Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
It's funny, because now in the age of AI, many of the people that support piracy are now trying to stop AI companies from doing the same thing.
> I should trot out all of the justifications here.
I'll start: personal use instead of profit. Certainly a difference, not convinced justification is required or even advisable.
^ sociopathic legalists really do think this way.
So.. I don't think it's appropriate for billion dollar companies to abuse copyrighted authored material for their own profit streams. They have the money. They can either pay or not use the material.
And yes, that's totally irrelevant. Because the mere fact that some people depend on some evil for their living doesn't justify its existence.
If you're just some nobody representing yourself instead of an expensive lawyer acting on behalf of a large company, maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.
[0] I don't like to say "represent yourself." I once angered a judge by pointing out that you can't "represent yourself, you are yourself."
With a guilty plea. They don’t walk away without a conviction.
Im sure a lot has changed no with much criminality in the justice system and government.
Property law is mostly concerned with protecting the rich from the poor, so when a rich person violates the property of a poor person, the courts can't allow the inversion of purpose and will create something called a "legal fiction," which is basically the kind of bending-over-backwards that my children do to try to claim that they didn't break the rules, actually, and if you look at it in a certain way they were actually following the rules, actually.
Value is not set by what you put into it, it is set by what people are willing to pay for it.
Browsing in a thrift store can be very enlightening!
Is a human life literally worthless, because they never pay to be born?
The map is not the territory, the price is not the value.
Less facetiously, you're committing a semantic error.
What value something has is totally dependent on who is valuing it.
More formally, it's the Law of Supply and Demand.
What do you base that belief upon?
Many judges take a dim view of expensive lawyers trying to pull the wool over their eyes with sophisticated but fallacious arguments. You have to deal with a lot of BS to be a long-standing judge, so it seems like resistance to BS may be selected for among judges.
The thing everybody ignores about this is context.
Suppose you upload a copy of a work to someone else over the internet for <specific reason>. Is it fair use? That has to depend on the reason, doesn't it? Aren't there going to be some reasons for which the answer is yes?
The "problem" here is that the reason typically belongs to the person downloading it. Suppose you're willing to upload a copy to anyone who has a bona fide legitimate fair use reason. Someone comes along, tells you that they have such a reason and you upload a copy to them. If they actually did, did you do anything wrong? What did you do that you shouldn't have done? How is this legitimate fair use copy supposed to be made if not like this?
But then suppose that they lied to you and had some different purpose that wasn't fair use. Is it you or them who has done something wrong? From your perspective the two cases are indistinguishable, so then doesn't it have to be them? On top of that, they're the one actually making the copy -- it gets written to persistent storage on their device, not yours.
It seems like the only reason people want to argue that it's the uploader and not the non-fair-use downloader who is doing something wrong is some combination of "downloading is harder to detect" and that then the downloader who actually had a fair use purpose would be able to present it and the plaintiffs don't like that because it's not compatible with their scattershot enforcement methods.
Well there's also the issue of enablement. If you're overly enthusiastic to turn a blind eye to illegal conduct you end up being labeled an accomplice. But of course that would seem to apply to Facebook here in equal measure.
That's something the industry made up out of whole cloth. If someone sells ski masks that can be used for both keeping the wind off your face when you're skiing and hiding your face when you're committing burglary and has no means to know what any given person intends to do with it, are you really proposing to charge the department store as an accomplice?
The way that would ordinarily work is that you could charge them if they were e.g. advertising their masks as useful for burglary. But now where are we with someone who doesn't do that?
No, that's how the law (at least in the US) generally works across the board.
Your ski mask example is misplaced. There are legitimate uses for the product and it isn't immediately apparent to the store why someone might be purchasing a given item. It's not their job to invade their customer's privacy.
Your logic regarding torrents only works if we assume that a significant number of peers are engaging in fair use. For a torrent containing copyrighted content that was never distributed by the rights holder via P2P. Thousands of peers all working together to make backup copies of their legitimately purchased products. Right.
