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Comment by upghost | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a precedent with tech companies that if you do a lot of illegal stuff in the beginning you can count on either failing before it matters or you can buy your way out of the consequences. Bonus points if you induce regulatory capture to make sure no one else can follow in your footsteps.

Please HN do your thing and prove me wrong or tell me the benefits to society outweigh the cons, because otherwise it's a depressing take.

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Well, the fruit of it, Llama 3, is public. Maybe it comes with some sort of license, but considering how it was made, I wouldn't feel guilty about violating it.

Then again, I would happily train a model on Anna's Archive myself without feeling guilty about it, if I had the resources to do so.

I think it ranks very, very low on the list of bad things Facebook has done.

When one end of the scale is "widespread and systematic contribution to genocide", everything else starts to look a little rosier, doesn't it?

The similarities to Google Books are interesting. Google created Books based on their own scans of books, which publishers considered piracy.

The legal battle initiated by the Authors Guild was vicious and it damaged and hampered Books and other entities and scanning projects like the Internet Archive.

Now Facebook pirates all the world's books, uses them without paying authors or publishers, and seemingly faces no consequences.

I would strongly prefer to live in a world where we could easily search and access all books, than one where the richest guys get to exploit them without consequences.

> Well, the fruit of it, Llama 3, is public. Maybe it comes with some sort of license, but considering how it was made, I wouldn't feel guilty about violating it.

Facebook would quite literally sue you until you killed yourself if you did that. It’s not the same rules for them and for us.

They have no real way of knowing though, unless someone goes advertising it.

I think you are right on all counts, but it doesn't make me depressed, it's just the way humanity moves forward.

Since deepseek it's clear that regulary capture just doesn't work in this case, only pure competition. If USA doesn't let NVIDIA sell GPUs to the world, Huawei will be happy to in a few years.

It is the golden rule. Whoever has the gold rules. Laws are for mortals, while big-tech can do whatever they please while channeling their masculine energy. Basically, behave in a self-serving manner violating basic norms such as dont do unto others what you dont want done to you.

As content gets polluted with ai-garbage, human-generated content will regain value.

Here is a startup idea: A startup that protects creator's content from violations. For a nominal subscription fee, ensure content is not ripped off on major social platforms and AI. Track regulations in different jurisdictions, and keep a legal team on the beat. Sue big-tech for damages when found. ie, police for the creators.

HN - take it and run.

> while channeling their masculine energy

What has this to do with masculinity? Is this cheap misandry?

I think it's a tongue in cheek nod to this: https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-masculine-en...

You do know how Facebook was started, right?

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/yes-mark-zuckerberg-did-crea...

It’s a direct quote of mark zuckerberg

I think it is a good thing to undermine copyright by creating various carve-outs that will eventually make it untenable to maintain, which is probably one of the faster ways to reform the obsolete system.

Piracy doesn't care about borders, and if US firms don't do it, Chinese firms will. It is a national competitiveness issue in that sense, which is the easiest argument to get the government to do things to weaken copyright.

Laying the groundworks for the eventual defeat of MAFIAA is a great benefit to society if it happens, and in my opinion outweighs the nonexistent "damage" they did. There wouldn't be llama if they didn't pirate the books, and the authors won't get paid anything either. Bonus points if we can get rid of DRM anti-circumvention as well.

For what it's worth Facebook doesn't seem to be doing the regulatory capture part, unlike "Open"AI and Anthropic.

Often it happens because there is a lot of market demand for the thing they are doing even if there are regulations against it, so you get Uber instead of normal taxis because the taxi service was no good, in this case you get informed AI instead of the information being tied up in court battles for years. So often the benefits to society do outweigh the cons, though not necessarily in every case.

I've been quite glad of Ubers and LLMs. I think it would be good if the LLMs could read the stuff Google Books scanned but was unable to make public. (this stuff https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/67fkkj/somewhere_at_...)

No, you're just right, and you should feel upset about it. Think about the systems and incentives that create this outcome. Think about what needs to change for better outcomes to be possible. Find people and work towards those goals.

The benefits to society outweigh the cons. If AI and copyright are really destined to fight each other -- an exercise in question-begging if there ever was one -- then copyright must lose.

If only because any other outcome will radically empower corporations (and entire countries!) that don't GAF about copyright.

There. We good?

Nah, you are right it is that simple. It was like that for years.

Russians have a phrase for this: "Never ask a billionaire how they made their first million".

I can't prove you wrong and I don't think there is any benefit to society when a company with a black box doesn't give back to the community (aka humanity as a whole) and doesn't pay anyone. Copyright may be broken, but the only realistic way to encourage creators is to give them money. We don't live in a utopia, and people need money to eat.

Also, in France and as an individual, if I were to openly torrent all the content of Libgen or Anna's Archive, I would have to spend the rest of my life in jail whereas Zuck can enjoy having more billions with the same behavior.

Some kind of rant: The world is truly fucked right now if such behaviors are rewarded, but at my grand old age of almost 50, I'm starting to move away from all this and it's relaxing: I live a simpler life, I buy from small creators, and I learn whatever I want. I have also gained a lot of time that I can now spend by helping people around me. Life can be fun if you ignore that you'll never be in control of all the bad behaviors around you.

> I would have to spend the rest of my life in jail whereas Zuck can enjoy having more billions with the same behavior.

Or you would driven by suicide for much smaller violations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

I mean, one could even argue that what Aaron was doing was not even violating copyright, as he had access....

Yet this guy is dead, and the Facebook owners are instead going to get a nice raise.

I don't think there is any benefit to society when a company with a black box doesn't give back to the community

They are at least giving the model they trained back to the community. https://www.llama.com/llama-downloads/

I have found throughout my life that the best gifts were ones that required me to give PII to the giver, and sign a binding agreement that legally restricts my use of said gift.

Bonus points if you harass me about your newsletter.

This is obviously annoying, but I suspect most people use them by downloading them off HF, Ollama, or similar sites which require no agreement. I also wonder why there is so much attention put on Facebook rather than OpenAI for example. Facebook is at least giving the weights to the public.

Downloading pirated material isn't illegal in the U.S., sharing it is.

Really dude?

I think a solid argument can be made that facebook downloaded and shared pirated material with literally every ML employee they had at the time…

EDIT: to those who downvoted, why? Do you disagree with what I said?

Sharing something locally doesn't fall under federal copyright law. They don't have jurisdiction.

See 17 U.S.C. § 501 and DMCA. And define "locally" not that it matters.

Yeah right at the start it says

> who imports copies or phonorecords into the United States in violation of section 602, is an infringer of the copyright or right of the author, as the case may be.

Copying itself is infringing. OC has no clue what they’re talking about.

If you are copying locally you aren't importing it into the U.S.

Read the law and stop being pedantic. The phrase is "or who imports..."

The intent is clear and the penalties are clear and with a few keypresses even the most irrational among us can balance how we wish things were versus how things are.

Given an informed base you can contemplate how to affect the change we all want instead of just posting misinformation in chat rooms.

> Yeah right at the start it says

That's not right at the start, and what is right at the start actually is better support for your point. Is this a copy-and-paste error?

Oh yeah. Started copying at the wrong “who”

You’re making up terms like “locally” and you’re moving the goalpost on your first (apparently incorrect statement)

Using it for commercial purposes still might be though

That's not what 17 U.S.C. § 501 says.

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