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Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

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Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#71

Post by nadermx »

"They then copied those stolen fruits"

How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?

Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act

And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

And you would be hard pressed to prove that LLM's haven't advanced the arts and sciences, so at bare minimum transformative, ie fair use.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#72

Post by triceratops »

qarl wrote: post #14
SahAssar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is arguing that the consumption is illegal. It's the reproduction that is illegal. Read a book, that's fine. Write a book, that's fine. Read a book and then write a book that is 99.9% the same as the book that you read and sell it for profit without a license from the original author, that's infringement.

No, if you read the article, the point is in the training, not the reproduction. That's what all these lawsuits are about - it's the training not the reproduction. I already agreed in my first comment that the reproduction is off limits. In this case, it appears that Meta torrented illegal copies of the work to do the training. Obviously that's bad. But conflating that with training itself doesn't follow.

Training requires making copies. Even if Meta had purchased each work they'd have had to make copies of it to distribute around the training cluster.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#73

Post by lenerdenator »

ginko wrote: post #16
karanbhangui wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment could get its own DSM classification for how insane it is. I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?

Is this controversial? Executives should be held liable, certainly moreso than just regular people sharing files.

For better or for worse, the idea behind incorporation is that you, as an owner of part or all of the company, are separated from it financially and legally in most circumstances.

Zuckerberg may be CEO, majority shareholder, and on the board of Meta, but he didn't break copyright law, Meta did. So if there were to be a consequence, Meta would pay out the fine. Not sure how you jail a company.

Now, in a company with a real corporate governance structure, the board would look at the loss incurred by said fine, look at Zuckerberg, and immediately fire him for causing the loss. However, like I said before, Zuck's in charge of Meta, so that's not going to happen, and the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares, which are the main repository of his wealth. So if he thinks he can make himself richer violating copyright law in the future, he will likely direct Meta to do so.

TL;DR, in the famous words of Bender from Futurama, "Hooray, the system fails again!"

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#74

Post by ben_w »

azinman2 wrote: post #27
gloxkiqcza wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For context, his net worth is ~$220 billion.

And meta's worth is much more than that. He's not personally paying.

A company being "worth" some amount doesn't mean it has that much money and real property; it means there exist people willing to buy shares, on the margin, at a price which works out like that. One of the common (very rough) approximations is that a business is worth as much as the profit it's expected to make over the next 20 years. But one of the reasons (there are many) that this is only a rough guide, is that if you tried to sell too much of a big company all in one go, it usually depresses the price a lot, and the other way around (trying to buy a whole company) tends to raise the price a lot; both effects are because most people have different ideas about how much any given company is really worth despite that rough guide, and trade their shares at different prices while you're doing it. You may note this is a circular argument, this is indeed part of the problem.

IIRC, Facebook's cash is more like $81-82 billion.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#75

Post by idle_zealot »

Lammy wrote: post #41
josefritzishere wrote: post #3

I would rather Zuckerberg do 6 months in jail and probation than fine Meta.

You aren't going to be able to make me anti-piracy just because some corpo benefits from it too.

I think this is an easy distinction to make: copyright is bullshit and knowledge should be free. I have no problem with pirates sharing information freely. I do have a problem with a company taking someone else's work and profiting from it. The only thing worse than copyright as it exists is copyright that can be selectively ignored when the powerful will it. Attempt to use copyright to promote Free software with the GPL? Ha, nope, copyright for me and not for thee; I'll train on your code and sell it back to you. You want to preserve access to a game or film that's unavailable or unplayable? Time to send the C&D and destroy you. Only bad things are possible.

Until we progress as a society to the point that we can put this system behind us we should at least fight to make enforcement uniform. In fact, uniform enforcement is probably a good starting point for arguing for abolition, as the pain of that enforcement is felt by proles and elites alike.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#76

Post by runjake »

I don't have strong opinions on Zuck needing to be punished for this, because I have friends and family doing the same thing, although perhaps not at the same scale. I myself do not download copyrighted content. I think "rules for thee, not for me" goes both ways.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#77

Post by Melatonic »

ipython wrote: post #36

Just gonna say... Aaron Swartz faced years of prison time and ultimately decided to take his own life... for downloading scientific journal articles ... to share freely with the world (aka not even profiting from it). But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that…

Truly ahead of his time

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#78

Post by FireBeyond »

runjake wrote: post #76

I don't have strong opinions on Zuck needing to be punished for this, because I have friends and family doing the same thing, although perhaps not at the same scale. I myself do not download copyrighted content. I think "rules for thee, not for me" goes both ways.

How much revenue have your friends and family made from "doing the same thing"?

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#79

Post by eaglelamp »

ronsor wrote: post #54
swader999 wrote: post #38

I take issue with the use of tense used in this framing. Its not 'infringed' its 'infringing' and to say that it happened is wrong, its happening and happening continuously in these models that are in use. To say a one time payment settles it is missing the whole scope of this theft. Royalties are owed and continuously owed as these models are deployed and doing inference. How is it any different to paying a small pi…

Royalties for inference are unrealistic in a way that even royalties for training aren't. The LLaMA models were released openly. Copies exist everywhere in the world. You aren't going to be able to charge someone for running `llama.cpp`; a court order ceases to have practical relevance at that point.

Inference might be unreasonable for a royalty agreement, but, in assessing damages, it is certainly relevant.

"I made enough copies for everyone" isn't a valid defense for copyright infringement.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#80

Post by runjake »

FireBeyond wrote: post #78
runjake wrote: post #76

I don't have strong opinions on Zuck needing to be punished for this, because I have friends and family doing the same thing, although perhaps not at the same scale. I myself do not download copyrighted content. I think "rules for thee, not for me" goes both ways.

How much revenue have your friends and family made from "doing the same thing"?

Some. In some cases they've "stolen" tens of thousands in content. Like I said, not at the same scale, but the same "crime" nonetheless.

I'd much rather prosecution focus on Zuck's more serious crimes against privacy and civilization as a whole. But maybe this is a small start?

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