I'll freely admit that scenario to be beyond absurd despite being no fan of the current copyright regime in the west.
You seem to be implying that nothing is ever legitimately fair use.
> Your logic regarding torrents only works if we assume that a significant number of peers are engaging in fair use.
What evidence do you have that this isn't the case? Not evidence that someone is doing it for the wrong reasons, evidence that no significant number of people are doing it for any legitimate reason.
There are a lot of things that are plausibly fair use. If you subscribe to a streaming service with a plan that includes 4k content but their broken service won't play that content on your 4k TV, can you get a 4k copy of the thing you're actually paying for? If you're a teacher and the law specifically says you can make copies for classroom use, but the copy you have has copy protection, can you get a copy that doesn't from someone else? If you're an organization trying to make software that can automatically subtitle videos based on the audio so that hearing impaired users can know what's being said, and you need a large amount of training data (i.e. existing video that has already been subtitled) to do machine learning, can you get them from someone else? What if you're an archivist and you actually are making backup copies of everything you can get your hands on to preserve the historical record?
What alternative do such people even have for doing the legitimate thing they ostensibly have a right to do?
By no means were they suing for downloading alone. They were suing for sharing while downloading, and seeding after, and as "early seeders" they helped thousands obtain copies.
Right or wrong, it was absolutely not about just downloading. It wasn't about taking one copy.
In their eyes, it was about copyng then handing out tens of thousands of copies for free.
Again, not saying it was right. However, please don't provide an abridged account, slanted to create a conclusion in the reader.
Additionally, looking at Google Trends[0], it seems they peaked in 21st-century online popularity in 2008 and had another notable uptick in 2017.
I think a lot of us want the assholes to have suffered real consequences for their behavior, but want is different from did.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
Normal people don't care- they just enjoy a ballad or two.
I've long since learnt to separate an artist from their art- a fair share of the musicians, actors, directors etc aren't really a decent bunch
Hah!
COuple of years ago I was sipping beer in some local bar and there were some music video running on a TV. Aged angsty men with an "AMERICA YEAH bald eagle screech" vocals and visuals. "What a lame Metallica copycats" I thought. And then the title card shown up...
real thrash is a real thing, you know it when you are in it
Which is really just a roundabout way of saying I think Apocalyptica did a lot to help refresh them in the modern zeitgeist (Yes I know it was older, but I remember youtube videos causing it to enter at least my and other's conscious space...)
Faith is not without a sense of humor.
Btw, perhaps you may not know that there's this crossover looks now - a mix of black-metal and hiphop hoodies, and all the KPop adopted this writing for their pikachu songs.
Please don’t use Botox for lip fillers, you will almost certainly die or wish you had.
Doesn't mean they aren't assholes but I'll still listen to them any time.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/10/kiss-frontman-we...
Found it: https://youtu.be/Yy45qY9c49k
Here is how their enforcement actions generally went.
1. They would initially send a letter asking for around $3 per song that was being shared, threatening to sue if not paid. This typically came to a total in the $2-3k range. There were a few where the initial request was for much more such as when the person was accused of an unusually high volume of intentional distribution. But for the vast majority of people who were running file sharing apps in order to get more music for themselves rather than because they wanted to distribute music it averaged in that $2-3k range.
2. If they could not come to an agreement and actually filed a lawsuit they would pick maybe 10-25 songs out of the list of songs the person was sharing (typically around a thousand) to actually sue over. The range of possible damages in such a suit is $750-30000 per work infringed, with the court (judge and jury) picking the amount [1].
NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go.
3. There would be more settlement offers before the lawsuit actually went to trial. These would almost always be in the $200-300 per song range, which since the lawsuit was only over maybe a dozen or two of the thousand+ songs the person had been sharing usually came out to the same ballpark as the settlement offers before the suit was filed.
