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

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

#221
post #35

Some 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…

> It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip.

Do you say the same thing about being required to wear pants in public?

Agreed that the extreme it has been taken to is absurd and entirely counterproductive though. 20-ish years was already a long time. If it takes you more than 20 years to market your book perhaps people just don't really like it all that much?

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

#222
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your memory may be failing you. The "maxima" you cite still exist, but they are merely statutory damages provisions. In other words, the plaintiffs can obtain such damages without proof of actual loss, i.e. strict liability. If the plaintiffs succeed in pricing actual damages beyond this level, they can obtain them.

Furthermore, in most copyright lawsuits that nerds like us actually care about (i.e. ones involving service providers and not actual artists or publishers), the number of works infringed is so high that the judge can just work backwards from the desired damage award and never actually hit the statutory damages cap. If the statutory damages limit was actually reached in basically any intermediary liability case, we'd…

That makes running a seedbox sound like a threat of global economic mass destruction.

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

#223

I wonder if big companies will now start paying shadow libraries like annas archive for direct access, to minimize publicity of how training data was acquired, like Nvidia supposedly did? Few tens of thousands of dollars is a rounding error in Meta's bottom line but if this case goes anything like the Anthropic one, I would see it likely. Of course it wouldn't prevent authors from asking LLM's for content from their…

They already do....

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

#224
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> The total actual damages are then $750, but the law would allow them to recover a minimum of $750 from each of them

Because they're statutory damages, because the actual point of the exercise is to make an example of the person breaking the law. Obviously in scenarios where it's feasible to reliably prosecute a significant fraction of offenders then making an example of people isn't justifiable.

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

#225

Earlier 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...

Wow, I already didn’t like him. Reading this feels validating.

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

#226
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even more egregious after watching interviews of a young Lars bragging about trading bootleg cassette tapes.

Lars was always a scumbag.

An insult to scumbags everywhere.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rock bottom pricing Value is not set by what you put into it, it is set by what people are willing to pay for it. Browsing in a thrift store can be very enlightening!

> Value is not set by what you put into it, it is set by what people are willing to pay for it. What do you base that belief upon?

Have you ever bought something that you didn't think was worth the money at the time?

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

#228
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rock bottom pricing Value is not set by what you put into it, it is set by what people are willing to pay for it. Browsing in a thrift store can be very enlightening!

> Value is not set by what you put into it, it is set by what people are willing to pay for it. Is a human life literally worthless, because they never pay to be born? The map is not the territory, the price is not the value.

Some people will pay a great deal to have a baby. Some will pay to abort their baby.

What value something has is totally dependent on who is valuing it.

More formally, it's the Law of Supply and Demand.

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

#229
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the RIAA suits were not for downloading They were not all the same, some were fairly complicated cases, and one was undoubtedly for distribution. `The court’s instructions defined “reproduction” to include “[t]he act of downloading copyrighted sound recordings on a peer-to-peer network.”' From: https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/11-282...

What I should have said is that all their lawsuits included an allegation of infringing the distribution right. There weren't any as far as I know that were just downloading.

I think you are correct for the overwhelming majority of cases for the US; The unauthorized reproduction/distribution is where things get very aggressive and easy to prosecute based on existing case law.

The only case that comes to mind as far as trying to threaten just for downloading, blew up in the law firm's faces... among other shenanigans, it came out their own machines were seeding files as an attempt to honeypot.

However other countries may have different laws as far as possession vs distribution and related penalties.

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

#230
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re correct about seeds, but peers who are also downloading will often stop sharing with you if you stop sharing with them. Seeds generally are configured to try to give different pieces to different peers so that they can send them to each other and reduce load on the seed; they don’t want to give you the entire file directly unless you’re the only person downloading. And peers prioritize and filter which other o…

Long-running torrents are mostly populated by seeders. Bit torrent was originally designed for a lot of downloaders to get a file at the same time with limited seeding bandwidth, so leechers would need to trade with each other a lot, but that's not really the situation most torrents are in today.

It depends what you’re downloading. Peer prioritization mechanics have been relevant for a lot of my recent downloads.
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