This sets a hilarious precedent where downloading torrents becomes completely fine. You can just cite this case if they win - even though we are talking about books the MPAA is probably going to have an opinion here.
Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
151–160 of 471 posts
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#152It's certainly nice to see someone accused of bittorrenting with the bankroll to come up with a decent legal defense team.
Isn't Meta going to be battling the full legal team of the entertainment industry with this argument? I think Meta did something stupid with this argument, because there is no way that Hollywood or the music industry is going be pleased with a precedence for legally downloading copyrighted material. They will now do everything in their power to get Meta found guilty.
Meta is a couple of times larger than the entire entertainment industry combined...
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#153It's certainly nice to see someone accused of bittorrenting with the bankroll to come up with a decent legal defense team.
The unfortunate side effect is that a megacorp gets to vacuum up the sum of human knowledge for free, boil it down, and sell it back to us for a nice profit.
How long before a handful of entities, having already ingested the available content into their proprietary systems, bankroll assaults on Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_... "Attached to the core rights of free speech and free press are several peripheral rights that make these core rights more secure. The peripheral rights encompass not only freedom of association, including privacy in one's associations, but also, in the words of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), "the freedom of the entire university community", i.e., the ri…
A bit off-topic, but I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship but are perfectly OK with advertising and other forms of propaganda (from social media editorializing, bought newspapers...), that arguably do much more to "control men's minds" than censorship ever would. It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative…
It's very simple, Americans believe that the individual is responsible for themselves while most of the rest of the world wants to be "protected" by a restrictive government. One leads to innovation and one stifles it. We would rather be responsible for discovering the truth on our own, than trust a central authority to decide what is and isn't true(or propaganda). I find it funny how Europeans think their governments are protecting them from propaganda instead of drowning them in propaganda.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meta's real (nigh invincible) defence is 'we have way more money than you and can keep this going forever'.
Money doesn’t keep it going forever, only about 2-4 years, even with appeals That’s enough to bankrupt individuals but industries fighting industries can see it to the end, if they don’t settle
2-4 years is optimistic IMO. I’ve seen many copyright disputes carry for 7 years or more.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is more reasonable for content owners to say what can and cannot be done with their data. After all, content is what make AI possible, and content owners could easily start their own LLM if they wanted to since a lot of it is open source now.
You're taking an "everything not permitted is forbidden" approach, which contradicts the common law principle of residual freedom. This would automatically outlaw any new use of information (eg music sampling) by default. If all novel uses were banned from the outset, cultural progress would suffer immeasurably.
I don't think cultural progress will suffer from copyright holders preventing AI from using their content.
What I think will suffer more is the bank accounts of AI corporations.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#157by 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.
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Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_... "Attached to the core rights of free speech and free press are several peripheral rights that make these core rights more secure. The peripheral rights encompass not only freedom of association, including privacy in one's associations, but also, in the words of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), "the freedom of the entire university community", i.e., the ri…
A bit off-topic, but I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship but are perfectly OK with advertising and other forms of propaganda (from social media editorializing, bought newspapers...), that arguably do much more to "control men's minds" than censorship ever would. It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative…
> It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).
This seems to describe ‘Murican Freedom pretty well to this particular American, for what it’s worth.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#159Disclaimer: not American. Copyright agencies that monitor torrents here have actually verified that peers offer at least one offending chunk on protocol level and the Market Court has decided it's the minimum that can be considered sharing. As far as I know, nobody has yet claimed their client has been modified to download without seeding.
I do not work for Meta. Still throwaway account for obvious reasons.
I wrote a modified torrent client that fake seeds. No data (not even a byte) of the content itself is ever uploaded to another peer.
I'm aware this is an asshole move, but it made the lawyers happier.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#160> Evidence instead shows that Meta "took precautions not to 'seed' any downloaded files," Meta's filing said. Seeding refers to sharing a torrented file after the download completes, and because there's allegedly no proof of such "seeding," Meta insisted that authors cannot prove Meta shared the pirated books with anyone during the torrenting process. Are they actually claiming only that they didn't share after the t…
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