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

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

variety.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 484 posts

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

#121

Post by gizajob »

fantasizr wrote: post #30
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

they'll litigate how meta acquired those materials to train. you can do whatever you want with a book after it's in your house. but how did it get there?

They’re already on record as hoovering up Library Genesis and Anna’s Archive. For their “fair use” copyright bonfire to train their LLM.

So not are these publishers rightfully pissed, Meta didn’t even give them the $6.99 for each epub to begin with. They’ve stolen the whole thing as part of this “fair use” campaign to destroy human authorship free of even the most basic remuneration.

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

#122

Post by qarl »

SahAssar wrote: post #104
qarl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But why should separate licensing be required at all? A search engine reads and indexes every word of every page it crawls. No one argues that requires licensing, only that the outputs must respect copyright. Why should training be different?

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

#123

Post by qarl »

triceratops wrote: post #112
qarl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it though? If they bought a copy for each machine?

Then no copying happened so they'd be on firmer legal ground.

Good, we're agreed. My only point here is that training is not inherently a copyright violation.

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

#124

Post by ginko »

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.

People who don't believe in copyright shouldn't be punished for "breaking" it.

Corporations believe in copyright so if they "break" it they should get punished for breaking rules they made up themselves.

Generally the law should be more strict for corporations than for real people.

edit: People downvoting can you argue why you disagree? I do think it's fair for the law to be more strict on the powerful rather than on the powerless.

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

#125

Post by qarl »

SahAssar wrote: post #109
qarl wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AH. Thank you.

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

#126

Post by websap »

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.

[flagged]

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

#127

Post by qarl »

triceratops wrote: post #110
qarl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AH. So you agree that it's not illegal.

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

#128

Post by jcalvinowens »

bflesch wrote: post #103
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.

Yeah, I dont know how anybody stays sane without it. I have a list of over a thousand ASNs I blackhole at this point...

Mine is a daily bash cronjob that fetches a text-based database and uses grep to build an nftables-apply script with all the IPs for the blocked ASNs. I keep meaning to share it, but it's embarrassingly messy I haven't had time to clean it up...

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

#129

Post by gizajob »

triceratops wrote: post #105
lenerdenator wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve sometimes pondered this about the legal personhood of a company - it has most of the rights as a human being but can’t suffer any of the major consequences, such as jail.

It could be possible to construct a legalistic jail for a company whereby if it has committed the type of crime that a human could be jailed for, then it could be frozen for the duration, say ten years, and all its assets, shareholder funds, contracts, everything were frozen and impounded.

Of course this seems completely ludicrous because it’s so “out there” but it’s worth having the thought experiment. Things like “corporate manslaughter” really have few consequences for the corporation itself - if it was actually jailed for twenty years and shareholders and officers left frozen out and on pause, then it might be the kind of punishment that really counted for something.

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

#130

Post by ScoobleDoodle »

ben_w wrote: post #93
dylan604 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, isn't Zuck's worth based on his shares of evilCorp while evilCorp's shares are what you just said. Ergo, the Zuck isn't worth all that either???

Yup. All the headlines following the pattern "${billionaire} {gains|loses} ${x} billion this week" are mostly just fluff, the marginal share price of any given stock wanders all over the place even without forced sales or people trying to buy them out. There's some interesting exceptions, like how Musk has managed to sell Tesla shares totalling more or less as much as the business itself has made in total lifetime re…

It doesn't seem to be mostly just fluff to me.

MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos' ex wife) show it can be turned into real money. As of December 2025 She had given away $7.1 billion in 2025 charitable donations, and $26.3 billion since 2019.

In reality there is the ability to execute on the shares to turn them into real money.

Jeff Bezos holds less than 10% of Amazon stock himself. Which is a huge amount of money, and a not insignificant amount of which can be turned into "real" money and even with some decline is still a phenomenal amount.

In that same time period the stock valuation has more than doubled.

Post reply on HN