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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

#381

Post by Telaneo »

Aurornis wrote: post #294
Telaneo wrote: post #138

Looking forward to the personal liability. I've wondered what the legalese justification for letting liability evaporate as it does so often with corps. So far the reasons I'm left with are ' shrugs ' and 'the relevant provision (seemingly? apparently?) simply don't apply', neither of which are any good. I was going to make a joke about how we should attach magnets to Aaron Swartz' corpse, since that'd make for a pre…

The handling of Aaron Swartz’s case was a travesty, but he wasn’t indicted for piracy. The charges were for fraud, unlawfully accessing a protected computer, and damaging a computer. In the years since the basis of the case has been forgotten and replaced with an assumption about piracy, but it was a case about unlawful access.

Given Swartz's intent and actions, I mostly don't care about the difference. Someone taking the clean copy of Star Wars (that probably doesn't exist) of Disney's servers and putting that up on the internet for everyone to download is mostly just doing copyright infringement. The computer equivelent of breaking and entering is a sideshow and a means to get to some files and little more (assuming they didn't do much more). The reasons I care about breaking and entering is because what usually follows is stealing and a violation of privacy (or if the case of computers, the latter, as well as the computer being turned against my own interests) neither of which is the case when it comes to what Swartz did. The breaking of the door itself isn't some sinful act, that should be punishable in and of itself.

The law doesn't see it that way, but it is not the ground truth.

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

#382

Post by electronoora »

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.

[dead]

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

#383

Post by gizajob »

protocolture wrote: post #343
gizajob wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my book isn’t in your LLM, then prove it and don’t use my book to train your LLM.

>don’t use my book to train your LLM. What makes you think you are entitled to tell people what they can and cant do with data they purchased (or otherwise acquired) from you. Extremely honest question. I just cant put myself in your shoes. Like if I had written anything useful I would be overwhelmingly flattered that my content be considered so worthy for inclusion. Your profile suggests that you are a philosopher.…

A million dollars please.

It’s called a copyright notice. Same as a license. If you’re running a commercial business you can’t legally just take that piece of work and reuse it. Pick any book off your shelf and pretty well every one of them will have words to the effect of:

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed "Attention: Permissions Coordinator," at the address below.

Same as every piece of commercial software has a license which has to be abided by. Same as use of Meta’s service has terms and conditions which HAVE to be agreed to.

So yeah they’re free to break that license but they’re also free to be sued by IP holders for breaking it at scale.

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

#384

Post by frozenseven »

teddyh wrote: post #357
frozenseven wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it Learning from copyrighted content is legal - for both humans and AI. If Meta is in hot water for anything, it's piracy and/or storage of copyrighted material.

By ”using it”, I mean using the AI model .

Huh? Then that's even more straightforward, and your comment from late 2022 doesn't hold up at all. So, unless you're specifically going out of your way to break copyright law, inference is totally fine.

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

#385

Post by bombcar »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #339
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's frustrating is that I don't even consider infringement to be a crime. Why are you all so upset about this, rather than his real crimes?

I'm a copyright abolitionist. I don't care at all that they're training AIs on copyrighted works. I care a lot that they're not getting relentlessly hunted down by the copyright industry for it like all the "pirates" that came before them. The copyright industry has actually ruined lives by litigating their "infringement" nonsense. It's only fair that they go after this guy as well. His constant violation of people's…

If this was guaranteed to result in either Facebook being completely destroyed, or copyright abolished, I’d be ride-or-die for either outcome.

But we all know it’ll be a slap on the wrist for Meta and nothing will change.

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

#386

Post by bombcar »

ScoobleDoodle wrote: post #130
ben_w wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

It’s real and unreal at the same time - as is true of many non-cash wealth.

You have a house? You can sell it next month for a certain price, sell it tomorrow for a bit less.

You own every house in your town? You can still sell a few for “full price” but liquidation of all of them is going to be a shock to the market.

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

#387

Post by fsflover »

AgentME wrote: post #349
shrubby wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/ Cory Doctorow wrote a nice summary of the Zuckerstreisand book by Sarah Wynn-Williams. "First, Facebook becomes too big to fail. Then, Facebook becomes too big to jail. Finally, Facebook becomes too big to care."

I liked Doctorow better before he cheered for stricter copyright enforcement.

He has always been against hypocrisy.

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

#388

Post by bombcar »

naniwaduni wrote: post #154
litoE wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, the money he borrows is not taxable. If he sold stock he would have to pay taxes before he could spend the income. Sure, he now owes money to someone, but he can refinance those loans again and again, and live tax-free the rest of his life while we, poor working stiffs, pay the taxes that built the airport where he parks the private jet he bought with the money he borrowed.

People seem to get the weird idea that borrowing against their stock holdings is some special thing rich people get to do with products that the rest of us don't have access to. It's not. Margin loans are widely available to the tune of ff+1%ish or lower, and if your brokerage's publicly offered rates are probably a ripoff, they're almost certainly negotiable. The bar for access to "institutional" rates is basically…

I’ve never seen it explained as to how it’s different in kind from a home equity loan - you still need income from something to pay the loan back (and if you say you pay it from the loan proceeds you’re just donating to a bank with extra steps).

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

#389

Post by qarl »

Quarondeau wrote: post #366
qarl wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But my question is about your point of scale. I don't understand why it should be allowed for one savant to study and answer questions about one book, but wrong for a company to hire one million savants to answer questions about one million books. And I'm asking where in the law or case law this is supported.

That's not what I said. The concern is not about "answering questions" about original works. That would probably be acceptable at any scale. It is whether the approach foreseeably results in the creation of market substitutes that compete with original works.

So then you agree with me that training itself is not a violation, it's whether the output is a violation.

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

#390

Post by qarl »

grebc wrote: post #350
qarl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. I'm not sure I follow your logic.

You asked, I answered. If you’re struggling to comprehend that a person reading a book is different then you’re a bad bot.

It's a shame that rudeness is so prevalent on this platform now.
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