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If you download one book you're a criminal. If they download millions of books, that's just business.
you are not. Thats their point
It's certainly nice to see someone accused of bittorrenting with the bankroll to come up with a decent legal defense team.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their point is that they are not.
It would set the precedent for everyone. The real difference is that they can beg the question and people like Aaron Schwartz couldn't.
It wouldn't have succeeded, just like this won't.
Lawyers will deploy any possible argument, just in case, even if it has a 0.1% chance of working because why wouldn't you?
If you download one book you're a criminal. If they download millions of books, that's just business.
... as a private individual, you are toast.
I think the more appropriate quote to paraphrase would be one from Dennis Hopper's character in the film Speed (1994): "Oh, no. Poor people are pirates, Jack. We are tech innovators!"
In fairness, I don't think Meta would have (had) any trouble paying the fair price of every book they downloaded (the price of exactly one copy) if that had been possible to do at scale.
Aaron Swartz didn't seed or distribute articles too
I don't think that what Aaron did was* wrong. Meta's wholescale theft, however, is pretty hard to defend, and Meta knew it. That's why they went to some lengths to hide it. Similarly, that OpenAI whistleblower, the one whose family was calling for a murder investigation, might be alive today if it wasn't pretty well known that stealing the work of thousands/millions of people to make a for-profit imitation machine is…
He intended to make journal articles publicly available. They should be, as many are publicly funded, and academic publishers like Elsevier do not pay for these articles. Scientists provide them to journals. Universities, libraries, and we then have to buy back access.
In fairness, I don't think Meta would have (had) any trouble paying the fair price of every book they downloaded (the price of exactly one copy) if that had been possible to do at scale.
Paying the price of one copy does not imply that you can use it for training, right ?