Well, I guess it would be nice if we could have some precedent for the claim that downloading copyright protected information is not in itself a breach of copyright.
It makes sense from the point of view that distribution is the act protected by copyright, not the mere act of copying. If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar, but then people might start wondering how keeping something from public domain for 90 years after the author's death could possibly be about protecting the rights of the author.
"distribution is the act protected by copyright" was the rule all along in many (non-US) jurisdictions, not an American so not sure about how the US does things.
This is why you often see people getting fines for torrenting (Germany is extremely notorious for this for example), but fines for using Usenet, IPTV, streaming or book download services are a lot more rare (which doesn't mean they're nonexistent)!
Operating / selling / promoting those services is a different matter, and most sensationalist articles about "people fined for IPTV piracy" are actually about people involved with that businesss, not the users.
I even remember reading about some (European) torrenting case that was successfully defended on the grounds of something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads, but I can't find the source right now.
> something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads
You generally can't set a client to 0B/s (as zero usually means “no limit”) but I'm not sure a good¹ lawyer on the other side would let you get away with claiming glacial distribution is not still distribution. At 1Kbyte/sec (I don't know a client off the top of my head that has control down to the single byte) a 50MByte file (not unusual for a book with illustrations/photos) can be transferred in less than 15 hours, a couple of Mbyte (a plain text book, compressed or just short) in less than one hour.
There are clients that can be set to not seed at all, or you could patch a common client that way. Some that don't even offer the capability at all (some command-line wget-style tools), that would be a legally safest option IMO².
----
[1] good as in good at their job, no moral judgement implied!
[2] caveat: not a lawyer, never played one on TV, nor even in local am-dram.
It isn't worth my time or risk to test it myself, but if you disable seeding will Warner Media still send a notice to your ISP? If you set your client to 0B/s I assume it's still broadcasting hashes. I suppose if you disable that function entirely in your client there would be nothing to see.
I guess some people may be worried about actual fines, but I would assume the biggest risk to most people is getting blocked by your ISP, which in many cases requires less than the legal standard for proof of copyright infringement.
The contractors whose job is collecting lists of people downloading films generally make sure to download at least a viewable clip of the film direct from your client so it could be shown in court. "Yes, your honor, here is the evidence we retrieved direct from the defendant".
Sure, but AIUI they generally are not leading with a lawsuit, they're sending a cease and desist notice to your ISP, which doesn't require that kind of proof. Operators like Comcast won't require that to drop you - in fact they may give you a warning for simply downloading torrents at all, even if they are literally, actually, Linux ISOs.
Most commonly used clients won't let you turn off seeding, but you can indeed limit the upstream to a really low value. You can also, at the same time, seed a ton of different things, preferably quite large, to saturate your upload and make it statistically improbable to fully send a copy of any single file.
Now, based on my feeling and cases I've seen in my country I'd say that the judge would make a claim that the sheer fact of making these files available is enough.
Moreover, there were rulings stating that even if you don't have the whole torrent on your disk, but only few fragments you are already in violation.
For me, it make sense, as when a company gets caught red handed they are judged based on the inventory of stolen programs they have, not an actual usage of them.
Lastly, here in an european country, consuming pirated media (books, movies, music, etc.) is not a crime. However there are plenty of caveats:
- you can't share it, so torrenting, as mentioned, might be illegal; getting a copy of a movie on a hard drive from a friend only puts him in jepardy
- it has to be personal use, so watching it alone or with your wife is ok, but playing stolen music in a club is not; commercial use is strictly forbiden ("commercial" as in "commercial licence", so usage in context of a company, so facebook case here is strictly in violation)
- it has to be a media that's already been published somewhere (cinema, television, streaming service); pirating leaks and prereleases is strictly forbiden
- pirating software is whole different animal, since now it's not a copyright, but a breach of licence agreement
You can think about it as owning a tiny portion of "soft drugs" (like marijuana), which is legal in some countries. Selling is not.
I mistyped a letter (thanks for indirectly pointing it out, fixed) and I get this flippant response. I guess this really is reddit.My real answer is close enough, I don't need to delineate on the level of bytes.
Either way this is oedantry. My point doesn't change; it depends on what kind of book you download.
Further, compression makes this all substantially more complicated, i imagine you could compress flat text down to extreme levels using a hashtable and leveraging book specifics (lack of Unicode characters, etc).
Either way, the argument is moot, most torrent clients set a minimum upload rate of 1-5kb/s.
Intent matters. I can well imagine a judge saying something like this:
While I am satisfied it has been proven you are aware that by torrenting said files, distribution also occurred. However, I am also satisfied it has been proven that by setting a 1 byte per minute upload limit, you had taken those steps you could to limit uploads in an effort to prevent the prohibited activity. Other evidence presented to the court demonstrates you are regularly employed, that your finances are generally in order, and you have not received payment for the meagre distribution that occurred as a consequence of your behaviour.
It is my opinion that the case brough by the prosecution does not rise to the level of requiring a sentence, nor even a conviction.
I agree with you intent matters, and I agree with you that setting the upload limit to 1 byte per second shows intent, I just disagree about what intent it shows.
> This is why you often see people getting fines for torrenting (Germany is extremely notorious for this for example), but fines for using Usenet, IPTV, streaming or book download services are a lot more rare (which doesn't mean they're nonexistent)!
It’s a lot easier to find out who is torrenting than to find out who is using Usenet for example though.
With torrents you can see the IP addresses of peers. And then I suppose they ask a court to tell the ISP to say which customer had that IP addresses at that time.
With Usenet you’d have to get a court to get each Usenet provider to give you a list of all customers that downloaded a file. That seems a little bit different to me.
And who knows, in the case of the torrents maybe they don’t always even need to get a court involved. With all of the data brokers out there, maybe there are lists you can buy of real people tied to different IP addresses and when you have a match you send a threatening letter telling them to pay up or they will take you to court?
This process of checking seeding peers to reporting an IP to an ISP to them send a user a nastygram is pretty automated. Torrent a Nintendo game (not even that new of one) and you will get an ISP nastygram within minutes.
Not sure if this is just misinformed, or anti-Germany/EU propaganda? Either way, not true.
In Germany, if you torrent something without protection of a VPN, you may receive a letter from a blood-sucking legal firm within a week or two, with a fine that can be argued down somewhat.
I'm sure the OP meant "knock on your door" figuratively. And refers to exactly what you say, those leechy law firm letters. In that sense it's entirely true.
If you’re torrenting and you happen to get caught, you will receive a letter from some copyright lawyer with a fine of X amount as well as a cease and desist.
The only knock on your door is the mail delivery man
What? No, you will not. You could get fined for seeding some popular stuff, but even then no one is knocking on your door, it'll probably come in the form of a letter, and even then it's not a guarantee.
I lived in Germany. At least back then it was definitely a letter. They were not very good at it, though, and I received one for torrenting large open source software.
I wonder if people could form a nonprofit that starts torrenting public domain media or open source software as a honeypot to find these firms and bury them in legal procedures. I'd gladly donate to such a nonprofit.
Downloading used to be legal here. Now it is explicitly not anymore. Because why not if you can squeeze some extra money from end users who would have never bought your item for the insane prices asked.
With "here", you mean Germany? Are you sure? Last time I looked into these things (granted, in 2022 or so), seemed to me that for example using Stremio with a torrent add-on would risk a fine in Germany, but using a Debrid service (that torrents in your name and you just do a direct download like e.g. is done in Youtube) would be free of risks or legal threats. I'm not in Germany though, so I didn't research it much further. Just out of curiosity.
> "distribution is the act protected by copyright" was the rule all along in many (non-US) jurisdictions, not an American so not sure about how the US does things.
I am pretty sure this is false. It is just that distribution carries heavier sentences and is easier to discover, not unlike with drug dealing.
It is not legal, anywhere, to (for example) borrow a DVD from someone, copy it, and give the original back. In some jurisdictions you have a right to backups, and a right to resale, but you emphatically do not have a right to privately copy.
> It is not legal, anywhere, to (for example) borrow a DVD from someone, copy it, and give the original back. In some jurisdictions you have a right to backups, and a right to resale, but you emphatically do not have a right to privately copy.
If the DVD doesn't have strong DRM (which is pretty rare, CSS counts as strong DRM) you are allowed to make a private copy in Finland. There is a levy on various storage mediums to compensate private copying. I believe there are similar laws in other countries based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
I'm not 100% sure if strictly downloading from illegal source makes downloader liable for damages, as far as I know in all court cases there was seeding involved (in Finland).
Of course the levy is somewhat questionable these days since pretty much everything has strong DRM (as bar is very low) and thus you are not allowed to make copies. The authors who protect their work with strong DRM still get part of the levies though.
Sorry, I may be missing something. Can you please clarify:
>you often see people getting fines for torrenting
>fines for using [...] are a lot more rare
Are you saying something kind of like, "When you torrent, you are also distributing that copyrighted information, which is often prosecuted, but simply procuring that information (without redistribution) is not." Or is it something different?
For example: in America, it is completely legal to buy, sell, and own a radar detector. Radar detectors are used to "detect" when the police use radar to catch speeding motorists. In spite of it being legal to own a radar detector, it is illegal to actively use a radar detector for its intended purpose. There are various reasons I have heard for this, but the most common was that the components of the device itself is not illegal, and picking up those signals are not illegal (because they are targeted at the public) but the reason and intent to use one is to commit a crime, and the use of a device in the assistance of committing an offense (speeding) is illegal. It's this kind of weird grey area, where you can possess the thing, but can't use it for the reason you (likely) bought it for.
Is it kind of like that? Like, you can possess copyrighted material that you have not paid for (for whatever justification), but actively sharing that copyrighted material without authorization, is criminal? If so, does that mean that lots of Germans simply don't seed illegal torrents?
"Attached to the core rights of free speech and free press are several peripheral rights that make these core rights more secure. The peripheral rights encompass not only freedom of association, including privacy in one's associations, but also, in the words of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), "the freedom of the entire university community", i.e., the right to distribute, the right to receive, and the right to read, as well as freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, and freedom to teach.[144]"
"The United States Constitution protects, according to the Supreme Court in Stanley v. Georgia (1969), the right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, and to be generally free from governmental intrusions into one's privacy and control of one's thoughts.[145]"
"As stated by the Court in Stanley: 'If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.'[146]"
The US Constitution grants congress the power to give authors and inventors time-limited exclusive rights to their works/discoveries (Art1.S8.C8). This moots the 1st amendment argument.
I don't think that authors having exclusive rights to their works necessarily implies that someone else _receiving_ them is legally culpable though. My admittedly naive thinking is that someone distributing something illegally doesn't necessarily imply that the receiver is also committing crime. If Robin Hood steals a fancy 4K TV from the mansion downtown and gives it to his neighbor as a birthday gift, would the neighbor be guilty of a crime as well? Does the answer change if Robin Hood were instead the owner of the mansion next door (who could plausibly be the owner of the TV) and gives it to his less wealthy childhood friend?
