agencies that monitor torrents here have actually verified that peers offer at least one offending chunk on protocol level and the Market Court has decided it's the minimum that can be considered sharing. As far as I know, nobody has yet claimed their client has been modified to download without seeding.
- itiduenacvylipt 2y agoI do not work for Meta. Still throwaway account for obvious reasons. I wrote a modified torrent client that fake seeds. No data (not even a byte) of the content itself is ever uploaded to another peer. I'm aware this is an asshole move, but it made the lawyers happier.
- crazygringo 2y agoThat's actually really interesting, thanks for sharing. I've genuinely been wondering if someone building these models has done exactly that, precisely after discussing with lawyers. It seems like the obvious move, legally.
- Mekoloto 2y agoIn germany its saver to illegally download through usenet because you don't upload and the cost a rights owner can make is only the cost of the product and not an aribrary number of (you puloaded it and created damage of x). It doesn't make it legal at all, it just makes it no longer interesting for IP owners to sue you.
- bmicraft 2y agoWasn't there a ruling like a decade ago that explicitly declared storing illegal, but streaming (download to RAM) is fine as a non-redistributing client? Of course the rights holder would have trouble proving whether you did save it, but that's a different issue.
- Mekoloto 2y agoIts official illegal for a while. Nonetheless its the same thing: if they can prove you watched it, the damage is small for you and because IP holders are splittered, and you didn't just watch content of one, its probably not worth it to sue you.
- fazeirony 2y agoso trying to understand here. when metallica et. al. went after kids (well, i guess ppl my age all those years ago lol) for using napster and downloading their music...they made this very clear distinction right? i'm beyond sick and tired of these large corpos arguing 'rules for thee but not for me.' unfortunately, in this country with no meaningful legislation around privacy or really, anything digital, it's a game of 'who has the slickest lawyers to pull one over on the judge/jury' it would seem.
- indigovole 2y agoThis amounts to a claim of fair use, since copying occurs. Pretty disingenuous of them to make a claim that an individual user would make. The outcome of a fair use claim by one of the world's largest corporations to ingest wholesale an entire corpus and use it for commercial purposes is probably not the same as one by an individual person who wanted to watch a movie. It's not the same use, and is much more likely to be found unfair.
- llm_trw 2y agoWell it was a nice run. I expect all LLMs to be illegal within a year if this is the sort of high caliber defense the top minds of meta can come up with.
- bilekas 2y agoThis is actually genius from the lawyers of meta. In this way they are pushing the onus onto the question of "what is illegal in regards to torrenting copyright content". They have the money and legal team to push it to any conclusion, but that conclusion would risk so many huge industries in the Us that too many parties would be effected. That would incentivize companies to drop this case against meta and the status quo can continue. I'm under absolutely zero illusion this will set some precedent for one way or the other. It's too valuable to too many people involved.
- thrance 2y agoYes, it will just turn into another proof that if you're rich enough you can get away with anything in this country. The rule of law is three times gone and never coming back.
- erremerre 2y agoCan someone, self representing, and with the very intention to lose, keep going this battle? I don't know, there are 70tb of books, could someone who had published under their name carry on independently?
- thrwaway1985882 2y agoAnybody can sue anybody, and this someone in your example would likely have standing, so why not? A single person self representing against a company that is essentially one of the largest law firms on the planet, and can outspend them tens of thousands times over - what's to be gained?
- erremerre 2y agocreate jurisdiction that downloading torrent is not illegal in the US
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y agoIn the Netherlands, for individuals at least, it's legal to download copyrighted works, but not to upload or seed. I don't know if that applies to corporations.
- gampleman 2y agoI'm a little confused about how is it supposed to work otherwise? Do I have an obligation as an internet user to ascertain if a website owner whose website I visit has the all the rights to all the media that the website contains (presumably also working out whatever jurisdictional issues come up)? Like how do you know that (say) Netflix actually has the right to stream you every show that they do? And how do you know that some random ad supported website doesn't?
- bilekas 2y agoIt's an argument made in bad faith to basically send a message to the claim bringers that "hey, we have enough money and time to push this argument all the way, want to try us?". Try this as a citizen.
