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Comment by hackingonempty | Hacker News Reader

Strike 3, the studio involved, files more lawsuits in the USA than anyone else. I think that makes them the biggest Copyright Trolls of all time. They run their own BitTorrent monitoring operation.

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Meta, the other company involved, engaged in industrial scale piracy in pursuit of training data[1].

Let me break out the world's tiniest violin for them.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

They downloaded pdfs (shock and horror) to create and publish the first open weights LLM

Your ethics shouldn't be dictated by US copyright law

> Your ethics shouldn't be dictated by US copyright law

If your ethics deem Meta ethical, they probably need recalibrating.

Actor and action conflation is incredibly common these days. If someone is bad and worth condemnation, all their actions must also be bad.

It's more likely that their motivation was bad.

Like they wanted Llama to kill babies, or what?

https://twitter.com/dril/status/831805955402776576

If a bad actor’s actions appear good, skepticism is warranted.

The actor is bad, the deed is good. Though, the open sourcing of llama 2 and beyond was pushed by Yann Lecun and others, some of whom have moved on from the company. Zuckerberg supports the AI initiatives but he's hardly leading them himself.

What argument do you have that releasing llama was actually good? They gave AI access to terrorists and criminals as much as they did to independent researchers. Arguably they are partially responsible for escalating blackhat cyber capabilities that are contributing to the rapid rise in attacks. Open source is neither inherently good or bad. The most you could really say is that it was accelerationist

> They gave AI access to terrorists and criminals as much as they did to independent researchers.

That's an odd hill to die own. Lots of despicable people use iPhones. Does that Apple is somehow complicit?

No, it means iPhones are neither good nor bad.

This is such a ridiculous response that I actually don't think it deserves any further time investment from me.

If you can’t explain why releasing llama was a net good then why bother commenting at all? One could surmise you don’t actually have any moral grounding for it and just like that you get to play with it for free

I can answer that question if you'd like, but the question you presented initially was extremely loaded and recycling tired political rhetoric that has already been beaten to a pulp.

Or you can just keep on making unfounded assumptions about my "moral grounding" if you'd like, you didn't leave a good first impression with me and I'm not terribly interested in discussing this with you if this is how it's going to be. Discussions are about finding common ground, but you seem to be looking for an argument.

Adolph Hitler is often credited (with varying accuracy) with the Autobahn, fixing Germany’s unemployment and launching Volkswagen to produce affordable motor vehicles.

None of these make him a good person any more than Meta’s occasional positive acts make it a good company.

Im glad we agree then, provided you assume neither building the autobahn or affordable vehicles are evil.

My whole point was bad actor /= bad deed.

Good action can also be a way for bad actors to buy good will so they can extend their other bad actions. Plus some of these actions are done on the interest of furthering the interest of the bad actors.

An example is Meta striking deals with telecom operators to offer unmetered access to Meta services making Facebook synonymous with the Internet in some countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org

Actions and actors live in a context. Stop being so autistic and start looking at the bigger picture. You are not immune to propaganda.

No need to be rude. Luckily, I also have room in my brain to hold two entire thoughts, and can acknowledge a deed and it's context are differnt too.

I don't have to take a brain-dead shortcut of claiming every deed is bad. Not even every deed that is self-serving is bad O_O

> If someone is bad and worth condemnation, all their actions must also be bad.

> I don't have to take a brain-dead shortcut of claiming every deed is bad.

What? Reconcile these seemingly opposing statements?

The second sentence of the first post was explication of the sentiment described and criticized by the preceding sentence. It is the sentiment I am calling out.

The first post could or should have been more clearly written with an em-dash, but then people would start calling me a clanker. /s

> Actor and action conflation is incredibly common these days — If someone is bad and worth condemnation, all their actions must also be bad.

My position: Bad person can do good thing for bad motives. example: The evil wife beating doctor who saves a baby just because they get paid for it.

My "autistic" brain can recognize that saving babies is still a good thing. I don't have to like the doctor, or their reasons. For whatever reason, a large portion of people see a comparable situation and instantly start arguing that saving babies is bad.

Thanks :) My autistic brain understood this much more clearly

>Good action can also be a way for bad actors to buy good will so they can extend their other bad actions. Plus some of these actions are done on the interest of furthering the interest of the bad actors.

We talking tech or Hell's Angels' teddy bear runs. Oh, wait....

Are you saying laws shouldn’t restrict any company that give out an open source next-token iterator?

I think that’s more hopium ethics.

> Your ethics shouldn't be dictated by US copyright law

Corporate lawlessness has no good outcomes for humans.

i don't necessarily disagree but others have been jailed for this activity (or like aaron swarz, driven to suicide)

Fantastic, so we win either way

The company that owns the copyright should be allowed to enforce it. I don't see how that can be called trolling.

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