Live data from Hacker News

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

torrentfreak.com

111–120 of 289 posts

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

#111
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.

Back in 2015 Twitter bragged that Periscope had been widely used the night before to pirate a pay-per-view boxing match. I thought that was odd.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/sports/periscope-a-stream...

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

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that Metallica band members played an active driving role in those lawsuits against their own underage fans. It wasn't just the RIAA / record company organizations behaving cruelly, it was Metallica themselves. Fuck Metallica.

how they were able to recover from that is beyond me.

[flagged]

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

#113
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.

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

No, but it does matter how much money the alleged infringer has.

Property law is mostly concerned with protecting the rich from the poor, so when a rich person violates the property of a poor person, the courts can't allow the inversion of purpose and will create something called a "legal fiction," which is basically the kind of bending-over-backwards that my children do to try to claim that they didn't break the rules, actually, and if you look at it in a certain way they were actually following the rules, actually.

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

#114
post #35

Some of us are old enough to remember when the RIAA sued children for downloading Metallica albums on filesharing networks. They sued for $100,000 per song, an absurd amount when you consider that even stealing a physical album would amount only to around $1 per song. What was bizarre was that courts took the figure seriously, even if they typically settled cases for around $3,000, still around 30x actual damages. Th…

Your memory may be failing you. The "maxima" you cite still exist, but they are merely statutory damages provisions. In other words, the plaintiffs can obtain such damages without proof of actual loss, i.e. strict liability. If the plaintiffs succeed in pricing actual damages beyond this level, they can obtain them.

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

#115
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.

> And the activists are now against it, because the big guys are doing it.

Different activists are different. "Information wants to be free" activists are against different things from "artists trying to make an honest living" activists.

And different big guys are different. A big guy AI company wants different things from a big guy book publisher.

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

#116
post #12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe that no one has ever tried that one before... So do we now roll back all of the previous copyright cases where downloading music with bittorrent has been prosecuted?

From my understanding, Meta's use of the pirated book was accepted as fair use and the plaintiffs admitted to no harm. In the case of pirated music and films, neither of those points are made. Copyright holders assume people who pirate would have bought the content, usually even assuming that one download is one lost sale. And I am not aware of a single case where watching or listening to pirated content was accepted…

I don’t get that, the use of these books was instrumental and necessary for the success of the training run. The expected value of these training runs is high as the build out of 100 billion+ infrastructure demonstrates, so the book publishers should at a minimum be paid a licensing fee, a small fraction of every inference run revenue or whatever they decide. The fact that authors and publishers didn’t get any say under what conditions their intellectual property can be used is pretty outrageous.

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

#118
post #53
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.

Activists are against AI training, not bittorrent

You're probably both right since activists are not a consistent monolith.

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how they were able to recover from that is beyond me.

[flagged]

Why are all forums inundated with this ridiculous nonsense? They are "MAGA"? How so? Are people who follow MAGA typically anti-piracy or something? Bizarre.

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

#120
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not. It is just yet another example of a 7-8 figure expensive attorney and their billions dollar corporation wasting everyone' time, tax payers dollars, and demonstrating that the law applies to us and not them. I expect them to just stop showing up in court in time. What can the court do when these people own the people that write the laws?

There really should be some type of panel for frivolous legal arguments. If they are used by corporation all of the lawyers, leadership and shareholders involved are thrown into jail. Could even get jury on this and have them give majority opinion.

That seems like a bad idea to me.
Post reply on HN