13 ms·
Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
https://apnews.com/article/meta-mark-zuckerberg-ai-publishers-lawsuit-llama-5609846d4d840014974a847b01079c32 https://apnews.com/article/meta-mark-zuckerberg-ai-publisher...
- motbus3 5mo agoI know personally a case of a engineer who was told to do something despite all the legal problems because the company had lawyers for a reason
- Telaneo 5mo agoI'd love for that to come out during discovery when the lawsuit hits, but it probably never will. Blowing the whistle is also not a great option in this economy, although I wish more people did.
- nojvek 5mo agoIf it wasn’t written down and there’s no recordings of it, hard to prove.
- Telaneo 5mo agoGiven Zuckerberg's prevoius rounds in court, it's liktly to be in an email somewhere. Or maybe he's learned to have the incriminating_shit@facebook.com inbox only keep the latest 30 days or whatever.
- Der_Einzige 5mo agoGood.
- WindyBolt907 5mo ago[dead]
- ben_w 5mo agoA lot of people would be very pleased if this leads to Zuckerberg getting even the statutory minimum damages ($750?) on each infringement. The previous infringement case with Anthropic said that while training an AI was transformative and not itself an infringement, pirating works for that purpose still was definitely infringement all by itself. The settlement was $1.5bn, so close to $3k for each of the 500k they pirated, so if Zuckerberg pirated "millions" (plural) it is quite plausible his settlement could be $6bn.
- gloxkiqcza 5mo agoFor context, his net worth is ~$220 billion.
- azinman2 5mo agoAnd meta's worth is much more than that. He's not personally paying.
- ben_w 5mo agoA company being "worth" some amount doesn't mean it has that much money and real property; it means there exist people willing to buy shares, on the margin, at a price which works out like that. One of the common (very rough) approximations is that a business is worth as much as the profit it's expected to make over the next 20 years. But one of the reasons (there are many) that this is only a rough guide, is that if you tried to sell too much of a big company all in one go, it usually depresses the price a lot, and the other way around (trying to buy a whole company) tends to raise the price a lot; both effects are because most people have different ideas about how much any given company is really worth despite that rough guide, and trade their shares at different prices while you're doing it. You may note this is a circular argument, this is indeed part of the problem. IIRC, Facebook's cash is more like $81-82 billion.
- financetechbro 5mo agoZuck can just take out loans against his equity. He doesn’t need to sell any of it to benefit from Metas “worth”
- josefritzishere 5mo agoI would rather Zuckerberg do 6 months in jail and probation than fine Meta.
- jmclnx 5mo agoI agree, time to start handing out real punishments, I think 6 months is way to small. If this was you or me, we would be in prison for decades and have a fine in the millions. Time for these people to feel consequences. As someone said, they will probably settle for around 6 billion, that is the same as say a $100 fine for us.
- karanbhangui 5mo agoThis comment could get its own DSM classification for how insane it is. I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?
- AlotOfReading 5mo agoThe non-strawman way to interpret the parent comment is that they want them to be treated the same as normal copyright violators. Jail is a common result of (criminal) copyright prosecution, with 44% of convicted offenders being imprisoned, averaging 25 months [0]. Now, I personally find the idea of imprisoning people for copyright offenses horrific, but I don't think it's remotely insane that someone else might come to that conclusion, given that we broadly accept it as a society. [0] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/quick-facts/Copyright_FY17.pdf https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
- yorwba 5mo agoFrom [0]: "In fiscal year 2017, there were 80 copyright/trademark infringement offenders who accounted for 0.1% of all offenders sentenced under the guidelines." This is such a low number that I assume most prosecuted cases are settled without ever making it to sentencing, or alternatively copyright infringement is just hardly ever prosecuted criminally at all.
- 28304283409234 5mo agoSo... "move fast and steal things"?
- MengerSponge 5mo agoAlways Has Been
- vips7L 5mo agoThe biggest theft from the working class that has ever happened.
- mil22 5mo agoIt started at the top and at the beginning.
