31–40 of 471 posts
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.
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 ?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would set the precedent for everyone. The real difference is that they can beg the question and people like Aaron Schwartz couldn't.
Aaron Schwartz's lawyer could have posed exactly the same claim. 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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What Aaron did was not wrong. 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.
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.
"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
(It's Tom Lehrer, for any who don't recognize it.)