- a2128 2y agoIt's a difference of intent. Paying Netflix as an individual with the intention and expectation of watching content legally is very different to torrenting terabytes of pirated books on company laptops for training a commercial AI to replace those writers, and employees even expressing concern over its ethics on recorded communication
- Ajedi32 2y agoSo your position is that it is illegal for me to watch a movie on Netflix that they don't have the rights to? Just that I wouldn't be prosecuted because I didn't intend to break the law? Unless perhaps I knew they didn't have the rights to it but watched it anyway?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoThat the judge will say you did not break the law because you reasonably believed you were following the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
- 2y ago
- gunalx 2y agoYou wouldnt download a BOOK. (But meta is allowed, because they are to big to fail or something)
- palata 2y agoBurning tires in Meta's offices isn't illegal without proof of having set the tires on fire.
- lucasyvas 2y agoThis sets a hilarious precedent where downloading torrents becomes completely fine. You can just cite this case if they win - even though we are talking about books the MPAA is probably going to have an opinion here.
- 999900000999 2y agoYou're typical 19 year old doesn't have a team of elite lawyers to argue for her when she torrents Game of Thrones. Expect Meta to "win" as in the plaintiffs just give up and calculate it's not worth pursuing. It would stun me if they even settle. Not to mention the LLMs themselves are creating unauthorized copies of copywriten content. But again, Meta has unlimited money. Different rules for them.
- thescriptkiddie 2y agohas anyone ever gotten in actual legal trouble for torrenting? I know there was that one kid that a record label made an example out of for using napster a long time ago
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoNot sure if it's still the case but this is it is in Canada. Downloading is legal but uploading is illegal.
- lucasyvas 2y agoI think you’re right but I don’t think this is the case in the US? I’ve certainly read many stories over the years of the hammer coming down on downloading on its own.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoThat was my understanding too for a long time. I thought everyone who got sued for using BitTorrent was sued because they were "distributing" copies. Downloading isn't distributing. I also don't think anyone has ever been sued in America for using websites which stream movies they don't have the rights to to you.
- toss1 2y agoMeta may not be re-seeding the titles in the original form, but Meta ARE definitely redistributing the content in altered form — it is the specific intent of their bulk-downloading — to ingest the content into their LLM to redistribute it as their product. The question I see for someone sitting in the judge's chair is whether this is fair use, sufficient alteration to constitute a new work, or a derivative work requiring compensation.
- moonlet 2y agoIf only every copyright lawyer in the world could suddenly band together and descend on them in a horde. This is such a disgusting abuse of book authors, who are usually not the big guys. As a non-author myself, I don’t care about the publishers and whatnot but most people who are authors only have written one book and should get the royalties they deserve from their work.
- otterley 2y agoBoth the headline and the theme of the story are incorrect and misleading. Meta isn’t claiming that everything they’re doing is lawful. They’re claiming that their activities don’t run afoul of a particular California state law, CDAFA, and section 1202(b)(1) of the DMCA. It’s very common in litigation for the plaintiff to accuse the defendant of every violation they might be guilty of or liable for (“throwing the book at them”), and for defendants then to systematically try to strip them away. As far as I know, Meta is not yet claiming their activities were completely lawful. Here is the actual filing: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Kadrey-v-Meta-Reply-In-Support-of-Motion-to-Dismiss-2-20-25.pdf https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Kadre...
- braiamp 2y ago> Meta responded to this complaint with a motion to dismiss. In a supporting reply filed on Tuesday, the company notes that the ‘torrenting’ allegations, relating to the removal of copyright information and the CDAFA violations, don’t hold up. They are addressing both the second and third counts. The "Direct Copyright Infringement" isn't being addressed by these claims. This is even quoted on the filing you provided: https://torrentfreak.com/images/seedingprecautions.jpg.webp https://torrentfreak.com/images/seedingprecautions.jpg.webp
- otterley 2y agoHow does your response conflict with what I said?
- tiahura 2y agoWon't named plaintiffs have the burden of proving meta actually seeded blocks containing their works? How could they ever do that?