- lm411 5mo agoWhen the AI scrapers were just getting started, that is basically what I thought - their plan was to scrape / suck up everything they possibly could before people realized what was happening and blocked them. The rate at which they were spidering and scraping was so far beyond what any other supposedly legit spider was doing, it seemed like the logical explanation.
- pseudalopex 5mo agoMove fast and break laws.
- platevoltage 5mo agoIn Mark's case, he still breaking things too.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- eowln 5mo agoSteal things? What is this, the “you wouldn’t pirate a car” argument again? I thought we were well over that.
- qarl 5mo agoI know people really hate AI training on their work - but is it really any different than a human reading it? I know there's a complaint that AI can verbatim repeat that work. But so can human savants. No one is suing human savants for reading their books. Producing copyrighted material, of course. Training on copyrighted material... I just don't see it. EDIT: Making a perfectly valid point, but it's unpopular, so down I go.
- NoOn3 5mo agoWhy should an AI have the same rights as a human? How about then to grant AI all other rights, for example, to allow voting?(sarcasm)
- qarl 5mo agoWe're not talking about rights, we're talking about illegal acts. If it's illegal for a machine to do it, how can it be ok for a human? Just from a rational argumentation point of view. Clearly if a law is written saying as much, then sure. But there is no such copyright law like that yet.
- NoOn3 5mo agoThe issue is certainly not so simple. But it seems to me, purely theoretically, that the rules don't necessarily have to be the same for living people and non-living machines.
- qarl 5mo agoWell - actually - it is pretty simple. For something to be illegal, there must be a law saying it's illegal. There are no laws distinguishing humans from machines in copyright law.
- triceratops 5mo ago> There are no laws distinguishing humans from machines in copyright law Correct. Because until very recently there was no need.
- 0x3f 5mo agoHN really loves the copyright lobby when it's against someone they hate, huh
- teddyh 5mo agoThe problem is people at large companies creating these AI models, wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it, but these large companies also want to keep copyright protection intact, for their regular business activities. They want to eat the cake and have it too. And they are arguing for essentially eliminating copyright for their specific purpose and convenience, when copyright has virtually never been loosened for the public’s convenience, even when the exceptions the public asks for are often minor and laudable. If these companies were to argue that copyright should be eliminated because of this new technology, I might not object. But now that they come and ask… no, they pretend to already have, a copyright exception for their specific use, I will happily turn around and use their own copyright maximalist arguments against them. (Copied from a comment of mine written more than three years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047>)
- frozenseven 5mo ago>wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it Learning from copyrighted content is legal - for both humans and AI. If Meta is in hot water for anything, it's piracy and/or storage of copyrighted material.
- teddyh 5mo agoBy ”using it”, I mean using the AI model.
- frozenseven 5mo agoHuh? Then that's even more straightforward, and your comment from late 2022 doesn't hold up at all. So, unless you're specifically going out of your way to break copyright law, inference is totally fine.
- SrslyJosh 5mo agoRules for thee but not for me.
- lenerdenator 5mo agoThe behavior will continue until a consequence is imposed.
- spate141 5mo ago> a Meta spokesperson said, “AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use. We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.” > Authors have sued AI companies for copyright infringement before - and lost. So, basically nothing will come out of this
- fantasizr 5mo agothey'll litigate how meta acquired those materials to train. you can do whatever you want with a book after it's in your house. but how did it get there?
- gizajob 5mo agoThey’re already on record as hoovering up Library Genesis and Anna’s Archive. For their “fair use” copyright bonfire to train their LLM. So not are these publishers rightfully pissed, Meta didn’t even give them the $6.99 for each epub to begin with. They’ve stolen the whole thing as part of this “fair use” campaign to destroy human authorship free of even the most basic remuneration.
- alex1138 5mo agoFun fact, if you link AA on FB it gets removed
- gizajob 5mo agoI’m not a user but that doesn’t surprise me. It’s also that Library Genesis was one of the best things on the internet until it came out that Meta had scraped it, at which point it became harder and harder to access. So not only did they pirate, their doing so made it harder for everyone else to enjoy piracy too.
