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Comment by fkyoureadthedoc | Hacker News Reader

Me getting free movies and music, piracy good

Meta getting free books to train an LLM, piracy bad

For the courts, it seems it's the opposite.. Meta, Anthropic and others seem to be getting away with terabytes of piracy, on a much larger scale than the typical consumer

Powerful entities getting a pass, bad.

Individuals getting a pass, good.

See, it just depends on how you slice the Venn diagram. With a bit of imagination you'll be able to start connecting the dots by yourself in no time.

I've already connected the dots of the HN zeitgeist. Besides this was done by a few individuals at Meta, or are you thinking they had a board meeting and shareholder vote on it?

even if we completely ignore organizational structure, do you truly believe not holding companies accountable for a few rogue employees is a good call? Is it too difficult for higher-ups to blame the rank-and-file and arrange scapegoats in the opaque black box that is a corporation? and even still, we can ignore this potential precedent and focus on motivation only: if an employee uses illegal means as a tool to reach their work goals, isn't an investigation into said work goals and culture warranted?

This is all already happening, that's why we know about it. But there's also nuance. Was piracy Meta corporate strategy, as implied ad nauseam on here, or was it some guy taking a shortcut?

Is it actually bad that Meta trained their AI on books? No, court already decided that it's substantially transformative and doesn't harm the publishers. Should Meta employees have stolen the books? No, obviously not. The middle men need their cut.

"Move fast and break things" A guy taking a shortcut is the ethos of Meta, it's the DNA.

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