Almost everyone settled at that point, because they realized that (1) they had no realistic chance of winning, (2) they had no realistic chance of proving they were were an "innocent infringer", (3) minimal statutory damages then of $750/song x 10-15 songs was more than the settlement offer, and (4) on top of that they would have not only their attorney fees but in copyright suits the loser often has to pay the winner's attorney fees.
4. Less than a dozen cases actually reached trial, and most of those settled during the trial for the same reasons in the above paragraph that most people settled before trial. Those were in the $3-15k range with most being around $5k.
[1] If the defendant can prove they are in "innocent infringer", meaning they didn't know they were infringing and had no reason to know that, then the low end is lowered to $200. If the plaintiff can prove that the infringement was "willful", meaning the defendant knew it was infringement and deliberately did it, the high end is raised to $150k.
They were not all the same, some were fairly complicated cases, and one was undoubtedly for distribution.
`The court’s instructions defined “reproduction” to include “[t]he act of downloading copyrighted sound recordings on a peer-to-peer network.”'
From:
https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/11-282...
The only case that comes to mind as far as trying to threaten just for downloading, blew up in the law firm's faces... among other shenanigans, it came out their own machines were seeding files as an attempt to honeypot.
However other countries may have different laws as far as possession vs distribution and related penalties.
But that's the whole problem, isn't it? Consider how a P2P network operates. There are N users with a copy of the song. From this we know that there have been at most N uploads, for N users, so the average user has uploaded 1 copy. Really slightly less than 1, since at least one of them had the original so there are N-1 uploads and N users and the average is (N-1)/N.
There could be some users who upload more copies than others, but that only makes it worse. If one user in three uploads three copies and the others upload none, the average is still one but now the median is zero -- pick a user at random and they more likely than not haven't actually distributed it at all.
Meanwhile the low end of the statutory damages amount is 750X the average, which is why the outcome feels absurd -- because it is.
Consider what happens if 750 users each upload one copy of a $1 song. The total actual damages are then $750, but the law would allow them to recover a minimum of $750 from each of them, i.e. the total actual damages across all users from each user. The law sometimes does things like that where you can go after any of the parties who participated in something and try to extract the entire amount, but it's not that common for obvious reasons and the way that usually works is that you can only do it once -- if you got the $750 from one user you can't then go to the next user and get another $750, all you should be able to do is make them split the bill. But copyright law is bananas.
Because they're statutory damages, because the actual point of the exercise is to make an example of the person breaking the law. Obviously in scenarios where it's feasible to reliably prosecute a significant fraction of offenders then making an example of people isn't justifiable.
That's quite inaccurate. Punitive damages are typically treble damages, i.e. three times the actual amount, not 750 to 150,000 times the actual amount.
The actual point of statutory damages is that proving actual damages is hard, and then if you caught someone with a pirate printing press it's somewhat reasonable to guestimate they were personally making hundreds to thousands of copies. The problem is they then applied that to P2P networks and people who were on average making a single copy.
What is? My claim is that regardless of the exact wording the intent behind the law in this specific case is to make an example of violators. Do you dispute that? If so, on what basis? Because I believe the past several decades of results speak for themselves.
> The problem is they then applied that to P2P networks and people who were on average making a single copy.
A person retains a single copy for himself. However he does indeed actively participate in the creation of many other copies (potentially hundreds of thousands as you say). That sure sounds like the digital equivalent of a pirate printing press to me.
What you were describing was not P2P but rather the users of pirate streaming sites. And as we see rights holders don't generally pursue such people, preferring instead to only go after distributors.
I say all of this as someone who doesn't support current copyright law and sincerely has no objections to what Facebook did here.
The notion that statutory damages were intended to exceed actual damages by such an unreasonable factor on purpose (hundreds to hundreds of thousands, when the standard for punitive damages is 3) rather than the ridiculous result of applying a law written with one circumstance in mind to an entirely different circumstance.
> A person retains a single copy for himself. However he does indeed actively participate in the creation of many other copies (potentially hundreds of thousands as you say).
