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

Post by chongli » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:35 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 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:50 PM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #51

plutokras wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no issue with anyone pirating. In my country — and soon in Italy as well — all storage media sales include a small levy (Artisjus) intended to compensate copyright holders for losses from piracy. One could argue it's unfair if you're not actually using the media for copying, but having been forced to pay it regardless, I have no moral qualms about pirating content I don't feel like paying for. By the same toke…

Why is it fair that you get to be subsidized by everyone who does pay? Imagine a world where everyone had the same attitude as you and did not pay for any media. Pirates get to pirate only because most people don’t. So why are you so special?

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

orbifold wrote: post #116

Sayrus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 un…

Post by garyfirestorm » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

budsniffer95o wrote: post #119

iririririr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Post by 47282847 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

muyuu wrote: post #108

gzread wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). Fro…