I'm not saying that either of these situations are directly analogous to the distribution of copyrighted works (since among other things, I don't think there's any way to buy a TV without being able to freely give it to someone else), but that it's not immediately obvious to me that the illegality in distribution has to be symmetric, and that there might be a coherent legal argument that people having the right to _receive_ information isn't inconsistent with the only people with the right to transmit it refusing to allow it. The part of the Constitution (edit: Supreme Court opinion; not actually the Constitution itself) quoted above doesn't seem to say anything about the right to share anything, just to receive it.
your TV example is a bad example for discussions around copyright — how does one copy a TV?
a more pertinent example to the main topic at hand
i download a file onto my PC. in doing so i have made a copy of that file onto my PC.
if that file is a copyrighted work, e.g. a musical work, i have reproduced the work by downloading it. i have copied it. streaming music is covered by copyright for the same reason - a copy is transferred onto your device because you clicked on a button. the act of copying, or reproducing, the work is the bit that matters.
the distributor (spotify/apple) just gave me access to their original copy to make my own, new, copy. distribution is covered, but slightly different as it is facilitating others to infringe copyright (if i’m pirating music).
in your TV example, a closer idea would be if i 3D printed a new TV based on a patented design. probably not allowed to do it (i don’t know patent law) but who’s gonna enforce it? no one knows about it.
if i start selling my 3D printed TVs, well, i should probably get a lawyer sharpish.
—
also, isn’t knowingly receiving stolen goods a crime? so receiver of the TV in your example could be charged with a crime if it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt that they knew it was stolen?
> If Robin Hood steals a fancy 4K TV from the mansion downtown and gives it to his neighbor as a birthday gift, would the neighbor be guilty of a crime as well?
In this specific example, probably yes.
> Does the answer change if Robin Hood were instead the owner of the mansion next door
Yes, it does. The main problem here is that Robin Hood is well known to obtain everything he has in the world by stealing it.
If Robin Hood sees a nice painting hanging in the castle, then commands a genie to create an exact brush-stroke-by-brush-stroke replica that is identical to the original in every way, then gives the replica to his neighbor as a birthday gift, has any crime even occurred?
In this situation, the noble does not own the painting, so much as they possess it and have only been granted a license to privately view it, not a license to show it to others, and further license only to reproduce it for their own personal archival purposes - Robin Hood did not have license to view the painting, and the genie did not have license to reproduce it
but now that the reproduction exists, does it carry the same license with it, and should the neighbor be held responsible for the original violation of the license, when all they’ve done is receive an illegally produced copy?
Should the owner if the original painting be held responsible for failing to prevent it from being illegally viewed and copied?
>In this situation, the noble does not own the painting, so much as they possess it and have only been granted a license to privately view it, not a license to show it to others, and further license only to reproduce it for their own personal archival purposes
What is the point of making such an "analogy"? Might as well say the noble has a copy of Die Hard in their DVD collection.
> an exact brush-stroke-by-brush-stroke replica that is identical to the original in every way
Yes, forgery is a crime in many jurisdictions, and in some it does not matter whether or not you are transparent about it being such -- specifically for copyright/trademark reasons.
Forgery would require trying to pass off the copy as an original. As long as it is not pretending to be something it isn't, it is just a replica, not a forgery.
Without taking a stand on whether this _should_ be illegal or not, but whether it _is_, I could imagine that a legal system might want to give the painter a way to get income for a limited time by distributing copies of the painting, and that copying it in this way would infringe upon those rights. In this case though, I'd argue that the modern analogue of this would be Robin Hood getting invited over to watch a movie with the noble (which would be allowed!) and then secretly burning a copy of the DVD when the noble went to the bathroom. Our current legal system doesn't consider "I didn't know what I was doing was illegal" to be a valid defense, so Robin Hood would still be committing a crime by sharing the DVD further after he's copied it. (Since we don't have genies in real life, I don't know how the law would consider them culpable, but based on my very limited knowledge of genie lore, my guess is that the amount of free will they have in this situation is about the same as the DVD burner, so they probably would be okay from the perspective of the law?)
Interestingly, I think that the more direct analog to what we have today would be if the noble themself had the genie copy the painting and gift it to their friend Robin Hood. I do think the same logic I gave above ultimately applies to whether our current legal system would allow the artist to enforce exclusivity, but I find it a lot more compelling as an argument about whether it _should_ be allowed or not compared to the hypothetical you gave. In your version of it, it doesn't feel like allowing what Robin Hood did is particularly beneficial to society, but in the version where the noble is an enthusiastic participant in the copying, it seems a lot more like outlawing it would lead to some harmful dynamics (like you mention about whether the noble bears responsibility for protecting access to the painting based on obtaining it). In other words, having a system where the artist is allowed to enforce his exclusive distribution rights universally actually seems _less_ problematic to me at first glance than one that only applies to those who sign an agreement when purchasing the paintings.
To put this in terms of torrenting, my naive understanding is that right now, it's definitively considered illegal to seed protected content, and the question is whether it's legal to download it without seeding or not. I actually think that it would be worse to allowing downloading without allowing seeding as well, so the system that Meta is arguing for would be worse than if what they did is also illegal. However, I'm honestly not sure if they're actually right or not about what the law says, and that's why I brought up the hypotheticals I did. I also honestly don't feel confident in my feelings on whether I'd prefer to ban both seeding and downloading protected content or to eliminate the legal protections entirely and allow both, but it doesn't seem like that's actually the legal question at the heart of the current matter.
Once you tell someone a secret, you need to be prepared to beat them up if they share it. — dad, 1996
This gives you the right “to beat them up” but not the right to learn a secret. You can take a patent and build that thing in your house. The government can’t stop you, neither the inventor. It’s when you try to sell it that they can come after you.
I don't think it'd hold up, but one could argue that the first amendment was an amendment, and thus changed the constitution, and therefore removed that ability of congress.
The amendments protect the rights as they existed at the time the amendment was passed. I.e. how would the plain text of the text be interpreted by a reasonable person in 1791. E.g., re 2nd, what did militia mean?
Thus, the 1A locks in speech rights as they existed in 1791. Because there was no right to slander, or threaten, or commit treason, or "share" in 1791, Congress retained the power to regulate.
>Because there was no right to slander, or threaten, or commit treason, or "share" in 1791, Congress retained the power to regulate.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and intentions of the constitution. Slander and fighting words are exceptions to the first amendment that were determined through the legislative process.
Essentially the entire US constitution is negative rights - the right to X when X means government NOT doing something. Right to freedom of movement, right to freedom of religion, right to freedom of speech, right to privacy - these are restrictions on government to protect the liberties of the people. And then you come to the tenth amendment -
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
It seems abundantly clear from even a cursory analysis that the founders explicitly designed the constitution to limit and restrict the power of a centralized federal government, as treasonous, violent disregard for a powerful centralized federal government is quite literally the premiere founding principle baked into the US's history.
Congress has zero power whatsoever whenever they lack the consent of the goverened. The functional legitimacy of the entire federal government is near zero - we're living in the orwellian nightmare where the military industrial complex more or less runs the entire show from behind the scenes - something Eisenhower tried to warn us about over half a century ago.
> Slander and fighting words are exceptions to the first amendment that were determined through the legislative process.
The legislative process can't make exceptions to constitutional provisions. These were recognized as not covered by first amendment protections by jurisprudence, not legislation.
"In interpreting this text, we are guided by the principle that “[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.” United States v. Sprague, 282 U. S. 716, 731 (1931) ; see also Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, 188 (1824). Normal meaning may of course include an idiomatic meaning, but it excludes secret or technical meanings that would not have been known to ordinary citizens in the founding generation." District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008).
Interpreted as an ordinary voter would have interpreted it.
>It seems abundantly clear from even a cursory analysis that the founders explicitly designed the constitution to limit and restrict the power of a centralized federal government, as treasonous, violent disregard for a powerful centralized federal government is quite literally the premiere founding principle baked into the US's history.
Which is why we immediately replaced a loose federation of Strong States with a new government built around an explicitly empowered and strengthened federal government?
The idea that the constitution was built around a very weak federal government is wrong. The founders built a weak federal government, immediately ran into problems with it, and immediately those same founders built a new government with a strong federal government with EXPLICIT and CLEAR authority and supremacy over the states on certain things.
For example, modern conservatives often decry how the federal supremacy on interstate commerce is used to regulate interstate commerce, but the commerce clause was built to tear down all possible protectionism and trade barriers states had erected amount themselves. The strong federal government was also built explicitly to be a single strong bloc for trade negotiations.
There were plenty of anti-federalists around during this time. They got to air their complaints and opinions. Nobody listened to them because the articles of confederation, and the loose, weak federal government it built was just that useless and broken. The founders literally tore up the government to make a new one without the authorization to do so because there was no stability, no long term hope for the existing one.
I would expect it to be argued by defendants that since no man (or indeed woman) at Meta actually read the books that were torrented, the First Amendment does not apply here. The question is: does the First Amendment apply to an algorithm?
> The question is: does the First Amendment apply to an algorithm?
No. The first amendment explicitly applies to Congress; by extension it applies to the policy-making authority of the federal government generally, and via the 14th amendment, it applies to the states.
It prohibits the abridgment of freedom of speech by government institutions, without distinction as to the identity of the speaker or the content of the speech.
A bit off-topic, but I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship but are perfectly OK with advertising and other forms of propaganda (from social media editorializing, bought newspapers...), that arguably do much more to "control men's minds" than censorship ever would.
It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).
> I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship
Not sure you can make this blanket statement about “Americans” any more. It seems like an increasing number are fine with censorship when they aren’t the ones being censored.
I know, I have friends and family in America. It was just a fun thought I had in my head for a while. I should have added a "Some americans..." in my comment. Sorry for the blanket statement.
It's very simple, Americans believe that the individual is responsible for themselves while most of the rest of the world wants to be "protected" by a restrictive government. One leads to innovation and one stifles it. We would rather be responsible for discovering the truth on our own, than trust a central authority to decide what is and isn't true(or propaganda). I find it funny how Europeans think their governments are protecting them from propaganda instead of drowning them in propaganda.
Heh. This is not the month to be making that argument.
I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.
I honestly believe we'd be better off with informational hygiene standards, too. The last two decades have taught me this lesson - free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society, and when you find a security hole that big, you patch it.
I recognize there's a balance to be found, and reasonable people will disagree on where the tipping point is.
>free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society
How does this work? What danger represents freedom of speech? With lack of it dangers is understandable: it is a giant "welcome" sign for bloody totalitarian dictatorship.
