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

arstechnica.com

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

#362
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you (which is one of the things that free speech absolutists generally argue for), then you will have no way of knowing if what you buy is going to kill you.

I don't know any "free speech absolutists" who argue that fraud should be legal. Misrepresentation of a product or service you're selling is fraud. We already have laws against that.

This has actually been a fairly common position among American libertarians. Alan Greenspan, for instance, was strongly against fraud laws until some time after the financial crisis. The idea was that the market would sort it out.

(And no, I don't understand how this is a serious position that serious people can seriously hold, but then that is how I feel about libertarianism in general.)

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

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta's rep continues to degrade - first they steal from copyright holders, but then they admit to leeching? Not even a 1:1 ratio?! /kickban

Seriously though, where is that magnet link? That's the only question on my mind when these articles come up.

annas archive has a whole section on torrenting

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

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that argument I believe the question becomes "is the output of a model considered a derivative work of the training data?" https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf

What else could it be?

The industry is banking on Author's Guild v. Google to be precedent in such a way that it's functionally transformative enough to be a completely new work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

I think they have about a coin flip of a chance that it passes muster in the courts.

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

#365
I believe that at least in the past the entertainment industry would try to detect someone seeding a file before going after them. The idea being that someone downloading is receiving a copy (not illegal), and the act of making the copy (illegal) was done by the seeder. I'm not sure to what degree this was an established requirement vs them trying to avoid ambiguity, but my point is that this framing by Meta isn't novel. I'm not expressing a judgment on whether it's correct or if it's good.

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

#366
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads You generally can't set a client to 0B/s (as zero usually means “no limit”) but I'm not sure a good¹ lawyer on the other side would let you get away with claiming glacial distribution is not still distribution. At 1Kbyte/sec (I don't know a client off the top of my head that has control down to the single byte) a 50MByte file (not unusual for a book with ill…

It's an interesting case. Most commonly used clients won't let you turn off seeding, but you can indeed limit the upstream to a really low value. You can also, at the same time, seed a ton of different things, preferably quite large, to saturate your upload and make it statistically improbable to fully send a copy of any single file. Now, based on my feeling and cases I've seen in my country I'd say that the judge wo…

> pirating software is whole different animal, since now it's not a copyright, but a breach of licence agreement

How can that be true? There is no way for me a breach a license agreement without being party to the agreement.

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

#367
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 that authors having exclusive rights to their works necessarily implies that someone else _receiving_ them is legally culpable though. My admittedly naive thinking is that someone distributing something illegally doesn't necessarily imply that the receiver is also committing crime. If Robin Hood steals a fancy 4K TV from the mansion downtown and gives it to his neighbor as a birthday gift, would the nei…

> If Robin Hood steals a fancy 4K TV from the mansion downtown and gives it to his neighbor as a birthday gift, would the neighbor be guilty of a crime as well?

In this specific example, probably yes.

> Does the answer change if Robin Hood were instead the owner of the mansion next door

Yes, it does. The main problem here is that Robin Hood is well known to obtain everything he has in the world by stealing it.

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

#369

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…

>If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar Man, that's such an ignorant type of thing to say. Copy does not only mean the act of making a duplicate. Copy also means the words/text directly. Terms like copy editor refer to those that make edits to the copy=>words/text, not those that make edits to the duplicate…

[deleted]

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

#370

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…

>If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar Man, that's such an ignorant type of thing to say. Copy does not only mean the act of making a duplicate. Copy also means the words/text directly. Terms like copy editor refer to those that make edits to the copy=>words/text, not those that make edits to the duplicate…

> Man, that's such an ignorant type of thing to say. Copy does not only mean the act of making a duplicate. Copy also means the words/text directly. Terms like copy editor refer to those that make edits to the copy=>words/text, not those that make edits to the duplicates. Maybe you are unfamiliar with the use of the word in that manner, but that's not the rest of the world's problem. That's a limited knowledge problem on your end.

Do you think freedom of the press involves the right to make any kind of juice you want?

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