- otterley 2y agoThe plaintiffs do have the burden of proof, but there are many ways to Rome. Any evidence they can find, whether it be packet captures, client and server logs, incriminating emails, or even admissions, will be proffered to the court and/or jury.
- josefritzishere 2y agoI guess that might be good for everyone else?
- stalluri 2y agoModels absorbed the pirated content. Now Meta is distributing those models. Is that considered distribution?
- WXLCKNO 2y agoIt really should be.
- noboostforyou 2y agoFor that argument I believe the question becomes "is the output of a model considered a derivative work of the training data?" https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
- ninalanyon 2y agoWhat else could it be?
- monocasa 2y agoThe industry is banking on Author's Guild v. Google to be precedent in such a way that it's functionally transformative enough to be a completely new work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... I think they have about a coin flip of a chance that it passes muster in the courts.
- Ajedi32 2y agoAn original composition based on a statistical analysis of the training data. Statistical data about a copyrighted work obviously isn't necessarily a derivative of that work. Otherwise Tolkien could sue me for telling you how many times The Lord of the Rings uses the word "the".
- rasz 2y agoCan it reproduce training data? Then its not analysis but compression, lossy compression.
- nerdponx 2y agoDid they really need a photo of a leech in the article? I get the connection, but it's gross and reminds me of a Taboola/Outbrain chumbox.
- jug 2y agoPirates around the world agree!
- dev1ycan 2y agoJust more proof that laws only exist for poor people, if you are the 1% you get away with virtually anything.
- calibas 2y ago“It's only illegal if you get caught”
- tiahura 2y agoThe author of the linked piece identifies as a "reporter," however it reads like an opinion piece. We should demand better from ALL journalists.
- phillypham 2y agoCould some disgruntled employee offer proof of seeding and collect a whistleblower reward?
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y agoI will admit that I did not have "FB ruling may end up making torrenting legal ( as long as you don't seed )" in my 2025 bingo card.
- bmicraft 2y agoSeems like a bad thing, increasing the percentage of non-seeding users will likely kill most torrents.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y agoI wasn't making a judgment on whether it is a good or a bad thing. I just did not see it coming. I was expecting lawsuits on AI will get interesting, but I did not expect this.
- bmicraft 2y agoYup, we can agree on that one.
- notepad0x90 2y agoCopyright laws exist to prevent those who are not wealthy from sharing their resources with each other. That's why AI companies and now FB can get away with it, the law wasn't meant for them. Fundamentally, the ability to share what you own is a right no government has legitimate authority to restrict. Such laws are illegitimate. Governments don't own people, they govern them. Governance is scoped within limits of authority. Even slaves and prisoners can share their food,clothing and other resources with each other, preventing them is not just inhumane but beyond the authority of slave owners and prison wardens. It boils down to this: if you own something, you can give it away for free because ownership implies authority to retain and give away the property. The right to own things can be restricted, but once ownership is allowed, no one has the authority to restrict retention or free exchange of owned resources. Governments can regulate commerce, but free exchange of resources is beyond their authority since it isn't commercial activity. Keep in mind that this is a more crucial and important concept beyond basic liberty and human rights. If you can't own stuff, nothing else matters regarding your relationship with the government. Telling you that you own stuff but then stripping away the meaning of ownership so that you don't really own stuff is a sneaky way of governments exceeding the limits of their authority. Another sneaky and fraudulent thing is implied acceptance of licensing. Stamping a copyright notice,eula, ToS,etc.. means nothing. if You buy a book with cash, your exchange is with the person who sold it to you and You now own the book. It isn't licensed to you, it is yours to give away for free. The same concept applies to software, video, music,etc.. neither intermediaries, nor original content authors have the authority to enforce a licensing agreement or copyright over the content, unless a license agreement is required at point of sale, and even then the agreement is beyond the two participants. If you agree to a copyright license contract and purchase music, and then you give it away for free, it makes sense to get sued by the copy right owner over violation of that contract. But the person you sold it to has no obligation to honor a contract they did not enter. The government has no right to implicitly force people to enter a license agreement when they receive goods free of charge by someone. only the person who originally agreed to the contract should be held liable.
