Can Meta fight Nintendo, too? Would love to see two legal Leviathans fight each other.
Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
201–210 of 289 posts
Re: Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
#202Earlier 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.
IIRC, Dave Grohl actually gave a lot of shit to Metallica, claiming that it would be one thing if this were some indie band selling cassettes having their music stolen, but it's another when multi-millionaires are crying that they aren't getting extra money. Found it: https://youtu.be/Yy45qY9c49k
His book (maybe he has several) is fantastic.
Re: Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
#203Earlier 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.
Another person who I remember really coming out as a villain in that era was Gene Simmons from KISS: "Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars."[1] [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/10/kiss-frontman-we...
Man back when ars was good. Feels like you're pouring salt into a wound posting that link.
Re: Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
#204The 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.
Billy downloading a copy of Game of Thrones because he's too poor to afford one, is radically different than super billionaires who just don't want to pay for a license.
Meta, Open AI and everyone else playing this game has enough money to pay the best lawyers on earth. They can act with impunity.
I could even imagine them getting a law passed, a license to ignore copywrite law. Of course Billy don't qualify. It'll only be for the billionaires and maybe a handful of millionaires.
Re: Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tit-for-tat kicks in. It's fine for smaller files to just jump peers with zero upload, but i reckon Meta would have found it challenging to download very large files without sharing. It's certainly much faster if you don't get throttled or banned by many peers.
Would you say that generally books would be considered a small file or a BIG file?
they'd most certainly go for very large curated collections like those of Anna's Archives, we're talking about 10s or 100s of TBs per archive
going 1 by 1 would be quite the exercise in itself considering just how much variety of formats, styles, crap added in the files, random password crapware, etc etc you find for anything other than the most trendy stuff
Re: Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
#206Some 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…
You are off a bit on the numbers. First, though, the RIAA suits were not for downloading. The suits were for distribution. Here is how their enforcement actions generally went. 1. They would initially send a letter asking for around $3 per song that was being shared, threatening to sue if not paid. This typically came to a total in the $2-3k range. There were a few where the initial request was for much more such as…
> NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go.
But that's the whole problem, isn't it? Consider how a P2P network operates. There are N users with a copy of the song. From this we know that there have been at most N uploads, for N users, so the average user has uploaded 1 copy. Really slightly less than 1, since at least one of them had the original so there are N-1 uploads and N users and the average is (N-1)/N.
There could be some users who upload more copies than others, but that only makes it worse. If one user in three uploads three copies and the others upload none, the average is still one but now the median is zero -- pick a user at random and they more likely than not haven't actually distributed it at all.
Meanwhile the low end of the statutory damages amount is 750X the average, which is why the outcome feels absurd -- because it is.
Consider what happens if 750 users each upload one copy of a $1 song. The total actual damages are then $750, but the law would allow them to recover a minimum of $750 from each of them, i.e. the total actual damages across all users from each user. The law sometimes does things like that where you can go after any of the parties who participated in something and try to extract the entire amount, but it's not that common for obvious reasons and the way that usually works is that you can only do it once -- if you got the $750 from one user you can't then go to the next user and get another $750, all you should be able to do is make them split the bill. But copyright law is bananas.
Re: Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
#207This is a desperate defense. They're making it because they have to try something, but I doubt the court will buy it. This is a class action brought by authors, so while Meta has deep pockets, I expect this will actually settle, with named plaintiffs getting payouts authors will find big and the rest of the class getting scraps. If a major media company were the plaintiff, I'd expect this to get very expensive quickly.
Re: Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Children can commit crimes too. It's funny, because now in the age of AI, many of the people that support piracy are now trying to stop AI companies from doing the same thing.
Children are afforded more lenience in sane societies (before the law and in social contexts) because they are still developing and not as well socialized/experienced as adults. I assume most pro-piracy people support personal use and not commercial use of content.
The issue is that child labor laws encourage children to pursue cybercrime if they want to make money since legitimate companies will not hire them. This results in a lot of incentive for children to commit cybercrime such as piracy and without the disincentive of punishment they are free to do it. These 2 things are incentivizing antisocial behavior in society.
Re: Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
#209I'm a little surprised Meta is even bothering to fight this. I mean the argument looks farcical to me be IANAL and weirder things have happened. If they do end up losing they'll have to pay however many millions to their law firms plus whatever the in or out of court settlement end ups being.
And you just know that whatever they end up paying will be so tiny that it will just be seen as the cost of doing business. From a corporation's perspective it's always better to break the law and maybe pay a tiny fine (if you get caught and can't argue your way out of it) than it is to follow the law and miss out on profit/revenue/strategic advantage etc.
Re: Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
#210Some 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…
Yeah, but remember how joyful we'd have been if copyright had been this weak in 2003. As long as this flows down to regular people instead of just corps, then copyright won't halt societal development as much as previously anymore. The weakening of copyright is a great thing. Just step back into space. Pretend you're so high that you can see your own person from outside yourself, like you are the CCTV camera in the c…
I rather doubt this more laissez-faire attitude towards intellectual property will be extended to those without.