If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you (which is one of the things that free speech absolutists generally argue for), then you will have no way of knowing if what you buy is going to kill you.
I don't know any "free speech absolutists" who argue that fraud should be legal. Misrepresentation of a product or service you're selling is fraud. We already have laws against that.
This has actually been a fairly common position among American libertarians. Alan Greenspan, for instance, was strongly against fraud laws until some time after the financial crisis. The idea was that the market would sort it out.
(And no, I don't understand how this is a serious position that serious people can seriously hold, but then that is how I feel about libertarianism in general.)
The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central planning organizations on the planet for so long. If central planning is libertarian then I'm a blue whale.
The term "free market" gets misused just as much. It's not a free market if the government (or the Fed, which is just an arm of the government) has its thumb on the scales.
> I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.
And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.
Also, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food, I've got some oceanfront property in North Dakota I'd like to sell you. You do know, don't you, that antibiotics in your beef, for example, is done all the time in factory farming with government approval?
You included in your argument at least one bad thing that, as I pointed out, is not only not stopped by government regulation, it's explicitly permitted by it. The fact that there was a bad thing that happened before government regulation, which a government regulation was then passed to try to prevent, doesn't make your argument valid.
>And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.
Sure, with reduced life expectancy. If you're fine dying out in your 30's, maybe 40's at best you can eat whatever you want. Your body is pretty resilient to poison short term.
>, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food
Extremist takes aren't doing you a favor here. Like I just said, we can resist a surprising about of poisons short term. Many people indulge in alcohol after all. We have no need to strive for "all bad things" out of our food.
> And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards
Narrator: "Most humans didn't survive past year five due to preventable illnesses and food born contamination, the humans' ancestor's infant mortality rate was rather high before the age of food safety and soap".
Sadly very true, I hope the hostility American officials recently showed toward our values and institutions will prompt them to do something. Not to mention America siding with Putin a few days ago.
This approach is great in theory, the problem is: it does not scale. We are bombarded with a lot of information in the news, ads, social media, and average individual does not have enough time (not to mention access to information, or intelligence to interpret it) to fact check everything on their own. "The last man who knew everything" lived in early 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Man_Who_Knew_Everythi...
You don't need to fact check the torrent of information you describe. You can just ignore it. None of it is worth the time and effort to fact check anyway. You don't need any of that information to make the decisions you need to make in your daily life.
If you want to argue that you need to fact check all that information to, for example, decide how to vote in elections, none of that information is of any value for that purpose either, because it's basically all propaganda at this point. There are no "independent" sources of information that you can trust, other than your own eyeballs and brain. (Possibly you are lucky enough to have some friends and family whose eyeballs and brain you can also trust.)
First of all, there's a difference between facts and understanding. Thomas Young may have understood the wave theory of light, but he could say nothing with certainty about Queen Victoria's underwear. Secondly, it's getting easier to understand everything, because ideas are becoming more powerful. We are however bombarded with facts, that part is true.
Not even most Americans believe that. I would say paradoxically we have a slice of folks who want liberty from the government and also have plenty of government protections.
Then there is the "liberty at all costs" types, the fringe of which idolizes the David Koresh lifestyle.
There are plenty of folks who also think it is OK to ruin someone's entire life if they post something sexist to Twitter.
Americans are not so easily generalized; they come in many flavors.
Seeing how almost everyone here in France despises our current government, I don't think this propaganda you mention is very effective, if it's as present as you claim.
Meanwhile money basically dictates who gets elected on your side of the pond, whith billionaires being crazy over-represented in your political offices, despite being a tiny minority in your population.
Also, the people advocating for smaller government are often on board with executive power consolidation and increased police and army funding, so I think it's little more than a stance.
You can't "discover the truth" on your own, no one can. Are you able to go everywhere something happens in the wordl to get a first hand account of the event and then build your own conclusions? Of course not, you rely on media (social or legacy) to digest the facts for you, and they might (and do) influence you and how you think about the world. It can't be another way, so fighting obvious lies isn't a bad thing in my book.
Author rights wouldn’t be an accurate term. Copy rights do not necessarily belong to the author, even when they are alive. Distribution rights or “distrights” would make more sense for your argument.
They are called "authorship rights" in Polish. While the right to distribute or make copies doesn't aleways belong to the author they always originate from author. And some are even non transferable or revocable, like the right to say "I, <my chosen name>, made this thing"
In some jurisdictions (e.g. Germany) "copyright" belongs exclusively to the author/creator and is non-transferrable, the German word for "copyright" (Urheberrecht) also literally translates to "author's right"). So instead of transferring copyright to an entity (e.g. the employer) you only grant an "exclusive, transferrable and unrestricted" license to that entity, essentially prohibiting you from using it without their permission while technically still retaining that right. This is also why CC0 exists as a substitute for a public domain declaration because in these jurisdictions it is literally impossible to transfer your copyright to the public domain.
In Germany copyright law there is actually one provision for the real transfer of copyright: death. So as far as copyright is concerned, the transfer of copyright requires literally death of the author - which might get a chuckle out of people into media studies.
Copy in copyright is not copy like copy in copying some data.
Copy in copyright is a term for the actual writing that gets published on ads, or magazines, or in a news paper. "I need to get the copy from marketing for this campaign." "The editor hasn't approved the copy for the article yet."
Typically, people not in/around the industry aren't familiar with the term, which leads to the confusion.
The word “copy” in the early 1700s when copyright was codified in law meant both a written text and a reproduction of a written text. The meaning you’re using, of text at an intermediate stage of a publishing process, is much later, 19th century. [0] So, the original meaning was a noun (the right to make “a copy” of a book) but meant the book itself, not the abstract text of the book. It would be interesting to research whether there were any rulings in that period about hand-copying a book, which was the only alternative to printing it.
Nowadays of course copyright covers much more than text, and includes such “copies” as the public performance of a theatrical work or reproduction of a sculpture, so the modern copyright clearly doesn’t have the meaning you’re using.
Any proof that the word copyright was intentionally referring to the noun instead of the verb? The British Statute of Anne in 1710, the first copyright statute, definitely referred to the act of copying a book, not some abstract concept of writing samples.
I always thought that ad copy also came from copy as in copy some data. Like it's the words that get copied when the media is replicated for distribution, as opposed to words that are for some internal communication purpose.
The use of the noun copy probably came from the act of copying, but both uses predated the word copyright, so that doesn't really help answer the question.
This sounds completely false to me. Do you have a reference for it?
In particular, the original Statute of Anne (the first law establishing a copyright) is officially titled:
> An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Copies, during the Times therein mentioned
No doubt people used the word "copy" in the sense you mean, but "copy" in "copyright" is absolutely about copying as in copying some data.
"Well, I guess it would be nice if we could have some precedent for the claim that downloading copyright protected information is not in itself a breach of copyright."
According to Meta's motion the claim about "seeding" (cf. the claim about removing CMI) relates to Cal Penal Code 502(c), the "Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act".
Whether the data accessed is "copyright protected information" is irrelevant to section 502(c). 502(c)(2) applies to "any data".
None of his corporations is a media one, and his social media company probably has some vague interest in not having too much enforcement of copyright.
Actually this is something that has always perplexed me about corporations that want to meddle in our government. Obviously they must know that it is going to involve the government following the interest of… some corporation. The voters are pretty fickle and having the government work for your competition seems like a pretty rough spot.
I guess it is like a prisoner’s dilemma type thing or something.
> ...then people might start wondering how keeping something from public domain for 90 years after the author's death could possibly be about protecting the rights of the author.
That's the best part, it's forever copyright! Because the creators are corporations that never die, or a huge number of humans, whomever dies last.
Went the opposite direction here. Copying things for personal use was always legal in Sweden, with some exceptions (notably software, since 1986). That law was amended in 2005 (because of The Pirate Bay, presumably) to say that you are no longer allowed to make a copy from an illegally distributed copy. So if someone is illegally sharing something on the internet you are not allowed to download it.
Sweden is always an edge case - education especially. It’s got a population of 10 million people. My metroplex area in DFW has half that with 75% more diversity. Sweden is cool but a terrible reference point for anything other than homogeneous social studies.
AFAIK, in the US it’s literally about copying. In fact, case law mostly supports the position that just the act of copying a program from disk into memory to run it is protected by copyright (with some statutory exceptions). (Google “RAM copy doctrine”.)
That’s my understanding as well. Duplicating the bytes of a file when you don’t have the rights to the content is technically infringement and grounds for an infringement claim, and then you have to explain in court why it’s “fair use.”
I remember back in the day when hefty penalties for torrenting music were in the news, they would erroneously describe it as penalties for “downloading” music. I suppose this was intentional in order to spook usenet users, etc.
>If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar
Man, that's such an ignorant type of thing to say. Copy does not only mean the act of making a duplicate. Copy also means the words/text directly. Terms like copy editor refer to those that make edits to the copy=>words/text, not those that make edits to the duplicates. Maybe you are unfamiliar with the use of the word in that manner, but that's not the rest of the world's problem. That's a limited knowledge problem on your end.
Even in the "rules" of copyright, you're allowed to make copies. Back in the days of the olds being young and in school, we had to go to places called libraries to look things up. We could pay the librarians to make copies of things for us to take home to use in whatever task we were assigned. The fee wasn't for any kind of rights usage, but simply to cover the library's expense in providing that copy to you.
It's amazing how quickly information is lost from the lack of use
> Man, that's such an ignorant type of thing to say. Copy does not only mean the act of making a duplicate. Copy also means the words/text directly. Terms like copy editor refer to those that make edits to the copy=>words/text, not those that make edits to the duplicates. Maybe you are unfamiliar with the use of the word in that manner, but that's not the rest of the world's problem. That's a limited knowledge problem on your end.
Do you think freedom of the press involves the right to make any kind of juice you want?
Why do you think that the meaning "text" is relevant to the element in copyright? The fact that a word has a particular sense doesn't mean that that sense appears in every use of the word.
And in this case we know that copyright refers to the production of copies, not of copy:
> the Statute of Anne is formally titled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Copies, during the Times therein mentioned"
Both the headline and the theme of the story are incorrect and misleading. Meta isn’t claiming that everything they’re doing is lawful. They’re claiming that their activities don’t run afoul of a particular California state law, CDAFA, and section 1202(b)(1) of the DMCA.
It’s very common in litigation for the plaintiff to accuse the defendant of every violation they might be guilty of or liable for (“throwing the book at them”), and for defendants then to systematically try to strip them away.
As far as I know, Meta is not yet claiming their activities were completely lawful.
Feels like their defense for some state incursion is an admission of a larger crime. I still don't get it.
I'm not going to murder someone, steal their car, then put out a statement that I was unaware the car had expired tags and I shouldn't be prosecuted for it.
Is this your first experience/exposure to the us legal system?
