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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

#101

Post by ginko »

lenerdenator wrote: post #73
ginko wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well I guess the idea of incorporation is wrong then. Execs and major shareholder should absolutely be held personally held liable.

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

#102

Post by anthk »

spate141 wrote: post #22

> a Meta spokesperson said, “AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use. We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.” > Authors have sued AI companies for copyright infringement before - and lost. So, basically nothing will come out of this

Until Sony, Nintendo, Disney... sues them and Zuck craps down his pants. And the NSA themselves, too; because for sure they are half-backed from them. If they keep pirating down Japanese and European media, these can just wipe their asses with USA licenses and declare all media from the US un-Copyrighteable Europe and Japan.

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

#103

Post by bflesch »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #55

I had to block meta's ASN on my personal cgit server a few weeks ago because they were ignoring robots.txt and torching it. Like hundreds of megabytes of access logs just from them, spread around different network blocks to clearly try and defeat IP based limiting. I couldn't believe it.

IMO ASN-based blocking should be much more common, but unfortunately it is not supported as a first-class configuration option in many common tools.

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

#104

Post by SahAssar »

qarl wrote: post #89
SahAssar wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of these lawsuits is the piracy. My parent comment was about the general situation, not this specific article. Pirating content is illegal, regardless of if it is to train an LLM. Usage of LLMs trained on unlicensed content (basically all of them) might or might not be illegal. Using any method to reproduce a copyrighted work by using that original as input in a way that supplants the market value of the or…

Well - maybe so. But the common belief is that training itself is a violation of copyright, no matter how it's done. That's the argument I'm countering here.

The issue is that the trainers have not sought licenses for the data and instead outright pirated it.

I don't think anyone thinks that all training is a copyright violation if all the training data is licensed. For example a LLM trained on CC0 content would be fine with basically everyone.

The problem is that training happens on data that is not licensed for that use. Some of that data also is pirated which makes it even clearer that it is illegal.

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

#105

Post by triceratops »

lenerdenator wrote: post #73
ginko wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Not sure how you jail a company.

> the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares

You lack imagination :-) but you've identified both the problem and the solution.

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

#106

Post by amanaplanacanal »

0x3f wrote: post #32

HN really loves the copyright lobby when it's against someone they hate, huh

I think it's more that the little guy gets the book thrown at them while the rich bitch gets a slap on the wrist. This is widespread, and is BAD regardless of your personal opinion on copyright.

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

#107

Post by esseph »

j-bos wrote: post #63
masfuerte wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American executives have been pushing to criminalise copyright infringement for decades, and America has worked hard to pressure countries all round the world to do this as part of trade deals. There is, for example, a Brit serving an eleven year sentence right now *. Why should Zuckerberg be exempt? * https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65697595

Facebook isn't one of the companies that's been pushing for that.

How is that relevant?

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

#108

Post by triceratops »

qarl wrote: post #6

I know people really hate AI training on their work - but is it really any different than a human reading it? I know there's a complaint that AI can verbatim repeat that work. But so can human savants. No one is suing human savants for reading their books. Producing copyrighted material, of course. Training on copyrighted material... I just don't see it. EDIT: Making a perfectly valid point, but it's unpopular, so do…

> I know people really hate AI training on their work - but is it really any different than a human reading it?

Yes it's very different. Humans need to eat, sleep, and pay taxes. You also have to pay them competitive wages.

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

#109

Post by SahAssar »

qarl wrote: post #37
doublescoop wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If copyright law doesn't extend to the works being used for training, why should it extend to the model that is produced as a result? AI model creators have set up an ethical scenario where the right thing to do is ignore copyright laws when it comes to AI, which includes model use. It might never be legal, but it has become ethical to pirate models, distill them against ToS, etc.

I'm not sure I follow. Can you say it a different way?

I think the parent is basically saying that if you can legally pirate a book to train a LLM why can't you legally pirate a LLM model?

It's a "rules for thee and not for me" argument.

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

#110

Post by triceratops »

qarl wrote: post #50
NoOn3 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is certainly not so simple. But it seems to me, purely theoretically, that the rules don't necessarily have to be the same for living people and non-living machines.

Well - actually - it is pretty simple. For something to be illegal, there must be a law saying it's illegal. There are no laws distinguishing humans from machines in copyright law.

> There are no laws distinguishing humans from machines in copyright law

Correct. Because until very recently there was no need.

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