Many of the early P2P networks (and some of the current ones, especially for small to medium files) don't have more than one user participating in any given transfer. If you wanted to download something on Napster it would connect to one other person and download the entire file from them, with no other users being involved.
That is also what happens in practice in modern day even for the networks that try to download different parts of the same file from different people, because connections are now fast enough that as soon as you connect to one peer, you have the whole file. A 3MB MP3 transfers in ~30ms on a gigabit connection, meanwhile the round trip latency to a peer in another city is typically something like 100ms (even for fast connections, because latency is bounded by the speed of light). So it's common to connect to one peer and have the entire file before you can even complete a handshake with a second one, and rather implausible for a file of that size to involve more than a single digit number of peers. Hundreds of thousands would be fully preposterous. And then we're back to, the number of uploads divided by the number of users is ~1, so if the average transfer involves, say, four peers, the number of uploads the average peer will have participated in for that file will also be four. Not hundreds, much less hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile you're back to the problem where splitting the files should be splitting the liability. If four people each upload 25% of one file to each of four other people, the total number of copies is four, not sixteen. If you want to pin all four on the first person then also pinning all four on the second person is double dipping.
I believe your claims about network speeds and peer count are largely inaccurate when it comes to torrents (and any other block based protocol that involves the equivalent of swarms) but I won't belabor it.
I'll also ask how you reasonably expect a court to go about performing the partial attributions you describe for data torrented from a large swarm. Like how would that even work in practice?
You make an interesting point about overall averages yet it seems to entirely miss the point of the law. Damages aren't reduced if I only illegally reproduce 25% of a book. A single chapter and the entire work are treated as equivalent here. It's the act and intent that the law is concerned with, not the extent (at least within reason).
The question is what color your bits are. Now how many of them you have or how many different people you obtained them from.
Whether they're mutually exclusive or not, I don't think that was even the point of the law. The point of statutory damages is supposed to be to address the problem of proving an exact amount of actual damages, by instead providing what was supposed to be a plausible estimate of them. But then they got applied in a context where the number hard-coded into the law is an exorbitant overestimate.
> I believe your claims about network speeds and peer count are largely inaccurate when it comes to torrents (and any other block based protocol that involves the equivalent of swarms) but I won't belabor it.
I'm pretty confident that's accurate for small files like a 3MB MP3. They literally do get fully transferred before the client has time to connect to a non-trivial number of peers. A lot of torrents use a 4MB chunk size, and even when the chunk size is smaller, you're still going to get multiple chunks from any given peer. Even with e.g. a 512kB chunk size a 3MB file has an upper limit of 6 peers, if you can even connect to that many before the first one has sent the whole file.
Large files could use more peers, but "hundreds of thousands" is still a crazy number. There are a non-trivial number of consumer junk routers that will outright crash if you try to open that number of simultaneous connections.
And I regularly use BitTorrent for Linux ISOs (I know it's a cliche but it's true), which are decently large files. The median number of connected peers when seeding really is zero, and the active number rarely exceeds 1, for anything that isn't a very recent release. Even if I leave the thing on indefinitely, until it's no longer a supported release and no one wants it anymore, on a connection with a gigabit upload, the average ratio will end up around 1. Because of course it is, because that's inherently the network-wide average.
> I'll also ask how you reasonably expect a court to go about performing the partial attributions you describe for data torrented from a large swarm. Like how would that even work in practice?
I mean this isn't really that hard, right? If getting the exact number for a specific person is unrealistic, we still know that total copies (and therefore total uploads) per user is ~1. So to do the normal punitive damages amount you take that number and multiply it by 3 instead of hundreds or hundreds of thousands.
> Damages aren't reduced if I only illegally reproduce 25% of a book. A single chapter and the entire work are treated as equivalent here.
But the entire work is being reproduced. The issue is that in the cases where it's a group effort, they're trying to double dip.
