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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

#461

Post by Ajedi32 »

rasz wrote: post #422
Ajedi32 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An original composition based on a statistical analysis of the training data. Statistical data about a copyrighted work obviously isn't necessarily a derivative of that work. Otherwise Tolkien could sue me for telling you how many times The Lord of the Rings uses the word "the".

Can it reproduce training data? Then its not analysis but compression, lossy compression.

For most LLMs, with most works, no.

If you trained an LLM repeatedly on nothing but the text of LOTR until it could re-produce the books verbatim and then tried to sell copies of that LLM, then I agree that would be blatent copyright infringement, yes.

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

#462

Post by pdonis »

rvense wrote: post #427
pdonis wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> American libertarians The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central pla…

> It's not a free market if the government... has its thumb on the scales See, this is why libertarianism doesn't make sense. If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place. The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check. The alternative is Oliver Twist, eco…

> If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place.

Historically, if there is government intervention, then monopolies--created by governments--incumbents, and rich and powerful people run things.

Of course if you take a society which has managed to regulate some aspect of all that using government, and then take away that particular government regulation--while leaving all the other ways the governments puts its thumb on the scale in place--then things will get worse, at least in the short term.

But that in no way shows that the absence of a government's thumb on the scale in every aspect, long term makes things worse. Historically, there have been societies that had little or no government intervention in things (for example, saga period Iceland, or some of the American colonies before the British tried to tighten up on them after the French and Indian War), and they did not have the bad things you mention; they had the opposite, people being able to run their own lives and getting along just fine, precisely because there was no government that could force them to do stupid things because of some government granted monopoly or incumbent, or because rich and powerful people were using their wealth and power to co-opt the government--the way they do in societies that do have government intervention.

> The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check.

That's the ostensible purpose, but it doesn't work. Giving a government the power to intervene in what would otherwise be a free market just means the rich and powerful use their wealth and power to co-opt the government. Having a government actually makes their job easier: it's cheaper to buy a government than it is to buy an entire society.

> there's a lot of hypocrisy on the Right in general

There's a lot of hypocrisy on all sides of the political spectrum. I don't think the Right is any worse than others in that respect.

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

#463

Post by pdonis »

flir wrote: post #437
pdonis wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> American libertarians The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central pla…

It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist. Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns.

> It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist.

This is an oxymoron. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be involuntary. So you can't have a free market with government's thumb on the scales.

> Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns.

Historically, this is simply false. There have been societies that did not have governments that could manipulate markets, and they did not work this way.

In terms of guns, in such societies everyone had guns; there was no one who had overwhelming military force at their disposal. (They also had less wealth inequality than modern societies with governments.)

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

#464

Post by flir »

pdonis wrote: post #463
flir wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist. Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns.

> It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist. This is an oxymoron. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be involuntary. So you can't have a free market with government's thumb on the scales. > Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns. Historically, this is simply false. There h…

> Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be involuntary.

Here is a list of transactions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repugnant_market) we're making illegal next Tuesday. Note that after Tuesday, all market transactions are still voluntary. Therefore your claim is wrong. (In other words you're not considering positive and negative freedoms).

> In terms of guns, in such societies everyone had guns; there was no one who had overwhelming military force at their disposal.

Tell me about power laws.

I recommend Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.

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

#465

Post by SahAssar »

wkat4242 wrote: post #254
mft_ wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this is just misinformed, or anti-Germany/EU propaganda? Either way, not true. In Germany, if you torrent something without protection of a VPN, you may receive a letter from a blood-sucking legal firm within a week or two, with a fine that can be argued down somewhat.

I'm sure the OP meant "knock on your door" figuratively. And refers to exactly what you say, those leechy law firm letters. In that sense it's entirely true.

"knock on your door within hours" does not usually even figuratively mean "getting a letter a few weeks later".

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

#466

Post by RajT88 »

buzer wrote: post #353
tempfile wrote: post #329

Earlier 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. I am pretty sure this is false. It is just that distribution carries heavier sentences and is easier to discover, not unlike with drug dealing. It is not legal, anywhere, to (for example) borrow a DVD from someone, copy it, and give the original back. In s…

> It is not legal, anywhere, to (for example) borrow a DVD from someone, copy it, and give the original back. In some jurisdictions you have a right to backups, and a right to resale, but you emphatically do not have a right to privately copy. If the DVD doesn't have strong DRM (which is pretty rare, CSS counts as strong DRM) you are allowed to make a private copy in Finland. There is a levy on various storage medium…

Canada has (had?) something similar. Once the movie and music industry got a significant tax levied on recordable media (flash cards, optical media, etc.) pirating became defacto legal.

At least this is what some Canadians explained to me once.

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

#467

Post by micromacrofoot »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #397
micromacrofoot wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

the laundering is training AI with the stolen data

they don't sell the data directly, but use it to train software that they use as part of their product

if they want to make the library argument, they should have to manually visit and scan library data like everyone else... otherwise I should be available to access the entirety of my local library remotely without restriction

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

#468

Post by LocalH »

account42 wrote: post #460
LocalH wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But you're not making a copy when your eyes focus the image on your retina?

Shh, don't give them ideas

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

#469

Post by pdonis »

flir wrote: post #464
pdonis wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist. This is an oxymoron. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be involuntary. So you can't have a free market with government's thumb on the scales. > Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns. Historically, this is simply false. There h…

> Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be involuntary. Here is a list of transactions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repugnant_market ) we're making illegal next Tuesday. Note that after Tuesday, all market transactions are still voluntary. Therefore your claim is wrong. (In other words you're not considering positive and negative freedoms). > In terms of guns, in such societies everyo…

> Therefore your claim is wrong.

No, it isn't. You are simply giving evidence that a market with any government intervention is not a free market. Which is perfectly true.

Whether the particular interventions governments make are good policy is a separate question. A free market is a tool. So are government interventions. Sometimes you have to make tradeoffs. But that doesn't change the fact that they are tradeoffs: that every time the government intervenes in a market, it means the market is no longer a free market, because some transactions are not voluntary. (Or because some transactions that would be voluntary if they happened are prevented from happening; see further comments below.)

> Note that after Tuesday, all market transactions are still voluntary.

First, even taken literally, this claim is not true, because there are lots of other government interventions in place that dictate non-voluntary transactions (the most common, of course, being taxation).

Second, you're quibbling. I gave the short version of the proper definition of a free market; the full version includes that preventing transactions from occurring that otherwise would occur (because both parties benefit) by making them illegal also counts as making transactions non-voluntary. In other words, "voluntary" has two sides: not forcing people to make transactions they wouldn't voluntarily choose to make, and not preventing people from making transactions they would voluntarily choose to make.

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

#470

Post by pdonis »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #381
pdonis wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef. And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned. Also, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food…

>And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned. Sure, with reduced life expectancy. If you're fine dying out in your 30's, maybe 40's at best you can eat whatever you want. Your body is pretty resilient to poison short term. >, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad t…

> with reduced life expectancy.

Most of that was due to high infant mortality. The average person who lived to adulthood did not die in their 30's.

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