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

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

#441

Post by cluckindan »

gowld wrote: post #399
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intent matters. I can well imagine a judge saying something like this: While I am satisfied it has been proven you are aware that by torrenting said files, distribution also occurred. However, I am also satisfied it has been proven that by setting a 1 byte per minute upload limit, you had taken those steps you could to limit uploads in an effort to prevent the prohibited activity. Other evidence presented to the cour…

You'd still be conspiring with others to violate copyright.

That would be a hard sell in court, the prosecution would have to prove at least that you have personally communicated with the other persons seeding a specific file.

If multiple people get caught speeding on the highway, are they conspiring with each other to violate law? Probably not, unless they were racing.

Organized seeding could be passable as criminal conspiracy, but a single person — nah.

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

#442

Post by anonym29 »

Gormo wrote: post #388
anonym29 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because there was no right to slander, or threaten, or commit treason, or "share" in 1791, Congress retained the power to regulate. You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and intentions of the constitution. Slander and fighting words are exceptions to the first amendment that were determined through the legislative process. Essentially the entire US constitution is negative rights - the right…

> Slander and fighting words are exceptions to the first amendment that were determined through the legislative process. The legislative process can't make exceptions to constitutional provisions. These were recognized as not covered by first amendment protections by jurisprudence, not legislation.

Yep, totally meant "judicial" not "legislative" here, my bad. My brain's word:meaning hashmap had a short circuit there, thank you for correcting!

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

#443

Post by odo1242 »

Scoring6931 wrote: post #340
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta's market cap is over $1.7 trillion. Over twice as large as the whole media and entertainment industry.

Market cap is not cash in the bank.

Point being:

Meta’s market cap is higher than that of the US entertainment industry

Meta’s revenue is also higher than that of the US entertainment industry

The parent of the comment you’re replying to conflated the two

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

#444

Post by LocalH »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #349
saghm wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

your TV example is a bad example for discussions around copyright — how does one copy a TV? a more pertinent example to the main topic at hand i download a file onto my PC. in doing so i have made a copy of that file onto my PC. if that file is a copyrighted work, e.g. a musical work, i have reproduced the work by downloading it. i have copied it. streaming music is covered by copyright for the same reason - a copy i…

> i download a file onto my PC. in doing so i have made a copy of that file onto my PC.

It's even deeper than that. Legally, you are also making a copy when you load the file into RAM to play it.

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

#445

Post by opo »

withinboredom wrote: post #431
opo wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...You can take a patent and build that thing in your house. The government can’t stop you, neither the inventor. It’s when you try to sell it that they can come after you. I don't think that is correct. The patent act states: >...Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United Stat…

> I don't think that is correct. It is. It's often called the "research exemption." You literally can only get into any kind of trouble when your intentions are commercial.

As a general defense, the research exemption is only applicable where you can reasonably claim you are using a patented invention for research purposes. But if it looks like the reason you are infringing on the patent is that you want to use the patent, but don't want to pay for the rights, that is not going to work. Even if your intentions are not commercial, making or using a patented invention is still infringement. Like I said before, it is highly unlikely that someone would know about the infringement if it was just done for personal use, but that doesn't mean it isn't infringement.

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

#446

Post by LocalH »

dTal wrote: post #382
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I can setup a cable streaming service with ripped vids as long a no one in my company watches it?

You would be distributing the videos. Meta is not distributing the things they torrented. No, LLM weights don't count.

If nobody watches it, then technically no copies of the video have been distributed.

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

#447

Post by stale2002 »

amelius wrote: post #392
stale2002 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You assume that "training" and human learning are similar things. No I don't. Because a human is choosing to enact the training regardless. Just like if a human held a book up to a rock. It would be ridiculous that an author could ban a human from "training" a rock from a book. Its their book, and they can show it to a rock if they want!

If you buy a DVD and show it at work, then that's also ok, because it is your DVD and you can do with it whatever you want? Turns out, nope, that's not ok.

> show it at work

No that distribution.

So my point stands. If you sell someone a book, you can't just put arbitrary restrictions on it. You cannot ban someone from training a model on it, nor ban you ban someone freak reading it upside down, or showing it to a rock.

You tried to claim that basically any restriction can be put on how something is used. Thats simply not true. Distribution is a specific carve out that has regulations on it.

But someone absolutely could train a model, as well as read it upside, or show it to a rock.

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

#448

Post by [deleted] »

asadotzler wrote: post #410
Ajedi32 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference being... what? Just scale? To be clear, Meta didn't "[resell] the laundered data": or at least they're claiming there's no proof of seeding.

Yes, scale matters, a lot. I can feed my neighbor some rycin and I'm a murderer. If I poison the state's water supply with rycin and millions die, I'm not just a murderer any more. I'm now a terrorist and an entirely new set of laws apply to me. Same with blowing up my neighbors barn vs blowing up a large building. Scale matters and these "what's the difference except the scale" comments seem unconsidered or naive to…

[deleted]

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

#449

Post by nativeit »

zeroq wrote: post #352
dspillett wrote: post #221

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…

I haven't really seen this point made elsewhere, but as I understand one of the more salient features of bittorrent is that peers are actively sharing the portions of a file they have downloaded. "Seeding" only refers to those who have the entire file and continue to share it, but all peers who are downloading the file are generally sharing the pieces of it they have while the rest downloads.

They could throttle their upload bandwidth, but if they were doing that to the extent that they could plausibly argue they hadn't distributed any of the content, I think they would have said so, and I think it would be a stronger argument than using lingo to merely suggest it (especially when the lingo doesn't imply what they say it does).

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

#450

Post by silverliver »

foobarian wrote: post #266
dspillett wrote: post #221

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…

transmission-cli -u 0

This. It can be easily done in the GUIs as well (Don't ask how I know).

I don't know where GP got the idea that you can't set a client to 0B/s. All the clients I am aware of support setting the seeding rate.

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