If only every copyright lawyer in the world could suddenly band together and descend on them in a horde. This is such a disgusting abuse of book authors, who are usually not the big guys. As a non-author myself, I don’t care about the publishers and whatnot but most people who are authors only have written one book and should get the royalties they deserve from their work.
Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
181–190 of 471 posts
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#182Disclaimer: 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.
That's actually really interesting, thanks for sharing.
I've genuinely been wondering if someone building these models has done exactly that, precisely after discussing with lawyers. It seems like the obvious move, legally.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#183Earlier 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.
That is not reasonable, should a child heed the restrictions placed on the 1st grade math book later in life, when they become PhD?
LLMs aren't people
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#184This is actually genius from the lawyers of meta. In this way they are pushing the onus onto the question of "what is illegal in regards to torrenting copyright content". They have the money and legal team to push it to any conclusion, but that conclusion would risk so many huge industries in the Us that too many parties would be effected. That would incentivize companies to drop this case against meta and the status…
Can someone, self representing, and with the very intention to lose, keep going this battle? I don't know, there are 70tb of books, could someone who had published under their name carry on independently?
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Weird, TIL. This has never been enforced though.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#186This is actually genius from the lawyers of meta. In this way they are pushing the onus onto the question of "what is illegal in regards to torrenting copyright content". They have the money and legal team to push it to any conclusion, but that conclusion would risk so many huge industries in the Us that too many parties would be effected. That would incentivize companies to drop this case against meta and the status…
In the Netherlands, for individuals at least, it's legal to download copyrighted works, but not to upload or seed. I don't know if that applies to corporations.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#187Earlier 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…
Downloading used to be legal here. Now it is explicitly not anymore. Because why not if you can squeeze some extra money from end users who would have never bought your item for the insane prices asked.
With "here", you mean Germany? Are you sure? Last time I looked into these things (granted, in 2022 or so), seemed to me that for example using Stremio with a torrent add-on would risk a fine in Germany, but using a Debrid service (that torrents in your name and you just do a direct download like e.g. is done in Youtube) would be free of risks or legal threats. I'm not in Germany though, so I didn't research it much further. Just out of curiosity.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#188[flagged]
America is a country of religious assholes. The pilgrims were kicked out of England because of their weird-ass insistence on founding their own churches, so they moved to the Netherlands, which at the time were a refuge for many English religious separatists. However, religious freedom was not enough! No, they wanted to found their own Godly country and evangelize to the natives of America, and also reap the economic benefits of an "uncivilized" land.
America:
-Selfish assholes? check! -Weirdly religious? check! -Entrepreneurial? check!
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#189If this was 15-20 years ago, arguably at the peak of P2P filesharing, I suspect most people would side with Meta.
I think people would dunk on Meta for not seeding
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is not reasonable, should a child heed the restrictions placed on the 1st grade math book later in life, when they become PhD?
LLMs aren't people
LLMs aren't the ones making the decision to use the copyrighted information as training data, and it's that decision that is at issue here.