- anthk 5mo agoUntil Sony, Nintendo, Disney... sues them and Zuck craps down his pants. And the NSA themselves, too; because for sure they are half-backed from them. If they keep pirating down Japanese and European media, these can just wipe their asses with USA licenses and declare all media from the US un-Copyrighteable Europe and Japan.
- ipython 5mo agoJust gonna say... Aaron Swartz faced years of prison time and ultimately decided to take his own life... for downloading scientific journal articles... to share freely with the world (aka not even profiting from it). But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that data set? Meh, sounds like Silicon Valley disruption, give the man a medal!
- alex1138 5mo agoHad Aaron copied Snapchat 5 times the DOJ would've been fine with it all. His fault for not having the foresight
- alex1138 5mo ago(I'm being sarcastic. Zuck gets rewarded for continually copying Snapchat features into his products)
- Melatonic 5mo agoTruly ahead of his time
- lesuorac 5mo agoAnd Jstor dropped the lawsuit when Aaron deleted his local copy. DOJ didn't drop theirs. I doubt Meta has deleted their local copy though ...
- alex1138 5mo agoAnd also I think MIT didn't defend Aaron but maybe I'm wrong about that
- qingcharles 5mo agoIt's absolutely unthinkable that Meta and friends aren't still using a corpus containing the entirety of every book they can obtain. There is no way they're building frontier LLMs without it. You can be sure as hell the Chinese are doing it, so the US corps are absolutely still doing it.
- swader999 5mo agoI take issue with the use of tense used in this framing. Its not 'infringed' its 'infringing' and to say that it happened is wrong, its happening and happening continuously in these models that are in use. To say a one time payment settles it is missing the whole scope of this theft. Royalties are owed and continuously owed as these models are deployed and doing inference. How is it any different to paying a small pittance to someone every time a song is played?
- kodt 5mo agoIf you steal a book and read it, should you have to pay every time you use the knowledge gained or recall parts of it from memory?
- drfloyd51 5mo agoIf I charged people for the privilege of listening to me recite relevant parts of the book to them for profit? Yes. Depending on the copyright.
- kodt 5mo agoSo like a teacher?
- teddyh 5mo agoNo. People are not LLMs. And even if some argue that they are mechanically similar, they are legally distinct.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- swader999 5mo agoIf I perform a song in public then yes, I should pay the creator every time I play it. I fail to see the difference here.
- jcalvinowens 5mo agoI had to block meta's ASN on my personal cgit server a few weeks ago because they were ignoring robots.txt and torching it. Like hundreds of megabytes of access logs just from them, spread around different network blocks to clearly try and defeat IP based limiting. I couldn't believe it.
- bflesch 5mo agoIMO ASN-based blocking should be much more common, but unfortunately it is not supported as a first-class configuration option in many common tools.
- walrus01 5mo agoIt's a real pain in the ass because in the absence of ASN based blocking, you often have to give something a long list of IP ranges in CIDR notation, and be certain you don't "miss" even one ipv4 /23 or /24 or a crawler will get through.
- jcalvinowens 5mo agoYeah, I dont know how anybody stays sane without it. I have a list of over a thousand ASNs I blackhole at this point... Mine is a daily bash cronjob that fetches a text-based database and uses grep to build an nftables-apply script with all the IPs for the blocked ASNs. I keep meaning to share it, but it's embarrassingly messy I haven't had time to clean it up...
- noxvilleza 5mo agoIt's been a real game of cat and mouse over the last few years. I used to do daily iptables updates to block repeat scrapers on my small niche stats site I run. About 5-6 ago it become more common to see broader ranges - so I started blocking ASNs which worked great (esp for the regulars like Alibaba, Tencent, compromised DigitalOcean/OVH, ...). In the last 2-3 years though the overall bot traffic has skyrocketed - it's easy to spot bot activity after the fact (no requests to the CDN for static assets, user agent changes from one request to the next, predictable ID enumeration, etc) but not in a real time. They're also often using residential-based proxies and Cloudflare bot detection has become pretty bad.
- wotsdat 5mo ago[dead]
- nadermx 5mo ago"They then copied those stolen fruits" How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen? Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" And you would be hard pressed to prove that LLM's haven't advanced the arts and sciences, so at bare minimum transformative, ie fair use.
