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Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

arstechnica.com

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Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#21

by the way they say "we didn't seed after the download" but what about while downloading in progress?

In any case it's really easy to configure a BitTorrent client to never seed. It would be dumb not to when torrenting for work.

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#24
post #8

Well, I guess it would be nice if we could have some precedent for the claim that downloading copyright protected information is not in itself a breach of copyright. It makes sense from the point of view that distribution is the act protected by copyright, not the mere act of copying . If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or…

Author rights wouldn’t be an accurate term. Copy rights do not necessarily belong to the author, even when they are alive. Distribution rights or “distrights” would make more sense for your argument.

Works fine in Dutch law really, you just have to allow for the option that a company can be an author. A work could also have multiple authors.

I prefer it to a name that's more accurate because it signals what the purpose of the law is, which I consider more important than its implementation.

Now that I think of it that also works quite well when naming things in software. Don't name things after their implementation, when you can help it.

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#25

"If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research." - Wilson Mizner

"Plagiarize, let no one else's work evade your eyes. Remember why the good lord made your eyes, so don't shade your eyes but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize !" ~ Me

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#26

It's certainly nice to see someone accused of bittorrenting with the bankroll to come up with a decent legal defense team.

This isn't a decent defence, it's a losing desperate one.

The noun phrase was "legal defence team" not "legal defence". A decent team can put forward a poor defence

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#27

It's certainly nice to see someone accused of bittorrenting with the bankroll to come up with a decent legal defense team.

This isn't a decent defence, it's a losing desperate one.

They can just bribe the president.

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#28

So openai announced once that it will cover its' clients legal costs for copyright infringement suits, wonder how it works. Either they are very cautious about where they are training or seeding the data from or there is a loophole.

It's a bluff, OpenAI and Microsoft both have an carveout in that guarantee that effectively says "if we think you deliberately did copyright infringement with our tools, we won't help you".

And of course, conveniently, if you get a copyright infringement lawsuit, they can just point to that. A company promising legal defense is only worth the paper it's written on and there's always carveouts like that, with the likelihood of them being used probably being equal to the risk the company takes on with that promise. US Copyright lawsuits having pretty extreme fines makes them fairly likely to get used.

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#29

by the way they say "we didn't seed after the download" but what about while downloading in progress?

The claim is that they "took precautions not to 'seed' any downloaded files" - that probably means blocking all upload actions which is possible with many torrent clients. They may also have used a custom hacked client that didn't even connect to other nodes that didn't claim to have 100% already.

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#30

So openai announced once that it will cover its' clients legal costs for copyright infringement suits, wonder how it works. Either they are very cautious about where they are training or seeding the data from or there is a loophole.

Probably "after the fact", meaning you first go bankrupt so they don't have to pay you.
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