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

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

torrentfreak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 289 posts

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

#101

Post by gzread »

imglorp wrote: post #52
progval wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way it works in France is that money goes to a company that collects it on behalf of all copyright holders. Its website does not offer any documentation as to how copyright holders can claim their share.

That sounds pretty shady. There's also the problem that most media generated globally is not French. Do they pretend to distribute the spoils globally?

In reality the system in these countries is pure corruption. The beneficiaries are large corporations who see it as an extra revenue stream and that's it.

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

#102

Post by cmiles74 »

PLenz wrote: post #76

This is the real reason the ultra rich are buying media companies. They expect the existing copyright laws to prevail in court and to either make significant revenue licensing IP for training or to take large stakes in AI companies in return for the IP. Only data is a moat, not algos, not compute.

Seems like a bad bet to me. It looks like authors are going to lose this case setting the precedent that you not only don’t need to license training data, obtaining it illegally (for free) is totally okay.

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

#103

Post by sumeno »

lukan wrote: post #2

The world has become so strange. In my pirate youth, I would have never imagined the big companies to argue in courts like this, basically pro piracy. And the activists are now against it, because the big guys are doing it.

It's almost like things can be good or bad in different contexts

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

#104

Post by Shadowmist »

mikkupikku wrote: post #54
jazz9k wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children can commit crimes too. It's funny, because now in the age of AI, many of the people that support piracy are now trying to stop AI companies from doing the same thing.

A child stole a candy bar from my shop, time to bankrupt his whole working class family! ^ sociopathic legalists really do think this way.

That child was just a fan of chocolate!

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

#105

Post by _heimdall »

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.

Unless I'm mistaken, the relevant copyright laws aren't limited to enforcement when money exchanged hands.

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

#106

Post by Loughla »

progval wrote: post #42
jagged-chisel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that money get distributed? If I create a film, how they decide if I’m worthy enough to receive some of that money?

The way it works in France is that money goes to a company that collects it on behalf of all copyright holders. Its website does not offer any documentation as to how copyright holders can claim their share.

Whoever is the director of that company must have laughed for weeks when they got that posting.

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

#107

Post by pwg »

Etherlord87 wrote: post #82
throw73848595 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. You can set upload speed to zero, and download entire dataset without uploading anything. Slower but doable.

As far as I know, setting upload speed to zero disables the limit. You can set it to be very low but not zero.

That is client dependent. On rtorrent, there is a separate "off" setting for the speed throttle that means "no throttle" with the result that "zero" actually means "no uploading".

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

#108

Post by muyuu »

gzread wrote: post #96
muyuu wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

and the protocol doesn't enforce you upload anything. The original design called for some kind of tit-for-tat algorithm, but it's long obsolete and you get whatever bandwidth the seeder has.

If you try to download any significant file with zero-upload, you will run out of peers that will share with you much earlier than you will download the file. It's not practical.

Most people that speak of leeching or not seeding really are talking about not seeding at all after they've completed. In fact, most clients will let you set upload speeds to a trickle but not zero (zero means unlimited in most clients). From a legal standpoint, that already means you uploaded.

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

#109

Post by zozbot234 »

PLenz wrote: post #76

This is the real reason the ultra rich are buying media companies. They expect the existing copyright laws to prevail in court and to either make significant revenue licensing IP for training or to take large stakes in AI companies in return for the IP. Only data is a moat, not algos, not compute.

If this happens then free and open content (the Wikipedia model, more or less) becomes a hugely impactful "commoditize the complement" play for the big AI and tech firms. Every good piece of open content is something that AI firms don't have to license from a proprietary supplier. And if models trained on entirely open content can write an acceptable "first draft" of something new, that's huge acceleration.

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

#110

Post by muyuu »

blamestross wrote: post #99
muyuu wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"tit-for-tat" trading of chunks only happens between peers that both are actively downloading. Seeding nodes just let anybody leech. You totally CAN disable all uploads in the torrent protocol. Just set the "upload budget" to zero in most clients. Just nobody realizes they can do that. Bittorrent is wildly successful in part because every popular client makes it nontrivial to "opt out" of it's more socialist componen…

Tit-for-tat kicks in. It's fine for smaller files to just jump peers with zero upload, but i reckon Meta would have found it challenging to download very large files without sharing. It's certainly much faster if you don't get throttled or banned by many peers.
Post reply on HN