Defending yourself from an accusation using a hypothetical admission doesn't actually admit to it. e.g. I didn't murder anyone, and I didn't steal that car, but if even if I did murder them, and steal their car, the car's expired tags wouldn't apply to me because [reason].
If you care about justice, you want to enable every truth to come out, and be decided on. If you prohibit someone from making an argument, because it might imply something that is separate, you limit the the possible outcomes to something strictly less fair. If someone did murder a person them and took their car, they should be prosecuted for that, but just because you did commit crime a, and crime b, doesn't mean you should be convicted of crime c. Even if crime c is the least significant. That's still not just.
A YouTube video I saw talked about the charges faced by the accused killer of the United Healthcare CEO.
Aside from murder , he faced:
- criminal possession of a weapon
- illegal possession of a silencer
- illegal possession of an automatic weapon (it wasn't full auto, but somehow due to the large capacity magazine, NY state considers it an automatic weapon)
So had he used a hammer or a knife, he might be able to get out again because murderers in NYS can be out in as little as 20 years. But all the firearms charges can effectively double his sentence.
The plaintiffs do have the burden of proof, but there are many ways to Rome. Any evidence they can find, whether it be packet captures, client and server logs, incriminating emails, or even admissions, will be proffered to the court and/or jury.
Fair enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if none of those methods pan out.
1) Given the timeline, it seems unlikely that anyone was doing a packet capture.
2) Why would anyone at META have been paying attention to, or logging, which blocks were being seeded and which weren't? Who would have personal knowledge such that they could admit that transmission didn't seed the declaration of independence 6 million times?
Again, they don’t have to trace actual data flows to have sufficient evidence to convince a court or jury that Meta is in breach of the law.
Other examples of evidence include an admission from a Meta employee during a deposition that they were instructed to download a bunch of copyrighted material and the undertook the efforts to do so.
Or, perhaps the plaintiffs seized the machines used in the scheme (happens all the time following a TRO and discovery motion) and found whole copies or traces of the copyrighted works on them, or even local client logs that suggest that it was done.
The plaintiffs will, eventually, need to prove that their claim is likely true ("preponderance of the evidence" standard.) Right now they're fighting about expanding discovery to try and uncover more evidence.
> Meta responded to this complaint with a motion to dismiss. In a supporting reply filed on Tuesday, the company notes that the ‘torrenting’ allegations, relating to the removal of copyright information and the CDAFA violations, don’t hold up.
They are addressing both the second and third counts. The "Direct Copyright Infringement" isn't being addressed by these claims. This is even quoted on the filing you provided:
Isn't Meta going to be battling the full legal team of the entertainment industry with this argument? I think Meta did something stupid with this argument, because there is no way that Hollywood or the music industry is going be pleased with a precedence for legally downloading copyrighted material. They will now do everything in their power to get Meta found guilty.
Or, more likely, drop the case to avoid establishing a precedent.
Sounds like Meta are banking on the entertainment industry looking at it and deciding that the risk of losing this case is too high given Meta’s almost infinitely deep pockets to mount a legal defence.
Awesome. And just to be clear, Meta will walk away scot-free, but Billy Torrent is definitely still going to be fined $500,000 if he pulls down "Sleeping Beauty" from 1959.
I love the idea. The problem is that we never even tried to establish some standard licensing system that encourages rewarding the creator while using their copyright. Most people would rather work around and re-invent a slightly bumpoer wheel.
So, if Meta were found to have been seeding or making copyrighted materials available to others without permission, that's a slam dunk, I think.
But Meta's contention is 'you don't have any proof of that'.
I think there is enough existing case law and ambiguity in the law as it's written that Meta stand a reasonable (although not a good) chance of being able to argue that they did not commit any crime because a.) they did not create the infringing copy (or that the infringing copy that they received was a technical copy, and they did not create an infringing copy themselves) b.) they did not infringe for private or financial gain (the models they trained on this material were released to the public for free). There's an argument that copyright infringement occurs only upon distribution, and as far as I'm aware, there's no case law that just downloading a copy is illegal.
Meta may also be able to argue that their use of the material could be considered 'fair', as it is non-commercial, transformative, and that the use of the material does not harm the market for the original work.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not arguing about the merits of these arguments, just that they seem to me to be plausible.
> a.) they did not create the infringing copy (or that the infringing copy that they received was a technical copy, and they did not create an infringing copy themselves)
Copyright protects against making copies of the work, which they definitely did.
> There's an argument that copyright infringement occurs only upon distribution
Not in most countries. Certainly not in America.
> b.) they did not infringe for private or financial gain (the models they trained on this material were released to the public for free).
They definitely gained from it. If their argument rests on that then they're screwed.
> Meta may also be able to argue that their use of the material could be considered 'fair', as it is non-commercial, transformative, and that the use of the material does not harm the market for the original work.
Probably their best bet but it's hard to see how that would fly given that it is commercial even if they released it for free, and fair use normally depends on how much of the work you use; they used all of everything.
They don't want to win, they want to reach a settlement where they admit no wrongdoing, but agree to pay some medium-large fee that establishes a precedent.¹ That fee is essentially trivial to Meta, but becomes an effective moat against new upstart rivals. The possibility of losing everything is the stick they wield to encourage the copyright owners to agree to accept only a medium-large fee.
¹ Not necessarily a formal legal precedent, but at least a floor on the "market value" of access to the data
The combined market cap of Disney and Comcast (who owns NBC and the like) is about 350 billion dollars [1][2]. Facebook alone is worth about 1.7 trillion [3]. I had trouble finding exact numbers on this, but it seems like the movie industry itself in the US is worth less than $100 billion.
Facebook could simply buy most of the companies involved if they give them too much shit. We've consolidated way too much power into a few large tech companies. I don't see it very likely that Hollywood could win this.
The current admin and the judges they installed are favorable towards Zuck and antagonistic towards most of the entertainment industry. If this case is seen through (which is not likely) & Meta wins (even if via appeal to higher courts), the legal decision will likely involve a very specific carve out that says what Meta did, and only what Meta did, was fine. It will have no affect on you or me.
There's more money to make for entertainment artists in licensing their image and voice for content creation at scale (for the average joe). They need the LLM to exist, so there's no point in crying about how it was made.
The U.S. Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry is the largest in the world at $649 billion (of the $2.8 trillion global market) and is projected to grow to $808 billion by 2028 at an average yearly rate of 4.3% (PwC 2024).
Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook Inc., continues to dominate the digital landscape with impressive financial growth. In 2024, the company's annual revenue reached a staggering 164.5 billion U.S. dollars, marking a significant increase from 134.9 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year. This upward trajectory reflects Meta's ability to monetize its vast user base across multiple platforms, solidifying its position as a tech giant.
Meta already runs three of the top eight copyright-violation distribution networks.
Google paid about $1b to Viacom in the YouTube piracy dispute. That's a lot of money, but do you recall anything seriously changing when that happened?
To me, the funniest product is Beat Saber. The best VR game by far. 99% of the value is tied up in violating musician's rights. Meta saved that game. Did people stop making music? No.
This book torrenting thing is complex. The main thing plaintiffs want is discovery of the training data. It's not complicated. There's no justification for the court to block that, it's a fishing expedition yes, but one that will turn up a lot of fish. Then all AI companies will have to acquiesce to it. That is the "win" for the industry.
The unfortunate side effect is that a megacorp gets to vacuum up the sum of human knowledge for free, boil it down, and sell it back to us for a nice profit.
Google doesn't "vaccuum up" anything. Every site indexed by Google is still available without using Google at all. They are _copying_ information, not moving or removing it.
It doesn't, unless the torrent later becomes unavailable. Then the AI trained with is the only "copy" left.
If anything, the law should require that they seed their training data so that the competitive landscape converges on actual technological innovation and not moat building through data destruction.
Perhaps. However, information won't be produced, if the already tenuous financial positions of authors is removed.
Things should be free, as in speech, not as in beer. Especially in this case. The giants of Silicon Valley could in fact purchase these rights.
Few authors care about people personally enjoying a product through otherwise means. They do care about mass distribution without attribution, without royalty, and without regard.
That's fine and dandy as part of a free as in beer ethos. When 'information' wants to pad the quarterly earnings statement of a gigantic corporation that exists only by grinding the suffering of fellow humans into a fine marketable paste I am somewhat less sympathetic. Information should be free. To people, for non-commercial use.
I still own my content. Google links to it and sends me traffic. We both win. This sort of relationship is not present when my content is anonymously fed into a training model intended to be used to extract users before they are sent to me. And, yes, I am aware Google has pulled some cute shit with this definition, and when they do it then it's also bad.
Used to, but more recently it's probably LLM agents using Google not people. And even if it's not yet, it will be. Last time I searched for something on Google it messed up so bad I quickly returned to GPT-4o+search.
How long before a handful of entities, having already ingested the available content into their proprietary systems, bankroll assaults on Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.
a) Meta are (so far) releasing their models for free.
b) There's nothing stopping non-mega-corps from doing the same, especially if this precedent was established. (Training is of course expensive but this is a challenge, not an absolute block.)
Not sure if he has the power to, and if everyone else will let him, but some EOs opening up the copyright system would be very welcome. There are already some things he's done around this:
After all, the main people hurt would be Hollywood, which is run by people supporting the Democrats. And it would be popular with many voters (not an issue for Trump but it is for Republicans).
Probably no need. Elon Musk already did that. And one of his companies just published a shiny new version of grok. I wonder where they get their training material. I'm sure it's all just tweets and no stashes of ebooks or other material got downloaded in some way or otherwise fell of the proverbial wagon.
Historically, copyright cases fell in favor of big media corporations based on the notion that they were very rich and powerful and could fight things endlessly, bribe/lobby politicians, and cause laws to be changed (e.g. the DMCA).
However, AI companies are wealthier still. Some have revenues exceeding the GDPs of most countries. Surely, rich enough to outright buy out some of these media companies. At which point it would stop being copyright infringement because they'd own the copyrights. I'm sure some other arrangement will be found that is less mutually disruptive than a lot of court cases. Both sides are making too much money for anything else to happen. Forget about small book publishers making much of a difference here.
As the richest man on Earth, with multiple investigations into him by various government agencies shown us, nothing is desperate with billions of dollars "in the bank".
"Plagiarize, let no one else's work evade your eyes. Remember why the good lord made your eyes, so don't shade your eyes but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize !" ~ Me
Plagiarism is claiming credit for work that is not yours: it is entirely different from a breach of copyright. You can breach copyright without plagiarism, and you can plagiarise without breaching copyright.
This is actually genius from the lawyers of meta. In this way they are pushing the onus onto the question of "what is illegal in regards to torrenting copyright content".
They have the money and legal team to push it to any conclusion, but that conclusion would risk so many huge industries in the Us that too many parties would be effected. That would incentivize companies to drop this case against meta and the status quo can continue.
