Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by glaslong » Sat, May 09, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

butlike wrote: post #411

glaslong wrote: post #335

All those lawsuits against students who downloaded but didn't even redistribute mp3s. Less than a fair use transformation. Just the file download itself. ... Lesson learned: those students should have stolen millions instead!

That may have been an information shaping campaign. If the end-user can get prosecuted, the discourse turns from a positive to a negative connotation inherently, which helps curb the behavior by the powers-that-be.

So if we want to run this strategy, I suppose we need to fine Meta out of existence, as an example to the rest.

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

#482

Post by m4x » Sat, May 09, 2026, 11:49 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #450

m4x wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your examples, as you say, are all public domain. Are all the works we train LLMs on public domain too? Was the original book in my analogy in the public domain? What do you think about training on material that isn't yet in the public domain?

You're framing this as an ethical question, but copyright term lengths are essentially arbitrary. They're set by the government, as are the boundaries of fair use. At which point you're making a circular argument. That it's bad if it's illegal and that it should be illegal because it's bad. So what happens if someone argues the opposite? That it's not unethical if it's fair use and then it should be fair use because…

I'm not making a circular argument, nor one based on legality. You explicitly changed your example to use "public domain" content, and ignoring the legal specifics of that it's clear that's a separate category of content. Most people have no ethical issue with remixing or using content that has already done the rounds and delivered most of its immediate value to the creator. This is very different to your earlier examples with books, framed as two contemporary pieces of media competing with each other.

Letting companies train LLMs on the "classics" is very different to training on contemporary media where the creator still depends on it.

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

#483

Post by stevenhuang » Sun, May 10, 2026, 4:15 AM UTC

jmye wrote: post #289

spongebobstoes wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

advocating for more punishment under copyright law is directly opposed to reform or removal of the laws court precedent is a useful tool of advocacy

[flagged]

Social norms and laws influence each other but often it is norms that change first, then laws change.

Once a technology becomes massively useful and socially normalized, it is our legal systems that adapt around the new reality.

You can make the bet copyright laws won't change in the future but it's one you'd likely lose.

For one, laws would probably be weakened to allow/look the other way for "wanton" training with copyrighted works for one simple reason: governments are unlikely to go for strict copyright maximalism because that would permanently cripple domestic AI development.

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

#484

Post by websap » Wed, May 13, 2026, 1:22 AM UTC

dlivingston wrote: post #327

websap wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah they’d have to use it to stand at the back of the unemployment line. Companies don’t care, someone more desperate will take the job.

Are you one of those engineers building said crawlers, by any chance?

Nope, I work in deep infra, but I don’t knock down engineers.