Suppose Alice, Bob, Carol and Dan work together to break into your shop like Ocean's 11 and steal four $1 cookies. They each get a cookie and you lost four. (Never mind whether you actually lost them or not.) If you only catch Carol, it's not always reasonable to put her on the hook for the entire amount instead of only her portion of it, but at least you could plausibly argue for it. But if you catch two of them, or all of them, expecting them to each pay the total for the whole group instead of collectively pay the total for the whole group is definitely unreasonable.
Linear arithmetic is one hell of a drug.
Beyond what level? I am loosing you on that.
Stupid kids
Just step back into space. Pretend you're so high that you can see your own person from outside yourself, like you are the CCTV camera in the corner. Now look at copyright, the law about the restriction of the right to copy to a select group. It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip.
This might be relief, we might hopefully get past copyright and patents and just have innovation free for all.
Do you say the same thing about being required to wear pants in public?
Agreed that the extreme it has been taken to is absurd and entirely counterproductive though. 20-ish years was already a long time. If it takes you more than 20 years to market your book perhaps people just don't really like it all that much?
Seems like it would be impossible to prove substantial damages from one individual downloading an album, because you have only lost the potential single sale. No different than a kid stealing a single CD in terms of lost revenue.
Sharing the song on Kazaa or Limewire or Napster however means that they could have potentially illicitly provided the album to thousands or even millions of potential customers, more akin to stealing a truckload or even a whole store full of cds. In that case, it does seem plausible that you could prove (or at least convince a judge/jury) significant damages more in line with the exorbitant punitive sums.
Since they “caught” you by setting up fake peers that recorded your ip when sharing, I always assumed it was the latter that actually got people in trouble.
What an argument to make in court. It can be proved false in minutes by the plaintiffs.
It is interesting to follow how this plays out for Meta and how that will impact future cases.
In the UK you can only claim for the actual damages incurred, which at most will be the profit you would've made on the sale of that book. Which makes most claims for private infringement uneconomical for corporations.
(2) The court may in an action for infringement of copyright having regard to all the circumstances, and in particular to—
(a)the flagrancy of the infringement, and
(b)any benefit accruing to the defendant by reason of the infringement, award such additional damages as the justice of the case may require.
If it's fair use, no licensing fee is needed.
No, because those cases were pirating-while-poor. This is pirating-while-trillion-dollar-corporation, which falls under a completely different section of the law.
Seeding is opt-out, not opt-in… but it is usually a default that has to actively manually overridden. Most users never touch those settings. The average pirate downloading a torrent is seeding whether they know it or not.
The protocol absolutely does not enforce seeding. A client can lie to the tracker, cap upload to 0k. BitTorrent has no mechanism to compel one to share. Leeching a file, downloading and sharing no forward packets is possible. While the "social contract" of seeding is entirely a norm enforced by private trackers and community shame. It is not the protocol itself.
you're uploading before seeding, and i'm willing to bet Meta weren't seeding but, as they correctly stated in that regard, they're sharing even when they try their best not to because of the way the protocol works as zero-upload is typically impractical for any significant size files
some trackers will additionally penalise you for not sharing file parts, but this depends on the tracker
The original design called for some kind of tit-for-tat algorithm, but it's long obsolete and you get whatever bandwidth the seeder has.
Most people that speak of leeching or not seeding really are talking about not seeding at all after they've completed. In fact, most clients will let you set upload speeds to a trickle but not zero (zero means unlimited in most clients). From a legal standpoint, that already means you uploaded.
I’m not aware of any clients that will refuse to share data with clients that are configured to not upload. I don’t even see how they could determine that, especially in situations where there are no other peers to upload to, and given that stats are entirely self-reported and clients that send bogus numbers exist.
You would need a central tracker that cares, which is what private torrent communities rely on, but not public/DHT torrents such as those discussed here.
The case for doing this would be just so you can have this ridiculous legal defence Meta seem to be trying to pull out. Really no other good reason. Even for the most parasitic leeches, zero upload is a bad strategy.