I'm under absolutely zero illusion this will set some precedent for one way or the other. It's too valuable to too many people involved.
Can someone, self representing, and with the very intention to lose, keep going this battle? I don't know, there are 70tb of books, could someone who had published under their name carry on independently?
Anybody can sue anybody, and this someone in your example would likely have standing, so why not?
A single person self representing against a company that is essentially one of the largest law firms on the planet, and can outspend them tens of thousands times over - what's to be gained?
In the Netherlands, for individuals at least, it's legal to download copyrighted works, but not to upload or seed. I don't know if that applies to corporations.
Yes, it will just turn into another proof that if you're rich enough you can get away with anything in this country. The rule of law is three times gone and never coming back.
>This torrent list is the “ultimate unified list” of releases by Anna’s Archive, Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, and others. By seeding these torrents, you help preserve humanity’s knowledge and culture. These torrents represent the vast majority of human knowledge that can be mirrored in bulk.
>These torrents are not meant for downloading individual books. They are meant for long-term preservation. With these torrents you can set up a full mirror of Anna’s Archive, using our source code and metadata (which can be generated or downloaded as ElasticSearch and MariaDB databases). We also have full lists of torrents, as JSON.
This sets a hilarious precedent where downloading torrents becomes completely fine. You can just cite this case if they win - even though we are talking about books the MPAA is probably going to have an opinion here.
You're typical 19 year old doesn't have a team of elite lawyers to argue for her when she torrents Game of Thrones.
Expect Meta to "win" as in the plaintiffs just give up and calculate it's not worth pursuing. It would stun me if they even settle.
Not to mention the LLMs themselves are creating unauthorized copies of copywriten content. But again, Meta has unlimited money. Different rules for them.
I think you’re right but I don’t think this is the case in the US? I’ve certainly read many stories over the years of the hammer coming down on downloading on its own.
I'm a little confused about how is it supposed to work otherwise? Do I have an obligation as an internet user to ascertain if a website owner whose website I visit has the all the rights to all the media that the website contains (presumably also working out whatever jurisdictional issues come up)?
Like how do you know that (say) Netflix actually has the right to stream you every show that they do? And how do you know that some random ad supported website doesn't?
It's a difference of intent. Paying Netflix as an individual with the intention and expectation of watching content legally is very different to torrenting terabytes of pirated books on company laptops for training a commercial AI to replace those writers, and employees even expressing concern over its ethics on recorded communication
So your position is that it is illegal for me to watch a movie on Netflix that they don't have the rights to? Just that I wouldn't be prosecuted because I didn't intend to break the law? Unless perhaps I knew they didn't have the rights to it but watched it anyway?
Copyright infringement is a strict liability offence, so not having intent isn't a defense.
However, in this scenario you'd very likely have a good "innocent infringement" defense, which would allow the judge to lower the statutory damages to as low as $200. Since the damages available are so low it wouldn't be worth suing over.
It's an argument made in bad faith to basically send a message to the claim bringers that "hey, we have enough money and time to push this argument all the way, want to try us?".
It's today and everyone on HN still should side with them.
It's a travesty that we let the RIAA and MPAA sue defenseless kids and elderly for impossibly large sums, forced them to settle out of court to avoid expensive legal fees, and then use those acts of terrorism to establish the insane idea that filesharing was tantamount to "theft" or should be restricted.
I hope Meta wins. I hope we see a reversal of the attacks on fair use and the end of abusive fraudulent DMCA takedowns, and I'm happy to finally have a powerful ally in the resistance against oppression from the copyright cartel.
11 years ago the EU made the Netherlands change their position: https://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-fi... AFAIK this is still the case - the Netherlands is more poorly-enforced than other EU countries, but it's still illegal to download pirated material.
No, it is not your right to copy! If you want to keep using euros and have free travel to other Eurozone countries, you need to respect EU law. The tax does not respect EU law because it makes no effort to actually offset losses to copyright holders.
Your comment doesn't even make sense! The intention was never to make piracy okay, it was to offset a tiny fraction of the financial losses. These financial losses are still occurring even now that piracy is formally illegal, so the tax is still justified.
More generally this seems a form of freeloading: picking the parts of the EU that you like, ignoring the parts that don't. Who cares about society, it's just me me me. Pure selfishness.
Not sure what you're on about but it was permitted by law, and the tax exists because of that reason. The EU bullied the NL into changing some laws (which aren't enforced), but the NL is still charging this tax.
None of that really has anything to do with me, I'm not a bureaucrat. But they chose to still tax me, so as far as I'm concerned I have the moral right to download as much as I want.
Anyway, feel free to lobby the NL to drop this tax and then we can talk.
Why do we have to play this purity game where we take a situation, remove context, and wag our finger at each other?
There's an ENORMOUS difference between college students pirating some movies or albums and the company worth $2 trillion doing it programmatically across millions of works and then reselling the laundered data.
This is a completely unserious discussion without considering context.
Yes, scale matters, a lot. I can feed my neighbor some rycin and I'm a murderer. If I poison the state's water supply with rycin and millions die, I'm not just a murderer any more. I'm now a terrorist and an entirely new set of laws apply to me. Same with blowing up my neighbors barn vs blowing up a large building. Scale matters and these "what's the difference except the scale" comments seem unconsidered or naive to me.
Depends on your jurisdiction. In Switzerland, downloading games, books, music, movies etc. for personal use is always legal even if the copy is "pirated". Work just needs to be published in any form. Dont know any other country where it works like this.
Czechia. In theory, there is a fee for every media (e.g.HDD) that is paid to OSA (authors organization) and OSA pays to authors through some distribution scheme. Since user already paid fee, downloading is OK.
This is mostly leftover before computers were a thing (think cassettes and paper copiers).
In practice, it's a racket and OSA is a mafia that doesn't pay to anyone. Also, the fees are rather small considering the the purpose (I think it's capped at ~$5 per device), but since authors don't actually get money from it(OSA practices) , it doesn't really matter.
Anyway, downloading audiovisual media is fine, seeding is not.
Sweden has something similar (except, as I mentioned elsewhere, the law was amended in 2005 to explicitly add an exception for downloads).
The Berne Convention has a special provision for this. Something about if the biggest rights organizations agree then a country can have laws that allow some free copying. So a tax on empty media (in Sweden also covering the computer hard drives and the flash memory built into phones) is used to pay off the big music and movie companies.
The weird thing is that only the biggest industries are paid off. No matter what you use your storage for, it is the big movie and music companies that receive the money. No other industries are paid off as far as I know, so most others just have to accept that their stuff is legally copied for free, without compensation (a few things like software are always illegal to copy, so those industries are not affected).
This is a common misconception: there are some exceptions for certain types of media, but for example downloading copyrighted software (including games) without authorization is not legal in Switzerland. And some of those exceptions are more constrained than others.
In South Africa (as far as I understand) it's also perfectly legal to copy stuff for personal use.
It's been a while since I've been in one, but our public libraries had coin operated photocopiers, you can just walk in, grab literally any book from the shelf, and copy away.
I think the more appropriate quote to paraphrase would be one from Dennis Hopper's character in the film Speed (1994): "Oh, no. Poor people are pirates, Jack. We are tech innovators!"
The scene where Jack climbs down the hole under the garbage can into the subway, having figured out the ransom money has moved. He tries to hold up Payne, who reveals he's holding Annie hostage.
That is definitely not their point. Their point is, quite simply, “don’t punish us, bro”. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the law in general or what it means for other people, they just want to make sure they specifically can do what they please without repercussion.
I think they try to argue around the diffrence of sharing activly (=illegal) and downloading (=valid) with this argument it does not matter if you download one book or 1 million books
On the off chance the defense succeeds I'm proven right, if the defense fails, I'm still proven right as the fine will only be a minor set back for Meta.
Maybe, but getting arrested with the FBI involved is a pretty traumatic event for a citizen. Having your company's lawyers mail back and forth with the DoJ less so.
Meta's wholescale theft, however, is pretty hard to defend, and Meta knew it. That's why they went to some lengths to hide it.
Similarly, that OpenAI whistleblower, the one whose family was calling for a murder investigation, might be alive today if it wasn't pretty well known that stealing the work of thousands/millions of people to make a for-profit imitation machine isn't exactly cool or legal.
He intended to make journal articles publicly available. They should be, as many are publicly funded, and academic publishers like Elsevier do not pay for these articles. Scientists provide them to journals. Universities, libraries, and we then have to buy back access.
An original composition based on a statistical analysis of the training data. Statistical data about a copyrighted work obviously isn't necessarily a derivative of that work. Otherwise Tolkien could sue me for telling you how many times The Lord of the Rings uses the word "the".
The industry is banking on Author's Guild v. Google to be precedent in such a way that it's functionally transformative enough to be a completely new work.
How about if I play your song at just the right speed with just the right EQ and I can get an exact reproduction of some of the songs you claim to have written? Because we can get large excerpts of exact copies of short and long form content as demonstrated clearly by the New York Times research on chatbots and their own content.
I don't know what the legal answer will be, but I believe it should be considered distribution. A model is basically a highly lossy and extremely compressed copy of its training data, available as a content-addressable database. To anthropomorphize, the model is trying to perfectly replicate its training set, its brain just isn't big enough to do so.
In germany its saver to illegally download through usenet because you don't upload and the cost a rights owner can make is only the cost of the product and not an aribrary number of (you puloaded it and created damage of x).
It doesn't make it legal at all, it just makes it no longer interesting for IP owners to sue you.
Wasn't there a ruling like a decade ago that explicitly declared storing illegal, but streaming (download to RAM) is fine as a non-redistributing client?
Of course the rights holder would have trouble proving whether you did save it, but that's a different issue.
Nonetheless its the same thing: if they can prove you watched it, the damage is small for you and because IP holders are splittered, and you didn't just watch content of one, its probably not worth it to sue you.
In fairness, I don't think Meta would have (had) any trouble paying the fair price of every book they downloaded (the price of exactly one copy) if that had been possible to do at scale.
(note; not a lawyer) It depends on if a model is a derivate work from it's source material or not. If yes, then all copyright protections come into force. If not, then the author can't rely on copyright to protect themselves.
My instinct/gut says that an AI model is a derivative work from the training data (in that it quite literally takes training data to produce a new creative output, with the "human addition" being the selection of training data to use), but there's not really clear judgements on it either way for the time being, which leaves room to argue.
The actual methodology used ("isn't an LLM like a computer reading a book for yourself?") is an irrelevant distraction in this regard. Computers aren't people and don't get that sort of protection; they're ultimately tools programmed to do things by humans and as a rule we hold humans responsible when those tools do something bad/wrong. "Computer says no" works on the small scale, but in cases like this, it's not really an adequate defense.
