Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 471 posts

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

#311

Post by thrwaway1985882 »

erremerre wrote: post #184
bilekas wrote: post #138

This 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?

Anybody can sue anybody, and this someone in your example would likely have standing, so why not?

A single person self representing against a company that is essentially one of the largest law firms on the planet, and can outspend them tens of thousands times over - what's to be gained?

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

#312

Post by DannyPage »

This line of argument sounds exactly what a lot of people tried in the past when they were getting hit by claims from the media companies.

If I were to scrape Meta's information and use it to train AI chat bots, would they say "That's fine, go ahead" because I'm not sharing the raw information in another way?

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

#313

Post by Mr-Frog »

knowitnone wrote: post #305
wkat4242 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Musk in the White House (who has similar interests) that might actually happen.

I don't know Musk but why would he make this happen? He's for corporate interests is he not?

I don't think Musk's interests are aligned with those of legacy media corporations.

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

#314

Post by amelius »

stale2002 wrote: post #306
amelius wrote: post #67

Earlier 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.

>I think it is more reasonable for content owners to say what can and cannot be done with their data. They lose that right as soon as they sell it to other people. No, you can't sell a book to someone and then sue anyone who reads the book, upside down. That would be ridiculous. If you don't want someone reading your book upside down, or training on it, then don't sell books.

You assume that "training" and human learning are similar things.

This is a bit like saying that taking a holiday picture of someone, and putting a surveillance camera on the street are the same thing.

I think many books actually prohibit the storage into an information retrieval system and AI can be considered a form of that.

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

#315

Post by Mekoloto »

bmicraft wrote: post #293
Mekoloto wrote: post #127

In germany its saver to illegally download through usenet because you don't upload and the cost a rights owner can make is only the cost of the product and not an aribrary number of (you puloaded it and created damage of x). It doesn't make it legal at all, it just makes it no longer interesting for IP owners to sue you.

Wasn't there a ruling like a decade ago that explicitly declared storing illegal, but streaming (download to RAM) is fine as a non-redistributing client? Of course the rights holder would have trouble proving whether you did save it, but that's a different issue.

Its official illegal for a while.

Nonetheless its the same thing: if they can prove you watched it, the damage is small for you and because IP holders are splittered, and you didn't just watch content of one, its probably not worth it to sue you.

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

#317

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

lucasyvas wrote: post #151

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.

Not sure if it's still the case but this is it is in Canada. Downloading is legal but uploading is illegal.

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

#318

Post by flir »

amelius wrote: post #291
flir wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So to be clear, you're arguing this one specific use (machine learning) should be knocked on the head? And not all novel uses? Because "content owners to say what can and cannot be done with their data" is quite broad.

No, that's not what I said. If we want to use data owned by others and make money with it, we can do two things: (1) just grab the data (2) ask the content owners I think what is fair is closer to (2) than to (1). Especially since the data was originally intended for human consumption. What you call "training" is what another person might call "mechanized processing", and would not fall within fair use of the data.

I'm honestly at a loss here. I can't figure out what your position is.

> If we want to use data owned by others and make money with it [...] ask the content owners

So is it "no commercial use without permission" you're arguing for?

> mechanized processing

Or are you arguing that training should fall under the existing mechanical license provisions for songs? I don't think you are, because those licenses are compulsory, and you seem to want an element of choice for the copyright holder.

Ok, put the chatbots aside for the moment. If [brand new use] for a book is invented, and I buy a copy of that book and want to do [that new thing] with it, should the copyright holder of that book be able to block me?

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

#319

Post by ru552 »

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…

Copy in copyright is not copy like copy in copying some data.

Copy in copyright is a term for the actual writing that gets published on ads, or magazines, or in a news paper. "I need to get the copy from marketing for this campaign." "The editor hasn't approved the copy for the article yet."

Typically, people not in/around the industry aren't familiar with the term, which leads to the confusion.

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

#320

Post by visarga »

idiotsecant wrote: post #144
visarga wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah you mean like Google Search?

I still own my content. Google links to it and sends me traffic. We both win. This sort of relationship is not present when my content is anonymously fed into a training model intended to be used to extract users before they are sent to me. And, yes, I am aware Google has pulled some cute shit with this definition, and when they do it then it's also bad.

> Google links to it and sends me traffic

Used to, but more recently it's probably LLM agents using Google not people. And even if it's not yet, it will be. Last time I searched for something on Google it messed up so bad I quickly returned to GPT-4o+search.

Post reply on HN