You will probably get the data eventually, and it really depends on the composition and configuration of the swarm, but generally, you do need to upload if you want to ensure the fastest and most reliable download.
You totally CAN disable all uploads in the torrent protocol. Just set the "upload budget" to zero in most clients. Just nobody realizes they can do that.
Bittorrent is wildly successful in part because every popular client makes it nontrivial to "opt out" of it's more socialist components (chunk trading, DHT participation, seeding by default).
Making an "leech behavior only" torrent client is straightforward and viable.
going 1 by 1 would be quite the exercise in itself considering just how much variety of formats, styles, crap added in the files, random password crapware, etc etc you find for anything other than the most trendy stuff
You're not that likely to get throttled by seeds though, and most torrents that are downloadable at all have a few seeds. Seeds have no way of verifying whether you're contributing the network, they're just there because someone (implicitly) decided to make the file available to whomever drops by and asks for it.
The activists are against it because the big guys are exploiting us small guys, again. Nobody would give a shit if Meta was just torrenting Nintendo's IP and OpenAI was torrenting Netflix IP, except the lawyers working for these companies.
The significant change is that 2025 corpo pirates are big corporations, and 2005 personal pirates are individuals. And I think the larger issue is that the big corpo pirates get away with what 2025 personal pirates wouldn’t.
Anyways, my opinion is that we should get rid of IP, but only with a replacement that ensures creators still get paid. I lean towards piracy being a small sin: immoral, but you can easily be a pirate and still overall moral person.
[citation needed]
> 2005 pirates allegedly harmed artists by decreasing their sales.
provably false
lol. The current "AI" industry is in the development phase where the surveillance industry was from 2000-2010 or so. After they're done getting everyone reliant on their products (including giving away many for free), and having installed their regulatory mote, they'll really start tightening the enshittification noose.
The original argument is fallacious because it ignores this obvious dynamic. "AI" companies aren't pirating works so they can then give them away for free indefinitely. Rather they are pirating works to create their own proprietary systems which will most certainly not be given away for free.
Eventually the activists pushing for copyright enforcement on "AI" training are going to start to "win" - after the big centralized "AI" players will have brokered deals with the relevant content cartels (this lawsuit is merely "haggling over the price"). So the dynamic will be to stomp out the training of new competing models, both grassroots libre and new proprietary startup competitors.
Oh no, its just legal for the big companies. The laws are different for everybody and that's what activists are worried about :)
By the same token, AI companies are in no position to complain when their models are scraped and distilled.
Still, they should pay me in order to listen all the mediocre music and crappy 'best sellers' they often produce. More than often I'd just buy some indie book from a small publisher which has much better stories than the whole mainstream.
Heck; every time I try to read some Spaniard technotriller it justs sucks because they focus on crappy emotions everytime focusing near nil on scientific facts or tecnological backgrounds. If any, of course. Hello, Gómez Jurado with the Red Queen sagas.
Meanwhile, people writting half-fantasy/half-geopolitics fiction such as Fabián Plaza with its book depicting a paranormal Cold War were the Spanish Francoist regime never ended and the USSR took the whole Germany for itself, you will get more enganing books. The hippies in Woodstock summoned magical Lovecraftian monsters and the CIA/KGB among paranormal agencies try to fight these. The even mention Orgonic fields and tons of American floklore on paranormal experiments from the CIA/USSR. We all know it's actual bullshit but it's documented bullshit. Modulo the magic, the author applied as a diplomat for Spain a few decades ago so he knows how to create a thriller by predicting how the characters will behave psichologically much better than the Gómez Jurado's books creating an Aspie Mary Sue character getting aspull skills.
The mainstream alternative? Some Humanities woman as the maincharacter alleging bullshit 'prime number finding' in order to boost IQ as a goverment experiment against another high IQ psychopath.