Or rather, that is how it should be; I think the uncomfortable truth here is that we need Congress to make laws to clarify the situation in the favor of society, and Congress does not seem willing to do that.
Doesn't synthetic data complicate this reasoning? If I train a model on synthetic data, which is not protected by copyright, I am free to do as I please. It won't even regurgitate the originals, it will learn the abstractions not memorize the exact expression, because it doesn't see it.
But it's not just supervised training. Maybe a model trained on reasoning traces and RLHF is not a mere derivative of the training set. All recent models are being trained on self generated data produced with reward or preference models.
When a model trains on a piece of text it won't derive gradients from the parts it knows, it will only absorb the novel parts. So what it takes from each example depends on the ordering of training examples. It is a process of diffing between model and text, could be seen as a form of analysis not simple memorization.
Even if it is infringement to train on protected works, the model size is 100x up to 1000x smaller than the training set, it has no space to memorize it.
The larger the training set, the less impact any one work has. It is de minimis use, paradoxically, the more you take the less you imitate.
All still pending as far as I'm aware. The only concluded lawsuit is that LAION isn't responsible for how AI companies use it's dataset and that merely providing a tagged image index isn't in and of itself copyright infringement (and that lawsuit was ruled in Germany, not the US.)
I think it is more reasonable for content owners to say what can and cannot be done with their data. After all, content is what make AI possible, and content owners could easily start their own LLM if they wanted to since a lot of it is open source now.
If we want to use data owned by others and make money with it, we can do two things:
(1) just grab the data
(2) ask the content owners
I think what is fair is closer to (2) than to (1). Especially since the data was originally intended for human consumption. What you call "training" is what another person might call "mechanized processing", and would not fall within fair use of the data.
I'm honestly at a loss here. I can't figure out what your position is.
> If we want to use data owned by others and make money with it [...] ask the content owners
So is it "no commercial use without permission" you're arguing for?
> mechanized processing
Or are you arguing that training should fall under the existing mechanical license provisions for songs? I don't think you are, because those licenses are compulsory, and you seem to want an element of choice for the copyright holder.
Ok, put the chatbots aside for the moment. If [brand new use] for a book is invented, and I buy a copy of that book and want to do [that new thing] with it, should the copyright holder of that book be able to block me?
they are not content "owners" though. they have a a copyright that regulates who can copy and distribute that data. they don't have a say how that content is used when acquired legally as long as you activity doesn't constitute a distribution.
> You assume that "training" and human learning are similar things.
No I don't. Because a human is choosing to enact the training regardless.
Just like if a human held a book up to a rock. It would be ridiculous that an author could ban a human from "training" a rock from a book. Its their book, and they can show it to a rock if they want!
Indeed. Although there is the case of owners of rights invited to come forward to receive their due, if it wasn't possible to contact them before. You probably need a proof that you made an effort though.
It's also true that anyone can go to a public library and read all the contents for free- the point is they can't further distribute them except in a highly processed form (i.e. they can distribute original products influenced by what they have read). Here the issue is the scale of both the "reading" part and of the "producing original work" part.
It's not just books; most websites technically don't allow scraping content, but most of the content on which these models trained was scraped from the web. It's legality is still an open question.
Its funny because courts are split on the making available theory since it was pushed during the napster/grokster days. So I do think this is a decent approach of attack since they are saying there can be no proof they made anything available and I'm not so sure meta wants to settle this at all.
I believe that at least in the past the entertainment industry would try to detect someone seeding a file before going after them. The idea being that someone downloading is receiving a copy (not illegal), and the act of making the copy (illegal) was done by the seeder. I'm not sure to what degree this was an established requirement vs them trying to avoid ambiguity, but my point is that this framing by Meta isn't novel. I'm not expressing a judgment on whether it's correct or if it's good.
The Open(Closed)AIs of the world have millions of dollars to spend on IP datasets.
Arguing that copyright forbids training AI models without paying authors is the moat that would prevent any hope that small labs, individuals, and open source communities can ever compete with these huge corpos.
The books and other artworks they are arguing over didn't come generated spontaneously from nowhere, and it's disingenuous to refuse sharing them to inform what is basically the worlds next currency : Intelligence. Doing so is just saying that knowledge and intelligence must belong to rich corpos only and never be democratized.
This is unexpected but Meta is basically being the good guy by giving away their research papers and models weight resulting from millions of $ of training.
The alternative to open source AI is everyone's subjugation to the oligarchists in charge of Intelligence. Copyrights holders who argue against free training of open source models from their work are morally and ethically wrong here.
I'm picturing some lawyers pulling up at the front of the court building in their clown car - a vehicle with the tight turning circle needed after all these years of hearing lawyers argue piracy is theft.
Copyright laws exist to prevent those who are not wealthy from sharing their resources with each other. That's why AI companies and now FB can get away with it, the law wasn't meant for them.
Fundamentally, the ability to share what you own is a right no government has legitimate authority to restrict. Such laws are illegitimate. Governments don't own people, they govern them. Governance is scoped within limits of authority. Even slaves and prisoners can share their food,clothing and other resources with each other, preventing them is not just inhumane but beyond the authority of slave owners and prison wardens. It boils down to this: if you own something, you can give it away for free because ownership implies authority to retain and give away the property. The right to own things can be restricted, but once ownership is allowed, no one has the authority to restrict retention or free exchange of owned resources. Governments can regulate commerce, but free exchange of resources is beyond their authority since it isn't commercial activity. Keep in mind that this is a more crucial and important concept beyond basic liberty and human rights. If you can't own stuff, nothing else matters regarding your relationship with the government. Telling you that you own stuff but then stripping away the meaning of ownership so that you don't really own stuff is a sneaky way of governments exceeding the limits of their authority.
Another sneaky and fraudulent thing is implied acceptance of licensing. Stamping a copyright notice,eula, ToS,etc.. means nothing. if You buy a book with cash, your exchange is with the person who sold it to you and You now own the book. It isn't licensed to you, it is yours to give away for free. The same concept applies to software, video, music,etc.. neither intermediaries, nor original content authors have the authority to enforce a licensing agreement or copyright over the content, unless a license agreement is required at point of sale, and even then the agreement is beyond the two participants. If you agree to a copyright license contract and purchase music, and then you give it away for free, it makes sense to get sued by the copy right owner over violation of that contract. But the person you sold it to has no obligation to honor a contract they did not enter. The government has no right to implicitly force people to enter a license agreement when they receive goods free of charge by someone. only the person who originally agreed to the contract should be held liable.
so trying to understand here. when metallica et. al. went after kids (well, i guess ppl my age all those years ago lol) for using napster and downloading their music...they made this very clear distinction right?
i'm beyond sick and tired of these large corpos arguing 'rules for thee but not for me.' unfortunately, in this country with no meaningful legislation around privacy or really, anything digital, it's a game of 'who has the slickest lawyers to pull one over on the judge/jury' it would seem.
I wasn't making a judgment on whether it is a good or a bad thing. I just did not see it coming. I was expecting lawsuits on AI will get interesting, but I did not expect this.
So openai announced once that it will cover its' clients legal costs for copyright infringement suits, wonder how it works. Either they are very cautious about where they are training or seeding the data from or there is a loophole.
It's a bluff, OpenAI and Microsoft both have an carveout in that guarantee that effectively says "if we think you deliberately did copyright infringement with our tools, we won't help you".
And of course, conveniently, if you get a copyright infringement lawsuit, they can just point to that. A company promising legal defense is only worth the paper it's written on and there's always carveouts like that, with the likelihood of them being used probably being equal to the risk the company takes on with that promise. US Copyright lawsuits having pretty extreme fines makes them fairly likely to get used.
The claim is that they "took precautions not to 'seed' any downloaded files" - that probably means blocking all upload actions which is possible with many torrent clients. They may also have used a custom hacked client that didn't even connect to other nodes that didn't claim to have 100% already.
This line of argument sounds exactly what a lot of people tried in the past when they were getting hit by claims from the media companies.
If I were to scrape Meta's information and use it to train AI chat bots, would they say "That's fine, go ahead" because I'm not sharing the raw information in another way?
I was a university student in golden age of libgen so Glass Houses and all - but it's crazy that this was approved from the top of a company that could maybe have even legally purchased the bulk of this collection without hurting quarterly returns
This lawsuit may have impact on legality of open AI models like LLAMA 3, if outcome makes it illegal this may prevent businesses utilizing these models directly in their project.
Copyright agencies that monitor torrents here have actually verified that peers offer at least one offending chunk on protocol level and the Market Court has decided it's the minimum that can be considered sharing. As far as I know, nobody has yet claimed their client has been modified to download without seeding.
That's actually really interesting, thanks for sharing.
I've genuinely been wondering if someone building these models has done exactly that, precisely after discussing with lawyers. It seems like the obvious move, legally.
Right, but did they? It being easy doesn't mean data scientists moving fast and breaking things bothered while they were already doing something illegal.
> Evidence instead shows that Meta "took precautions not to 'seed' any downloaded files," Meta's filing said. Seeding refers to sharing a torrented file after the download completes, and because there's allegedly no proof of such "seeding," Meta insisted that authors cannot prove Meta shared the pirated books with anyone during the torrenting process.
Are they actually claiming only that they didn't share after the torrent completed? Or is the journalist just confused?
My understanding with bittorrent is that normally during download you are also uploading. "Seeding" is just what the uploading part is called when you're not also downloading.
I think it is possible to download without doing any uploading at all, but I feel like the onus of proof should be on them to show that they actually did that.
You're right that torrent clients typically share during downloading, although one might limit this by limiting the upload bandwidth.
However, while we have no idea the lengths that Meta went to (or not), I suspect they have the engineering chops to fork and tweak their own 'download-only' torrent client.
But that’s not quite how the law works. Meta’s response here is “you have no evidence of any wrongdoing”.
The fact we’re even discussing this shows that there’s at least some doubt that Meta could be successfully prosecuted for downloading alone.
With regards to uploading, legally speaking, it sounds like they’re right. Generally, the presumption of innocence means that whoever’s doing the accusing carries the burden of proof, and without any evidence that Meta did anything wrong, it also sets a worrying precedent that Meta would proactively have to prove their innocence in the face of no evidence to the contrary.
I think it's possible with the optimistic unchoking feature of BT but it would be slow and rely on generous clients.
But at the end of the day I don't think Meta care enough. They see themselves as being above the law and likely didn't seed 'more than necessary' only because it didn't benefit them.
In the end it's it about the money? ie the loss to the copyright holder.
One of the reasons people sharing were gone after is you could aggregate the loss to one lawsuit - the person sharing was responsible for every lost sale - rather than chasing the thousands of individual lost sales, one at once, for each download. Not sure that actually made the best sense from a legal perspective as the sharer wasn't necessarily benefiting - but it was pushed for practical reasons.