- runjake 5mo agoI don't have strong opinions on Zuck needing to be punished for this, because I have friends and family doing the same thing, although perhaps not at the same scale. I myself do not download copyrighted content. I think "rules for thee, not for me" goes both ways.
- FireBeyond 5mo agoHow much revenue have your friends and family made from "doing the same thing"?
- runjake 5mo agoSome. In some cases they've "stolen" tens of thousands in content. Like I said, not at the same scale, but the same "crime" nonetheless. I'd much rather prosecution focus on Zuck's more serious crimes against privacy and civilization as a whole. But maybe this is a small start?
- pessimizer 5mo ago> Some. In some cases they've "stolen" tens of thousands in content. That's not revenue.
- CalmBirch127 5mo ago[dead]
- pessimizer 5mo agoShouldn't this stuff trigger RICO? Why do torrent site operators get led off in cuffs for running operations that usually lose money, but Zuck doesn't? RICO specifically cites "criminal infringement of a copyright" as laid out in 18 U.S. Code § 2319. If the CEO tells his employees to download hundreds of thousands of works illegally in order to carry out his money-making scheme, how is that not organized crime even if (dubiously) LLM training on the material is fair use? ----- RICO: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-96 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-96 Definitions: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961 > As used in this chapter — (1) “racketeering activity” means (A)[...]; (B) any act which is indictable under any of the following provisions of title 18, United States Code: [...], section 2319 (relating to criminal infringement of a copyright),[...] 18 U.S. Code § 2319 - Criminal infringement of a copyright: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2319 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2319 ----- edit: > 18 U.S. Code § 1962 - Prohibited activities > (c) It shall be unlawful for any person employed by or associated with any enterprise engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce, to conduct or participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise’s affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity[...]. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1962 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1962 From the lawsuit: “Meta — at Zuckerberg’s direction — copied millions of books, journal articles, and other written works without authorization, including those owned or controlled by Plaintiffs and the Class, and then made additional copies of those works to train Llama,” the suit says. “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement. Meta also stripped [copyright management information] from the copyrighted works it stole. It did this to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.”
- stopbulying 5mo ago[dead]
- stopbulying 5mo ago[dead]
- alex1138 5mo ago
- dmitrygr 5mo agoWho will be the first to implement a one-layer three-weight model and add it to BitTorrent? Let it “train” on all downloaded files. That makes it fair use. Am I doing this right?
- Telaneo 5mo agoLooking forward to the personal liability. I've wondered what the legalese justification for letting liability evaporate as it does so often with corps. So far the reasons I'm left with are 'shrugs' and 'the relevant provision (seemingly? apparently?) simply don't apply', neither of which are any good. I was going to make a joke about how we should attach magnets to Aaron Swartz' corpse, since that'd make for a pretty potent energy source, given how fast he must be spinning. But honestly, I think he would have seen this sort of thing coming, given how his case was handled and how things really haven't gotten any better.
- woah 5mo agoAlternate reality Aaron Swartz escaped canonization and is now running an AI/crypto startup that pays you to upload training data with his YC alum buddies
- Telaneo 5mo agoEvery now and then, I feel like we live in the worst possible world. Then I realise it could be much worse. This does not comfort me.
- Aurornis 5mo agoThe handling of Aaron Swartz’s case was a travesty, but he wasn’t indicted for piracy. The charges were for fraud, unlawfully accessing a protected computer, and damaging a computer. In the years since the basis of the case has been forgotten and replaced with an assumption about piracy, but it was a case about unlawful access.
- j-bos 5mo agoYeah, cpaa is a loaded gun pointed at anyone who's ever touched a computer.
- Telaneo 5mo agoGiven Swartz's intent and actions, I mostly don't care about the difference. Someone taking the clean copy of Star Wars (that probably doesn't exist) of Disney's servers and putting that up on the internet for everyone to download is mostly just doing copyright infringement. The computer equivelent of breaking and entering is a sideshow and a means to get to some files and little more (assuming they didn't do much more). The reasons I care about breaking and entering is because what usually follows is stealing and a violation of privacy (or if the case of computers, the latter, as well as the computer being turned against my own interests) neither of which is the case when it comes to what Swartz did. The breaking of the door itself isn't some sinful act, that should be punishable in and of itself. The law doesn't see it that way, but it is not the ground truth.
