Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn’t illegal without proof of seeding

This is honestly a win-win. Either the courts recognize that the LLM uses stolen copyrighted content, or they recognize that torrenting is legal by default.

Though with the way courts have been bending case law into knots recently, I wouldn’t be surprised if they somehow word the ruling in a way that favors Meta and makes torrenting outright illegal.

Well, at least they released llama for free, But honestly, their hypocrisy is so pathetic.

Hey, who knows? Maybe now they're gonna like start funding legal defense funds for people torrenting. Part of their whole corporate social responsibility, If they feel so strongly about it... right? /s

My class action Spidey sense is tingling

This is why I try to find legitimate sites offering direct downloads instead of illegally uploading during torrenting. There are many sites offering direct downloads, but I often have trouble finding them.

So not just they pirated them, which may or may not be a crime and where I may or may not be impartial, but they are also leeches who would be banned on any decent torrent tracker of the olden days.

This is irrelevant because Meta should not be tried for this the same as a private individual would be.

The case for torrenting being illegal for private individuals is one or both of:

1. Downloading in of itself is stealing.
2. Uploading is giving unauthorized access to someone else who otherwise might have had a harder time finding it. Anything else, such as watching, reading, listening, learning, etc. is not illegal (or does not make sense to make illegal). The exception might be publishing. This is rare for private individuals (e.g. using pirated FL studio to make a commercial song).

For corporations, a lot change. Firstly, a corporation downloading a torrent is necessarily making unauthorized material available for some people of the company. It's like a group of 20 friends all downloaded and uploaded to each other. Secondly, they used this copyrighted material commercially (like playing pirated music in a public night club). Both should be illegal.

However, all of this is still a distraction. The real issue is using copyrighted materials to train commercial AI. Does Meta require permission from copyright holders to make AI based on their work? The law is grey on this, and desperately needs regulations.

Just my thoughts.

So, piracy is legal if you don't distribute? What the fuck is Zuck smoking?

Another example of Republican principles. Corporations are protected by laws but not bound by them, while the average citizen is bound by laws but not protected by them.

Of course that fuck isn't a good seeder. Leech.

It's not illegal to download books without yourself offering them for upload. What's illegal is when you feed those books into your reality devouring content monster and it outputs all that copyrighted content in a slightly different order and you profit off that content vomit.

Also I love how they they don't say they didn't seed, just say there is no proof

So where's the MAFIAA? Here you go guys, literal industrial scale piracy.

Or are you afraid to go after someone that isn't a teenager in their parent's back room?

So it's okay if we download content from well known online repositories?

I mean isn't that at least some extent technically true to a level.

I mean if we weren't talking a shitty corporation to begin with. If this were say, a 20 year old mcdonnalds worker pirating game of thrones.

IMO the bigger concept is still rather than if they got it... defining whether using that data after the fact is legal. I mean hypothetically speaking lets just say they bought 1 copy of each of the millions of books, or bought used copies, or say had a machine that could scan every book in a library. IMO the issue shouldn't be whether or not anyone managed to download the books in their pure form afterwards. The focus should be the AI trained on their books, is going to be distributing portions of their book to millions of people, and any potential profits of such will be going to meta and uncredited to the original authors. The idea that meta's involvement in torrenting may have let little timmy get a copy of his text book 15 seconds faster... shouldn't be the driving force here.

Double Standard!

You wouldn't download car....and then upload its stats to a centralised system

Rules for thee and not for me, plus we PROFIT off of it to boot. But none of you guys can do that. Only for Richys.

Well good news if they are successful in their arguments it can set precedent to make piracy legal.

Facebook got FBI_README.txt at the root of their DC++ share.

That's true, it's not really your problem in most areas if you don't seed, basically scraping them. If a legal person comes your way it's not good but for facebook they have lawyers. They will just say not our problem, we never hosted it, just scraped it. not many people would decide to go against facebook lawyers bc they can pay to drain you.

According to the law (the thing that determines if something is or isn’t illegal) it’s illegal. Zuck is a criminal.