In this case I'm assuming Meta downloaded as many pirated books as it could get it's hands on in order to avoid paying for them.
Seems common sense what they did is/should be illegal.
This amounts to a claim of fair use, since copying occurs.
Pretty disingenuous of them to make a claim that an individual user would make.
The outcome of a fair use claim by one of the world's largest corporations to ingest wholesale an entire corpus and use it for commercial purposes is probably not the same as one by an individual person who wanted to watch a movie.
It's not the same use, and is much more likely to be found unfair.
So not only did they pirate all those books, they were also jerks about it? Meta's seeding ratio would've gotten them kicked off of most private trackers back in the day.
Yeah, the difficulty of tracking is a huge factor. Plus, with torrenting, the "making available" part is pretty blatant. With Usenet or direct downloads, it's a grayer area unless you're running the server. I've always wondered about the legal nuances of just passively receiving copyrighted data – like if a misconfigured server pushes something to you without you requesting it.
The law doesn't punish those who break it. It punishes those who can't afford expensive legal teams and those who hurt people who can afford expensive legal teams.
Meta may not be re-seeding the titles in the original form, but Meta ARE definitely redistributing the content in altered form — it is the specific intent of their bulk-downloading — to ingest the content into their LLM to redistribute it as their product.
The question I see for someone sitting in the judge's chair is whether this is fair use, sufficient alteration to constitute a new work, or a derivative work requiring compensation.
That was my understanding too for a long time. I thought everyone who got sued for using BitTorrent was sued because they were "distributing" copies. Downloading isn't distributing. I also don't think anyone has ever been sued in America for using websites which stream movies they don't have the rights to to you.
If only every copyright lawyer in the world could suddenly band together and descend on them in a horde. This is such a disgusting abuse of book authors, who are usually not the big guys. As a non-author myself, I don’t care about the publishers and whatnot but most people who are authors only have written one book and should get the royalties they deserve from their work.
I am astonished that Meta is even trying this defense. It does not even remotely pass the smell test. Seeding is not remotely relevant, and neither is the fact that torrenting in general is legal. The works are not published with the consent of the rightsholders - LibGen and Z-Library distribute them illegally, and Meta therefore obtained them illegally.
Semantic details aside (I was just downloading/leeching, bro!1! I pinky promise). Clearly a PR campaign.
It’s abhorrent that a multibillion dollar company is not just pirating the content for personal use (? wtf how can a for profit company download it for _personal_ use ?) but also _profits_ on the pirated content by using it for training material.
The whole “corporations” are people ruling is fucking stupid, and truly shows how much this country bends to the billionaire class
America is a country of religious assholes. The pilgrims were kicked out of England because of their weird-ass insistence on founding their own churches, so they moved to the Netherlands, which at the time were a refuge for many English religious separatists. However, religious freedom was not enough! No, they wanted to found their own Godly country and evangelize to the natives of America, and also reap the economic benefits of an "uncivilized" land.
Next they'll say that "just because we downloaded the content does not mean we USED the content, and you have no proof we used the content, so we are not pirates".
Well, I guess it would be nice if we could have some precedent for the claim that downloading copyright protected information is not in itself a breach of copyright.
It makes sense from the point of view that distribution is the act protected by copyright, not the mere act of copying. If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar, but then people might start wondering how keeping something from public domain for 90 years after the author's death could possibly be about protecting the rights of the author.
"distribution is the act protected by copyright" was the rule all along in many (non-US) jurisdictions, not an American so not sure about how the US does things.
This is why you often see people getting fines for torrenting (Germany is extremely notorious for this for example), but fines for using Usenet, IPTV, streaming or book download services are a lot more rare (which doesn't mean they're nonexistent)!
Operating / selling / promoting those services is a different matter, and most sensationalist articles about "people fined for IPTV piracy" are actually about people involved with that businesss, not the users.
I even remember reading about some (European) torrenting case that was successfully defended on the grounds of something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads, but I can't find the source right now.
> something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads
You generally can't set a client to 0B/s (as zero usually means “no limit”) but I'm not sure a good¹ lawyer on the other side would let you get away with claiming glacial distribution is not still distribution. At 1Kbyte/sec (I don't know a client off the top of my head that has control down to the single byte) a 50MByte file (not unusual for a book with illustrations/photos) can be transferred in less than 15 hours, a couple of Mbyte (a plain text book, compressed or just short) in less than one hour.
There are clients that can be set to not seed at all, or you could patch a common client that way. Some that don't even offer the capability at all (some command-line wget-style tools), that would be a legally safest option IMO².
----
[1] good as in good at their job, no moral judgement implied!
[2] caveat: not a lawyer, never played one on TV, nor even in local am-dram.
It isn't worth my time or risk to test it myself, but if you disable seeding will Warner Media still send a notice to your ISP? If you set your client to 0B/s I assume it's still broadcasting hashes. I suppose if you disable that function entirely in your client there would be nothing to see.
I guess some people may be worried about actual fines, but I would assume the biggest risk to most people is getting blocked by your ISP, which in many cases requires less than the legal standard for proof of copyright infringement.
The contractors whose job is collecting lists of people downloading films generally make sure to download at least a viewable clip of the film direct from your client so it could be shown in court. "Yes, your honor, here is the evidence we retrieved direct from the defendant".
Sure, but AIUI they generally are not leading with a lawsuit, they're sending a cease and desist notice to your ISP, which doesn't require that kind of proof. Operators like Comcast won't require that to drop you - in fact they may give you a warning for simply downloading torrents at all, even if they are literally, actually, Linux ISOs.
Evidence is generally collected for every detected violation in case it ends up in court.
It's an interesting case.
Most commonly used clients won't let you turn off seeding, but you can indeed limit the upstream to a really low value. You can also, at the same time, seed a ton of different things, preferably quite large, to saturate your upload and make it statistically improbable to fully send a copy of any single file.
Now, based on my feeling and cases I've seen in my country I'd say that the judge would make a claim that the sheer fact of making these files available is enough.
Moreover, there were rulings stating that even if you don't have the whole torrent on your disk, but only few fragments you are already in violation.
For me, it make sense, as when a company gets caught red handed they are judged based on the inventory of stolen programs they have, not an actual usage of them.
Lastly, here in an european country, consuming pirated media (books, movies, music, etc.) is not a crime. However there are plenty of caveats:
- you can't share it, so torrenting, as mentioned, might be illegal; getting a copy of a movie on a hard drive from a friend only puts him in jepardy
- it has to be personal use, so watching it alone or with your wife is ok, but playing stolen music in a club is not; commercial use is strictly forbiden ("commercial" as in "commercial licence", so usage in context of a company, so facebook case here is strictly in violation)
- it has to be a media that's already been published somewhere (cinema, television, streaming service); pirating leaks and prereleases is strictly forbiden
- pirating software is whole different animal, since now it's not a copyright, but a breach of licence agreement
You can think about it as owning a tiny portion of "soft drugs" (like marijuana), which is legal in some countries. Selling is not.
> pirating software is whole different animal, since now it's not a copyright, but a breach of licence agreement
How can that be true? There is no way for me a breach a license agreement without being party to the agreement.
It's can't be true. It's nonsense.
License is an agreement that grants you rights that would otherwise be prevented by copyright or other laws.
You can violate a copyright, or a license agreement, or both, or neither.
> You generally can't set a client to 0B/s
It depends on client, it is possible in e.g. transmission
transmission-cli -u 0 <url>
> I'm not sure a good¹ lawyer on the other side would let you get away with claiming
Fortunately that’s not how courts work.
I’m not familiar with the case, but it’s possible setting a 1 byte per second limit showed intent to not distribute.
In the context of a book, that could still be seeding a book every few hours..
1 byte per second would give you a couple of pages every few hours. So probably not.
I byte pee second translates to a little over 3KB/hr. Depends on the book.
It's 3600 bytes/hr. 60seconds per minute and 60minutes per hour. 60*60*1byte. Not to be condescending but the math here really isn't hard.
I mistyped a letter (thanks for indirectly pointing it out, fixed) and I get this flippant response. I guess this really is reddit.My real answer is close enough, I don't need to delineate on the level of bytes.
Either way this is oedantry. My point doesn't change; it depends on what kind of book you download.
Further, compression makes this all substantially more complicated, i imagine you could compress flat text down to extreme levels using a hashtable and leveraging book specifics (lack of Unicode characters, etc).
Either way, the argument is moot, most torrent clients set a minimum upload rate of 1-5kb/s.
One page is like 2K. It would need to be an incredibly short book.
It’s also possible that setting a 1 byte per second limit showed they were aware what they were doing was illegal.
Intent matters. I can well imagine a judge saying something like this:
While I am satisfied it has been proven you are aware that by torrenting said files, distribution also occurred. However, I am also satisfied it has been proven that by setting a 1 byte per minute upload limit, you had taken those steps you could to limit uploads in an effort to prevent the prohibited activity. Other evidence presented to the court demonstrates you are regularly employed, that your finances are generally in order, and you have not received payment for the meagre distribution that occurred as a consequence of your behaviour.
It is my opinion that the case brough by the prosecution does not rise to the level of requiring a sentence, nor even a conviction.
You're free to go.
> Intent matters
I agree with you intent matters, and I agree with you that setting the upload limit to 1 byte per second shows intent, I just disagree about what intent it shows.
You'd still be conspiring with others to violate copyright.
Booooooo don't leech without seeding. Share a little at minimal risk
> This is why you often see people getting fines for torrenting (Germany is extremely notorious for this for example), but fines for using Usenet, IPTV, streaming or book download services are a lot more rare (which doesn't mean they're nonexistent)!
It’s a lot easier to find out who is torrenting than to find out who is using Usenet for example though.
With torrents you can see the IP addresses of peers. And then I suppose they ask a court to tell the ISP to say which customer had that IP addresses at that time.
With Usenet you’d have to get a court to get each Usenet provider to give you a list of all customers that downloaded a file. That seems a little bit different to me.
And who knows, in the case of the torrents maybe they don’t always even need to get a court involved. With all of the data brokers out there, maybe there are lists you can buy of real people tied to different IP addresses and when you have a match you send a threatening letter telling them to pay up or they will take you to court?
This process of checking seeding peers to reporting an IP to an ISP to them send a user a nastygram is pretty automated. Torrent a Nintendo game (not even that new of one) and you will get an ISP nastygram within minutes.
I've heard.
Germany is wild. You will get a knock on your door within hours of firing up a torrent client
Not sure if this is just misinformed, or anti-Germany/EU propaganda? Either way, not true.
In Germany, if you torrent something without protection of a VPN, you may receive a letter from a blood-sucking legal firm within a week or two, with a fine that can be argued down somewhat.
I'm sure the OP meant "knock on your door" figuratively. And refers to exactly what you say, those leechy law firm letters. In that sense it's entirely true.