- HumblyTossed 5mo agoWaiting for the perp walk. Tired of the double standard that CEOs get away when bad things happen (because they can’t be everywhere all the time) but all the benefits when the company makes a great profit (because they’re personally driving results!).
- danielmarkbruce 5mo agoExcept, as the article says.... it's not copyright infringement. Whether it should be or not is another issue.
- hoppyhoppy2 5mo ago>But the latest lawsuit alleges that Meta and Zuckerberg deliberately circumvented copyright-protection mechanisms — and had considered paying to license the works before abandoning that strategy at “Zuckerberg’s personal instruction.” The suit essentially argues that the conduct described falls outside protections afforded by fair-use provisions of the U.S. copyright code.
- danielmarkbruce 5mo agoOne can allege all manner of things. The title is clickbait at it's worst. The situation around copyright and AI is stock standard "CEO makes a decision in an area that is clear as mud".
- hoppyhoppy2 5mo agoHow are you so sure "it's not copyright infringement" if the area is "clear as mud"?
- danielmarkbruce 5mo agoHe made the call and there has been some case law since. CEOs often make calls in areas that aren't legally clear (see the oracle v google case regarding java for a good one if you are an engineer). The case gets decided after the fact and the law becomes clear, but it wasn't at the time the decision was made. It's how the world works.
- soundworlds 5mo agoI should hope that if Zuckerberg isn't severely punished for this, it at least sets a legal precedent for every other person to do the same with immunity. All the Aaron Schwartzes of the future could freely share scientific papers with the world.
- agnosticmantis 5mo agoWilling to bet they'll lobby for regulatory capture and raise the drawbridge for the little guys.
- _doctor_love 5mo ago"You can be unethical and still be legal that’s the way i live my life" - Mark Zuckerberg
- _doctor_love 5mo agoNote for the downvoters: this is literally what he said.
- senordevnyc 5mo agoI downvoted because this was from an IM to a friend back in 2004, when Zuckerberg was twenty years old. I'm sure if you already hate him, this is so juicy and interesting, but I don't find 99.99% of the dumb shit young adults say to their friends in private conversations to be informative of almost anything.
- _doctor_love 5mo agoOrdinarily I would agree, and I'm generally speaking not a fan of dredging up quotes from 20 years and holding people accountable to them. I make an exception for Mark because he never changed his attitude or behavior, and if anything, he simply doubled down on it. I will never, ever, ever, EVER trust him to be a moral or ethical person.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- giannicmptr1000 5mo agothis dude got in over his head with the evil empire, it is interesting how he learned judo and tried to surf, that being said I despise social media and what it did to society
- bawolff 5mo agoDoes it matter? The company's liability would (i assume) not change if the ceo authorized it or some other high level figure authorized it. The question to answer is, did it happen and if so is this copyright infringement (not covered by fair use), not which company official authorized it.
- zx8080 5mo agoCan someone explain why are we reading this instead of "Meta was fined for copyright infrigement" news?
- tbrownaw 5mo agoWell the article says this is the start of a lawsuit, so maybe wait for it to work its way through the courts?
- solid_fuel 5mo agoIn 2024, voters signaled that they don't care about corruption when they reelected the most corrupt administration in American history. Since then, there has been a widespread understanding that the rich will not face consequences in this country. For example, take a look at the Trump administration's suppression of the Epstein files. Or the Trump families cryptocurrency schemes. Or the ridiculous ballroom. Anyway, the point is - there will be no justice until the citizens of the united states demand it.
- k33n 5mo ago[flagged]
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoThis is rage bait and isn't worth spending any oxygen on it.