The media in Spain sucks because Spain arrived late to a scientifical mindset socially -thanks, Francoist /s- and male/female Humanities people dominate both the press and the literary world. Instead of Gideon Crew like books (which are a bit bullshit, but with a bit of realism too) like sagas, we get drama bound thrillers with no actual research; if any, hidden Apple product placements.
You would say, heck, Dan Brown it's the same and Tom Clancy's novels are a joke against the ones from actually versed people throwing stereotypes away because they did a good research (the US is not just a bigger Texas and Spain is not a big Andalusia), but that's not the issue here.
The matter it's that most of the readers in Spain are women, and somehow they are afraid of reading a thriller with less drama and emotions and more action (action women do exist you know) and resolution and developing actual skills o the spot instead of aspulling them.
Just look at text adventures. Anchorhead it's just a modern Lovecraft retelling but it has a female protagonist and you as the player should drive her solving all the ingame puzzles. If something like that existed in 1998, the Spaniard should be able to write tons of interesting media (books and series) where crimes were not solved with people just happening to be in the right spot at some specific time. That's a cheap writting and an obvious neglection to the reader allowing him to join the proofs together.
Or else it doesn't count.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/sports/periscope-a-stream...
Different activists are different. "Information wants to be free" activists are against different things from "artists trying to make an honest living" activists.
And different big guys are different. A big guy AI company wants different things from a big guy book publisher.
...uhhh, I mean, maybe my perspective is skewed because I largely run in bluegrass/deadhead circles, but the venn diagram of these two seems to be nearly a circle.
Meta, Open AI and everyone else playing this game has enough money to pay the best lawyers on earth. They can act with impunity.
I could even imagine them getting a law passed, a license to ignore copywrite law. Of course Billy don't qualify. It'll only be for the billionaires and maybe a handful of millionaires.
People (and corporations/politicians/neighborhood groups/unions/countries/whatever) are by and large for whatever they think will benefit them, and against what they think will hurt them.
Few tens of thousands of dollars is a rounding error in Meta's bottom line but if this case goes anything like the Anthropic one, I would see it likely.
Of course it wouldn't prevent authors from asking LLM's for content from their books and suing Meta again but I imagine authors would be less likely to with less evidence.
The way Disney &co coopted law to pack their coffers is a travesty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
My best idea for a solution is better education, so people don’t make bad laws then badly enforce them.
Education also bends to power (people can be “educated” via propaganda), but it’s harder because people have some level of critical thinking. You can only chain so many lies before they contradict each other or live experience.
human nature will not change. the best change folks here could make is accepting that.
And you just know that whatever they end up paying will be so tiny that it will just be seen as the cost of doing business. From a corporation's perspective it's always better to break the law and maybe pay a tiny fine (if you get caught and can't argue your way out of it) than it is to follow the law and miss out on profit/revenue/strategic advantage etc.
Only data is a moat, not algos, not compute.
Video transcription has more or less been solved. Imagine how much data Google has in YouTube transcripts. And the longer these AI chat bots operate the more data they manage to collect for training as well (I think Google making it so you can easily upvote or downvote a response by the bot is a good idea).
"Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B US to settle author class action over AI training"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/anthropic-ai-copyright-sett...
as someone that's disabled upload when I'm downloading copyrighted material via bittorrent for decades, it is absolutely a choice
so there's that
On the other hand, it'd be absolutely hilarious if they succeeded with this argument. VPN vendors would not find that as hilarious I bet.
And on another the hypocrisy is mindboggling. I guess you can't blame the lawyers from going after every angle, but this is quite creative.
But really I do just want to find out if money continues to buy justice.
I sincerely hope Facebook loses and is found to have knowingly infringed on copyright of all the books in the lawsuit. At $150K per violation, I'd almost feel bad for the poor shareholders. Zuck would probably take full responsibility and fire tens of thousand of workers.
how much you have to bribe a judge to even begin to consider saying that in a defense?
Seriously? They couldn't be bothered setting upload speed to 0?