Models absorbed the pirated content. Now Meta is distributing those models. Is that considered distribution?
It really should be.
Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
211–220 of 471 posts
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#212Well, 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…
Would definitely torrent any leaked internal facebook data.
But never seed your honor, that would be illegal!
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#213It'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.
Really?
a) Meta are (so far) releasing their models for free.
b) There's nothing stopping non-mega-corps from doing the same, especially if this precedent was established. (Training is of course expensive but this is a challenge, not an absolute block.)
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meta is a couple of times larger than the entire entertainment industry combined...
I think its reversed, and that's just the USA - The U.S. Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry is the largest in the world at $649 billion (of the $2.8 trillion global market) and is projected to grow to $808 billion by 2028 at an average yearly rate of 4.3% (PwC 2024). https://www.trade.gov/media-entertainment Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook Inc., continues to dominate the digital landscape with impressi…
I think the first statement is reporting on market cap and the second statement is reporting on revenue.
If you look at UMG's revenue, one of the largest labels, their revenue was 11B.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#215Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#216Earlier 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…
The US Constitution grants congress the power to give authors and inventors time-limited exclusive rights to their works/discoveries (Art1.S8.C8). This moots the 1st amendment argument. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
I don't think it'd hold up, but one could argue that the first amendment was an amendment, and thus changed the constitution, and therefore removed that ability of congress.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#217> 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…
You're right that torrent clients typically share during downloading, although one might limit this by limiting the upload bandwidth.
However, while we have no idea the lengths that Meta went to (or not), I suspect they have the engineering chops to fork and tweak their own 'download-only' torrent client.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#218If this was 15-20 years ago, arguably at the peak of P2P filesharing, I suspect most people would side with Meta.
Why do we have to play this purity game where we take a situation, remove context, and wag our finger at each other?
There's an ENORMOUS difference between college students pirating some movies or albums and the company worth $2 trillion doing it programmatically across millions of works and then reselling the laundered data.
This is a completely unserious discussion without considering context.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#219I am curious, where did the other companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, et al) get their training data from? Why is only Meta under fire for this?
It's not just books; most websites technically don't allow scraping content, but most of the content on which these models trained was scraped from the web. It's legality is still an open question.
Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, more likely, drop the case to avoid establishing a precedent. Sounds like Meta are banking on the entertainment industry looking at it and deciding that the risk of losing this case is too high given Meta’s almost infinitely deep pockets to mount a legal defence.
Maybe. But it's hard to see how they could possibly win this case no matter how good their defence team is.
They don't want to win, they want to reach a settlement where they admit no wrongdoing, but agree to pay some medium-large fee that establishes a precedent.¹ That fee is essentially trivial to Meta, but becomes an effective moat against new upstart rivals. The possibility of losing everything is the stick they wield to encourage the copyright owners to agree to accept only a medium-large fee.
¹ Not necessarily a formal legal precedent, but at least a floor on the "market value" of access to the data