- k33n 5mo ago[flagged]
- throwaway-11-1 5mo agoprobably this, since it was 7 years after he was convicted for prostituting a minor, so its hard to believe any excuse saying they didn't know his background: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/epstein-secret-pic-wild-dinner-205453585.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/epstein-secret-pic-wild-... Also that there are over 2,000 emails with Peter Thiel. Or maybe the part where Sergey Brin was helping Epstein shop for an aircraft carrier (also after conviction). Honestly it was incredibly revealing that none of these people care that he raped kids. I would love to see the Trump files which were withheld but clearly thats never gonna happen. Anyway, congrats to everyone involved on the MAGA golden age!
- palata 5mo agoToo rich to care.
- alex1138 5mo agoHonestly, too rich potentially off fraud Consider the case of someone who gets banned but Facebook keeps collecting money on their business account. Or consider the case of Facebook's video metrics scandal, or... whatever. It's a little fuzzy translating how much value equates to how much stock price equates to how much real-world is-this-useful-to-me but it does matter when FB is accused of marketing (Aaron Greenspan, thinkcomp, has brought this up, in his 2019 testimony to UK parliament) advertising to more people in a region or country than actually physically exist So fraud builds on itself, you have more fraud money to pay lawyers to try to defend you in fraud cases
- modeless 5mo agoFunny how people are suddenly on Elsevier's side. It's clear to me that AI training is transformative fair use under existing law. Maybe this will be the case to prove it.
- eloisius 5mo agoI find it grating that so many AI boosters try to frame pushing back against the AI industry as a sudden about-face for everyone that spent the last 20 years pushing back against the copyright industry. I’m also in favor of decriminalizing or legalizing small amounts of pot for personal use. That doesn’t mean I’m behind industrialized narcotic production on such a huge scale that it that it starts to distort the economy, and companies looking for new ways to add methamphetamine to every goddamn product.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoSpeaking of ai and meth, have you seen videos of the palantir CEO Alex karp? Dude looks like he's regularly getting the same meth shots Hitler used to get. But I hear you. One of my biggest tells that someone can't be reasoned with is when they resort to whataboutism without any consideration for how 2 situations can actually be different even if there is some commonality. It's a powerful bad faith argument technique. When that style of argument comes up I nod my head and walk away. Some people are just doomed.
- chungusamongus 5mo ago[flagged]
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoI am not s copyright maximalist, but I would tell you be careful of a world where copyright and IP is meaningless. Might as well let any other country/company one shot your entire industry.
- UltraSane 5mo agoRemember when nerds loved saying "information wants to be free"?
- isaisabella 5mo ago[dead]
- andai 5mo agoAnd thus sparked the entire sector of open weight LLMs...
- glaslong 5mo agoAll those lawsuits against students who downloaded but didn't even redistribute mp3s. Less than a fair use transformation. Just the file download itself. ... Lesson learned: those students should have stolen millions instead!
- watwut 5mo agoThe real distinguishing criterion is whether you are super rich or not.
- strathmeyer 5mo ago[dead]
- butlike 5mo agoThat may have been an information shaping campaign. If the end-user can get prosecuted, the discourse turns from a positive to a negative connotation inherently, which helps curb the behavior by the powers-that-be.
- glaslong 5mo agoSo if we want to run this strategy, I suppose we need to fine Meta out of existence, as an example to the rest.
- Steeeve 5mo agoActually, it was the uploads that were a problem. Not downloads.
