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

arstechnica.com

41–50 of 471 posts

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

#41

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 ?

(note; not a lawyer) It depends on if a model is a derivate work from it's source material or not. If yes, then all copyright protections come into force. If not, then the author can't rely on copyright to protect themselves.

My instinct/gut says that an AI model is a derivative work from the training data (in that it quite literally takes training data to produce a new creative output, with the "human addition" being the selection of training data to use), but there's not really clear judgements on it either way for the time being, which leaves room to argue.

The actual methodology used ("isn't an LLM like a computer reading a book for yourself?") is an irrelevant distraction in this regard. Computers aren't people and don't get that sort of protection; they're ultimately tools programmed to do things by humans and as a rule we hold humans responsible when those tools do something bad/wrong. "Computer says no" works on the small scale, but in cases like this, it's not really an adequate defense.

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

#42
post #31

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.

They would have a better defense if they had escrowed that money and/or reasonably tried to buy.

Indeed. Although there is the case of owners of rights invited to come forward to receive their due, if it wasn't possible to contact them before. You probably need a proof that you made an effort though.

It's also true that anyone can go to a public library and read all the contents for free- the point is they can't further distribute them except in a highly processed form (i.e. they can distribute original products influenced by what they have read). Here the issue is the scale of both the "reading" part and of the "producing original work" part.

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

#45

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.

As the richest man on Earth, with multiple investigations into him by various government agencies shown us, nothing is desperate with billions of dollars "in the bank".

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

#47

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

Plagiarism is claiming credit for work that is not yours: it is entirely different from a breach of copyright. You can breach copyright without plagiarism, and you can plagiarise without breaching copyright.

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

#48
post #32

Pirating used to be the worst. The law is awfully flexible when large companies want it to be.

The law doesn't punish those who break it. It punishes those who can't afford expensive legal teams and those who hurt people who can afford expensive legal teams.

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

#49

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…

"distribution is the act protected by copyright" was the rule all along in many (non-US) jurisdictions, not an American so not sure about how the US does things.

This is why you often see people getting fines for torrenting (Germany is extremely notorious for this for example), but fines for using Usenet, IPTV, streaming or book download services are a lot more rare (which doesn't mean they're nonexistent)!

Operating / selling / promoting those services is a different matter, and most sensationalist articles about "people fined for IPTV piracy" are actually about people involved with that businesss, not the users.

I even remember reading about some (European) torrenting case that was successfully defended on the grounds of something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads, but I can't find the source right now.

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