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

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

#111

Post by trilbyglens »

codetrotter wrote: post #61
miki123211 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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)! It’s a lot easier to find out who is torrenting than to find out who is using Usenet for example though. With torrents you can see the IP addresses of peers. And then I…

Germany is wild. You will get a knock on your door within hours of firing up a torrent client

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

#112

Post by 2mlWQbCK »

mnau wrote: post #81
greyw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your jurisdiction. In Switzerland, downloading games, books, music, movies etc. for personal use is always legal even if the copy is "pirated". Work just needs to be published in any form. Dont know any other country where it works like this.

Czechia. In theory, there is a fee for every media (e.g.HDD) that is paid to OSA (authors organization) and OSA pays to authors through some distribution scheme. Since user already paid fee, downloading is OK. This is mostly leftover before computers were a thing (think cassettes and paper copiers). In practice, it's a racket and OSA is a mafia that doesn't pay to anyone. Also, the fees are rather small considering t…

Sweden has something similar (except, as I mentioned elsewhere, the law was amended in 2005 to explicitly add an exception for downloads).

The Berne Convention has a special provision for this. Something about if the biggest rights organizations agree then a country can have laws that allow some free copying. So a tax on empty media (in Sweden also covering the computer hard drives and the flash memory built into phones) is used to pay off the big music and movie companies.

The weird thing is that only the biggest industries are paid off. No matter what you use your storage for, it is the big movie and music companies that receive the money. No other industries are paid off as far as I know, so most others just have to accept that their stuff is legally copied for free, without compensation (a few things like software are always illegal to copy, so those industries are not affected).

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

#113

Post by roenxi »

shakna wrote: post #100
bolognafairy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how does downloading a torrent differ from that?

The sites copied by Google Search explicitly allow it. The books copied by Meta, explicitly disallow it, and require payment for distribution.

The sites indexed often don't explicitly allow it. I can see my website in the index of web search engines that I never opted in to.

I'm not unhappy about it; but was never consulted.

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

#114

Post by sheepdestroyer »

The Open(Closed)AIs of the world have millions of dollars to spend on IP datasets.

Arguing that copyright forbids training AI models without paying authors is the moat that would prevent any hope that small labs, individuals, and open source communities can ever compete with these huge corpos.

The books and other artworks they are arguing over didn't come generated spontaneously from nowhere, and it's disingenuous to refuse sharing them to inform what is basically the worlds next currency : Intelligence. Doing so is just saying that knowledge and intelligence must belong to rich corpos only and never be democratized.

This is unexpected but Meta is basically being the good guy by giving away their research papers and models weight resulting from millions of $ of training.

The alternative to open source AI is everyone's subjugation to the oligarchists in charge of Intelligence. Copyrights holders who argue against free training of open source models from their work are morally and ethically wrong here.

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

#115

Post by grotorea »

latexr wrote: post #8
contravariant wrote: post #2

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.

I think the equivalent is called author's right in civil law countries

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

#116

Post by xyst »

Semantic details aside (I was just downloading/leeching, bro!1! I pinky promise). Clearly a PR campaign.

It’s abhorrent that a multibillion dollar company is not just pirating the content for personal use (? wtf how can a for profit company download it for _personal_ use ?) but also _profits_ on the pirated content by using it for training material.

The whole “corporations” are people ruling is fucking stupid, and truly shows how much this country bends to the billionaire class

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

#117

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

apexalpha wrote: post #94
userbinator wrote: post #54

If this was 15-20 years ago, arguably at the peak of P2P filesharing, I suspect most people would side with Meta.

In the Netherlands this is still the law. Downloading is fine, uploading is not. We used to have a sort of national library of every single media on Usenet back in the day.

11 years ago the EU made the Netherlands change their position: https://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-fi... AFAIK this is still the case - the Netherlands is more poorly-enforced than other EU countries, but it's still illegal to download pirated material.

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

#118

Post by paulryanrogers »

contravariant wrote: post #2

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…

> ...then people might start wondering how keeping something from public domain for 90 years after the author's death could possibly be about protecting the rights of the author.

That's the best part, it's forever copyright! Because the creators are corporations that never die, or a huge number of humans, whomever dies last.

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

#119

Post by 2mlWQbCK »

actionfromafar wrote: post #106
mnau wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Czechia. In theory, there is a fee for every media (e.g.HDD) that is paid to OSA (authors organization) and OSA pays to authors through some distribution scheme. Since user already paid fee, downloading is OK. This is mostly leftover before computers were a thing (think cassettes and paper copiers). In practice, it's a racket and OSA is a mafia that doesn't pay to anyone. Also, the fees are rather small considering t…

Sweden apparently kept the fee and made it illegal. That's extra mafia.

It is specifically illegal to make a copy of something that has been illegally published, not illegal to make copies for personal use in general.

Not that I am a lawyer.

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

#120

Post by axus »

roenxi wrote: post #113
shakna wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sites copied by Google Search explicitly allow it. The books copied by Meta, explicitly disallow it, and require payment for distribution.

The sites indexed often don't explicitly allow it. I can see my website in the index of web search engines that I never opted in to. I'm not unhappy about it; but was never consulted.

Linking is different from copying, and fortunately the last case I remember allows it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster_Corp._v._Tickets.....

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