- spwa4 5mo agoYou mean the courts found a technical legal explanation for why very large scale copyright infringement by multinationals was legal, but infringement by individuals of multinational owned copyrights was to be HEAVILY punished? No shit. Of course, the excuse doesn't even apply: the offense of the tech bosses is not training these models (they had that declared legal the second it became clear only the big companies would be training big models), the offense of all these tech companies is running a piracy site. Taking copyrighted works, storing them, reproducing them and then publishing the results to third parties, in many cases for payment, and organizing this practice knowingly, willingly as a company. Paying others to help them do it. This is the worst copyright offense one can possibly commit. It is what one public prosecutor referred to in the Nappster case as "organizing a criminal cartel to violate criminal law on a huge scale". Tech bosses weren't sued for downloading, in other words, they were sued for uploading. For asking payment for publishing copyrighted works, without any money going to the authors. When Kim Dotcom did that, in the words of the US Attorney general, this is "charges of criminal copyright infringement, racketeering, and money laundering" (you see, getting paid for criminal activity is money laundering, a charge that was also made against teenagers selling warez cds) ChatGPT tells me, unaware and unwilling to discuss the INCREDIBLE unfairness, that in the US, first-time offenders can face up to 5 years in prison, while repeat offenders can face up to 10 years PER OFFENCE. ChatGPT is unwilling to discuss it. The courts are also unwilling to discuss this, but no worries! New technicality: only a public prosecutor gets to ask ... Dario Amodei wilfully committed large scale copyright infringement, as did all the tech bosses from Musk to Bezos ... and "strangely" nobody in any court even mentioned how much 10 years times 500,000 is, despite systematically threatening that punsihment repeatedly in the cases against teenagers. Note that the law is extremely clear that company management IS NOT shielded if ordering criminal actions (violating criminal law, as opposed to violating a contract). In that case, company management carries full criminal culpability, INCREASED from if they did it themselves. Of course, this is only ever applied for refusing to pay tax or court fees. If the law were applied alike and fairly to individuals and tech bosses, Amodei would have to be VERY lucky the human race still exists by the time his corpse leaves prison.
- _s_a_m_ 5mo agoCant wait for absolutely no consequences. Consequences are for peasants like us.
- dbg31415 5mo agohttps://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-staff-torrented-nearly-82tb-of-pirated-books-for-ai-training-court-records-reveal-copyright-violations https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... > "81.7TB" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz > "approximately 70 gigabytes"
- forestingfisher 5mo agoBased. If i read a book from a piracy site, i can still cite that book publicly. This should also apply to AI models. I am also opposed to copyright at all, but that’s another question
- tabs_or_spaces 5mo agoWhy is there only a fine and not also the seizure/forfeiture of the stolen property and the derivative works/products built on it? Like the fine means nothing to meta, and they'll still be the beneficiaries of their infringement. In this current state, you really just need to have enough money to bypass this lawsuit and be on your way.
- coolThingsFirst 5mo agoI love how there's not even a class action lawsuit against AI companies that stole the work of everyone to train their models on. Who gave permission to Anthropic/ClosedAI to scan hundreds of thousands of books to feed to their systems which they commercially sell. Why is this the new normal. Even GitHub a month ago was like if you don't opt out we will read even your private repos for AI training. Tech is turning into next level BS, I don't know if it always was like this but this has pierced even the very bottom.
- HollowRidge427 5mo ago[dead]
- pixel_popping 5mo agoThat's non-sense to think every single model provider hasn't done this, where are they supposed to get their data from? I think it's a bit unfair to assume it's fine for Kimi, Deepseek or the hundred of other models but not for Meta.
- Jensson 5mo ago> I think it's a bit unfair to assume it's fine for Kimi, Deepseek or the hundred of other models but not for Meta. The difference is how easy they are to sue. Good luck suing Chinese companies over this, but suing American companies is much easier.
- Steeeve 5mo agoThe title of the article and the content of the article are not the same. Zuck has been accused, according to the article, but then the article itself basically says that Meta was pursuing licensing and then at some point the business unit responsible for pursuing that licensing was told not to, presumably because there was a fair-use strategy of some sort in place so licensing would not be required.
- theonemind 5mo agoI saw something about this. It would seem like it would be hard to obtain all of those licenses, probably impossible, and then if you want to go on to pirate more, that you licensed stuff kind of makes it look like you knew or believed you should've done it for all of them, which I think would make infringement willful, and imply some cognizance of guilt? When you think about the objectives and constraints on the table, and how disproportionately light penalties imposed on large corporations can be, if you can muster any kind of crappy argument, doing absolutely zero licensing is the no-brainer clear win. You get all of the material. You avoid a massive cost. Then the tech friendly Federal courts of the Trump administration will interpret all of the laws as far as possible in your favor and impose the lightest penalties they reasonably can. It's a no brainer. License none of it, it's more data, it's cheaper, it's easier, the win is blinding. But if you license, you pay so much, if you use anything you didn't license you've tipped your hand on cognizance of guilt, blahblah. The contrast is stark.