- ngneer 2y agoThe gall! Next they'll say that "just because we downloaded the content does not mean we USED the content, and you have no proof we used the content, so we are not pirates".
- ngneer 2y agoI suppose this comment wasn't adding much to the conversation, or not realistic enough in the context of a legal argument. More to life than law, though.
- DannyPage 2y agoThis line of argument sounds exactly what a lot of people tried in the past when they were getting hit by claims from the media companies. If I were to scrape Meta's information and use it to train AI chat bots, would they say "That's fine, go ahead" because I'm not sharing the raw information in another way?
- foxygen 2y agoCopyright laws should not exist. Claiming you "own" a specific sequence of words/pixels is crazy. I hope Meta wins the case.
- tempfile 2y agoI am astonished that Meta is even trying this defense. It does not even remotely pass the smell test. Seeding is not remotely relevant, and neither is the fact that torrenting in general is legal. The works are not published with the consent of the rightsholders - LibGen and Z-Library distribute them illegally, and Meta therefore obtained them illegally. This is an open-and-shut case.
- gosub100 2y agoUsing LLMs trained on copyright books should be banned anywhere downloading copyright books is illegal
- cryptonector 2y agoMeta can afford to buy copies of the books / whatever it's scraping.
- acc_297 2y agoI was a university student in golden age of libgen so Glass Houses and all - but it's crazy that this was approved from the top of a company that could maybe have even legally purchased the bulk of this collection without hurting quarterly returns
- darig 2y ago[dead]
- kmod 2y agoI believe that at least in the past the entertainment industry would try to detect someone seeding a file before going after them. The idea being that someone downloading is receiving a copy (not illegal), and the act of making the copy (illegal) was done by the seeder. I'm not sure to what degree this was an established requirement vs them trying to avoid ambiguity, but my point is that this framing by Meta isn't novel. I'm not expressing a judgment on whether it's correct or if it's good.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
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- harvey9 2y agoI'm picturing some lawyers pulling up at the front of the court building in their clown car - a vehicle with the tight turning circle needed after all these years of hearing lawyers argue piracy is theft.
- nadermx 2y agoIts funny because courts are split on the making available theory since it was pushed during the napster/grokster days. So I do think this is a decent approach of attack since they are saying there can be no proof they made anything available and I'm not so sure meta wants to settle this at all.
- gizajob 2y agoWell whatever they’ve done, it sure has borked libgen :(
- hulitu 2y ago> Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal > Uber claims it's drivers are not employees > AirBNB claims it is not renting > Google, Microsoft, Meta claims your data is theirs The best democracy money can buy.
- httpgetintent 2y agoIf the user clicks play on a song video on YouTube, can their intent to distribute copyrighted content be established from just that? Was there a virus or a relay on that computer at that IP then? Do government infosec researchers violate copyright of darknet resources when they access them with a browser? Must they disclose their government ID? Does the enemy have the advantage if they do not limit themselves with copyright? Which government operations are immune from copyright? Do you have intent to distribute a copyrighted web page if you click on a URL in a web browser? Does checking out a library book amount to copyright violation? Please do not grant censorship rights to big content. DRM does not prevent people from recording with a videocamera. Please do not grant big content the ability to disable cameras or mics because of their need for content licensure. Is it possible to force government agents to disclose their government credentials with copyright entrapment? Please do not create a censorship backdoor with copyright. It is telling that nobody has moved to compensate visual artists on YouTube according to fingerprinting. Which qualify as journalists, researchers, academics, and government agents authorized to reuse copyrighted video clips in a sufficiently transformative compilation?
- httpgetintent 2y agoIt were that private investigations of copyright infringement required presumption of guilt or illegal unauthorized surveillance and illegal search, which jeopardizes criminal investigations. Can copyright private investigators legally invade computers and homes of agents' kids on false premises? Do actors and political speech decoys use MK BCI capabilities that nullify intent claims, in P20 file sharing cases too? Are those secure? Priorities. Great, more foreign VPNs and copyright blackmail