Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues

Post by dotancohen » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #67

ohbleek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, does this mean that people can simply argue in court now (if they were to be prosecuted for downloading media via bittorrent) that it is fair use if they used it to train a local model on their machine?

People could always simply argue in court that their torrenting was free use. If you're just some nobody representing yourself instead of an expensive lawyer acting on behalf of a large company, maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.

Post by fao_ » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #68

willis936 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like there has been some change in principle and some sort of knife to sharpen. "2005 personal pirate" was about making art accessible. "2025 corpo pirate" is about killing art.

LLMs make pirated art more accessible, and 2005 pirates allegedly harmed artists by decreasing their sales. The significant change is that 2025 corpo pirates are big corporations, and 2005 personal pirates are individuals. And I think the larger issue is that the big corpo pirates get away with what 2025 personal pirates wouldn’t. Anyways, my opinion is that we should get rid of IP, but only with a replacement that e…

Post by gzread » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:41 PM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #91

yorwba wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People could always simply argue in court that their torrenting was free use. If you're just some nobody representing yourself instead of an expensive lawyer acting on behalf of a large company, maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.

It has been often said that a man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.

Post by thisislife2 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #67

ohbleek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, does this mean that people can simply argue in court now (if they were to be prosecuted for downloading media via bittorrent) that it is fair use if they used it to train a local model on their machine?

People could always simply argue in court that their torrenting was free use. If you're just some nobody representing yourself instead of an expensive lawyer acting on behalf of a large company, maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.

Post by blamestross » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

muyuu wrote: post #83

Teknomadix wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly automatically. Seeding is opt-out, not opt-in… but it is usually a default that has to actively manually overridden. Most users never touch those settings. The average pirate downloading a torrent is seeding whether they know it or not. The protocol absolutely does not enforce seeding. A client can lie to the tracker, cap upload to 0k. BitTorrent has no mechanism to compel one to share. Leeching a file, d…

seeding is not the only way you actually upload you're uploading before seeding, and i'm willing to bet Meta weren't seeding but, as they correctly stated in that regard, they're sharing even when they try their best not to because of the way the protocol works as zero-upload is typically impractical for any significant size files some trackers will additionally penalise you for not sharing file parts, but this depen…