Huh, what in the world are you talking about.
If you’re torrenting and you happen to get caught, you will receive a letter from some copyright lawyer with a fine of X amount as well as a cease and desist.
The only knock on your door is the mail delivery man
What? No, you will not. You could get fined for seeding some popular stuff, but even then no one is knocking on your door, it'll probably come in the form of a letter, and even then it's not a guarantee.
I lived in Germany. At least back then it was definitely a letter. They were not very good at it, though, and I received one for torrenting large open source software.
I wonder if people could form a nonprofit that starts torrenting public domain media or open source software as a honeypot to find these firms and bury them in legal procedures. I'd gladly donate to such a nonprofit.
Do these letters have teeth or just trying to scare you into a settlement for lawsuit that would never come?
BS
Downloading used to be legal here. Now it is explicitly not anymore. Because why not if you can squeeze some extra money from end users who would have never bought your item for the insane prices asked.
With "here", you mean Germany? Are you sure? Last time I looked into these things (granted, in 2022 or so), seemed to me that for example using Stremio with a torrent add-on would risk a fine in Germany, but using a Debrid service (that torrents in your name and you just do a direct download like e.g. is done in Youtube) would be free of risks or legal threats. I'm not in Germany though, so I didn't research it much further. Just out of curiosity.
When and where? This does not sound true for any jurisdiction I know about.
Are there cases in Germany who went through until the end?
In France despite a hefty budget, the org in charge (HADOPI) was so bad they merged it with another one and I think it os over now.
> "distribution is the act protected by copyright" was the rule all along in many (non-US) jurisdictions, not an American so not sure about how the US does things.
I am pretty sure this is false. It is just that distribution carries heavier sentences and is easier to discover, not unlike with drug dealing.
It is not legal, anywhere, to (for example) borrow a DVD from someone, copy it, and give the original back. In some jurisdictions you have a right to backups, and a right to resale, but you emphatically do not have a right to privately copy.
> It is not legal, anywhere, to (for example) borrow a DVD from someone, copy it, and give the original back. In some jurisdictions you have a right to backups, and a right to resale, but you emphatically do not have a right to privately copy.
If the DVD doesn't have strong DRM (which is pretty rare, CSS counts as strong DRM) you are allowed to make a private copy in Finland. There is a levy on various storage mediums to compensate private copying. I believe there are similar laws in other countries based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
I'm not 100% sure if strictly downloading from illegal source makes downloader liable for damages, as far as I know in all court cases there was seeding involved (in Finland).
Of course the levy is somewhat questionable these days since pretty much everything has strong DRM (as bar is very low) and thus you are not allowed to make copies. The authors who protect their work with strong DRM still get part of the levies though.
Sorry, I may be missing something. Can you please clarify:
>you often see people getting fines for torrenting
>fines for using [...] are a lot more rare
Are you saying something kind of like, "When you torrent, you are also distributing that copyrighted information, which is often prosecuted, but simply procuring that information (without redistribution) is not." Or is it something different?
For example: in America, it is completely legal to buy, sell, and own a radar detector. Radar detectors are used to "detect" when the police use radar to catch speeding motorists. In spite of it being legal to own a radar detector, it is illegal to actively use a radar detector for its intended purpose. There are various reasons I have heard for this, but the most common was that the components of the device itself is not illegal, and picking up those signals are not illegal (because they are targeted at the public) but the reason and intent to use one is to commit a crime, and the use of a device in the assistance of committing an offense (speeding) is illegal. It's this kind of weird grey area, where you can possess the thing, but can't use it for the reason you (likely) bought it for.
Is it kind of like that? Like, you can possess copyrighted material that you have not paid for (for whatever justification), but actively sharing that copyrighted material without authorization, is criminal? If so, does that mean that lots of Germans simply don't seed illegal torrents?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
"Attached to the core rights of free speech and free press are several peripheral rights that make these core rights more secure. The peripheral rights encompass not only freedom of association, including privacy in one's associations, but also, in the words of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), "the freedom of the entire university community", i.e., the right to distribute, the right to receive, and the right to read, as well as freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, and freedom to teach.[144]"
"The United States Constitution protects, according to the Supreme Court in Stanley v. Georgia (1969), the right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, and to be generally free from governmental intrusions into one's privacy and control of one's thoughts.[145]"
"As stated by the Court in Stanley: 'If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.'[146]"
[144] - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/381/479/
[145], [146] - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/557/
The US Constitution grants congress the power to give authors and inventors time-limited exclusive rights to their works/discoveries (Art1.S8.C8). This moots the 1st amendment argument.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
I don't think that authors having exclusive rights to their works necessarily implies that someone else _receiving_ them is legally culpable though. My admittedly naive thinking is that someone distributing something illegally doesn't necessarily imply that the receiver is also committing crime. If Robin Hood steals a fancy 4K TV from the mansion downtown and gives it to his neighbor as a birthday gift, would the neighbor be guilty of a crime as well? Does the answer change if Robin Hood were instead the owner of the mansion next door (who could plausibly be the owner of the TV) and gives it to his less wealthy childhood friend?
I'm not saying that either of these situations are directly analogous to the distribution of copyrighted works (since among other things, I don't think there's any way to buy a TV without being able to freely give it to someone else), but that it's not immediately obvious to me that the illegality in distribution has to be symmetric, and that there might be a coherent legal argument that people having the right to _receive_ information isn't inconsistent with the only people with the right to transmit it refusing to allow it. The part of the Constitution (edit: Supreme Court opinion; not actually the Constitution itself) quoted above doesn't seem to say anything about the right to share anything, just to receive it.
your TV example is a bad example for discussions around copyright — how does one copy a TV?
a more pertinent example to the main topic at hand
i download a file onto my PC. in doing so i have made a copy of that file onto my PC.
if that file is a copyrighted work, e.g. a musical work, i have reproduced the work by downloading it. i have copied it. streaming music is covered by copyright for the same reason - a copy is transferred onto your device because you clicked on a button. the act of copying, or reproducing, the work is the bit that matters.
the distributor (spotify/apple) just gave me access to their original copy to make my own, new, copy. distribution is covered, but slightly different as it is facilitating others to infringe copyright (if i’m pirating music).
in your TV example, a closer idea would be if i 3D printed a new TV based on a patented design. probably not allowed to do it (i don’t know patent law) but who’s gonna enforce it? no one knows about it.
if i start selling my 3D printed TVs, well, i should probably get a lawyer sharpish.
—
also, isn’t knowingly receiving stolen goods a crime? so receiver of the TV in your example could be charged with a crime if it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt that they knew it was stolen?
> If Robin Hood steals a fancy 4K TV from the mansion downtown and gives it to his neighbor as a birthday gift, would the neighbor be guilty of a crime as well?
In this specific example, probably yes.
> Does the answer change if Robin Hood were instead the owner of the mansion next door
Yes, it does. The main problem here is that Robin Hood is well known to obtain everything he has in the world by stealing it.
If Robin Hood sees a nice painting hanging in the castle, then commands a genie to create an exact brush-stroke-by-brush-stroke replica that is identical to the original in every way, then gives the replica to his neighbor as a birthday gift, has any crime even occurred?
In this situation, the noble does not own the painting, so much as they possess it and have only been granted a license to privately view it, not a license to show it to others, and further license only to reproduce it for their own personal archival purposes - Robin Hood did not have license to view the painting, and the genie did not have license to reproduce it
but now that the reproduction exists, does it carry the same license with it, and should the neighbor be held responsible for the original violation of the license, when all they’ve done is receive an illegally produced copy?
Should the owner if the original painting be held responsible for failing to prevent it from being illegally viewed and copied?
>In this situation, the noble does not own the painting, so much as they possess it and have only been granted a license to privately view it, not a license to show it to others, and further license only to reproduce it for their own personal archival purposes
What is the point of making such an "analogy"? Might as well say the noble has a copy of Die Hard in their DVD collection.
> an exact brush-stroke-by-brush-stroke replica that is identical to the original in every way
Yes, forgery is a crime in many jurisdictions, and in some it does not matter whether or not you are transparent about it being such -- specifically for copyright/trademark reasons.
Forgery would require trying to pass off the copy as an original. As long as it is not pretending to be something it isn't, it is just a replica, not a forgery.
Thsis was my impression at first too, but legal experts in my jurisdiction have taught me they're not always so cleanly separable.
Without taking a stand on whether this _should_ be illegal or not, but whether it _is_, I could imagine that a legal system might want to give the painter a way to get income for a limited time by distributing copies of the painting, and that copying it in this way would infringe upon those rights. In this case though, I'd argue that the modern analogue of this would be Robin Hood getting invited over to watch a movie with the noble (which would be allowed!) and then secretly burning a copy of the DVD when the noble went to the bathroom. Our current legal system doesn't consider "I didn't know what I was doing was illegal" to be a valid defense, so Robin Hood would still be committing a crime by sharing the DVD further after he's copied it. (Since we don't have genies in real life, I don't know how the law would consider them culpable, but based on my very limited knowledge of genie lore, my guess is that the amount of free will they have in this situation is about the same as the DVD burner, so they probably would be okay from the perspective of the law?)
Interestingly, I think that the more direct analog to what we have today would be if the noble themself had the genie copy the painting and gift it to their friend Robin Hood. I do think the same logic I gave above ultimately applies to whether our current legal system would allow the artist to enforce exclusivity, but I find it a lot more compelling as an argument about whether it _should_ be allowed or not compared to the hypothetical you gave. In your version of it, it doesn't feel like allowing what Robin Hood did is particularly beneficial to society, but in the version where the noble is an enthusiastic participant in the copying, it seems a lot more like outlawing it would lead to some harmful dynamics (like you mention about whether the noble bears responsibility for protecting access to the painting based on obtaining it). In other words, having a system where the artist is allowed to enforce his exclusive distribution rights universally actually seems _less_ problematic to me at first glance than one that only applies to those who sign an agreement when purchasing the paintings.
To put this in terms of torrenting, my naive understanding is that right now, it's definitively considered illegal to seed protected content, and the question is whether it's legal to download it without seeding or not. I actually think that it would be worse to allowing downloading without allowing seeding as well, so the system that Meta is arguing for would be worse than if what they did is also illegal. However, I'm honestly not sure if they're actually right or not about what the law says, and that's why I brought up the hypotheticals I did. I also honestly don't feel confident in my feelings on whether I'd prefer to ban both seeding and downloading protected content or to eliminate the legal protections entirely and allow both, but it doesn't seem like that's actually the legal question at the heart of the current matter.
Once you tell someone a secret, you need to be prepared to beat them up if they share it. — dad, 1996
This gives you the right “to beat them up” but not the right to learn a secret. You can take a patent and build that thing in your house. The government can’t stop you, neither the inventor. It’s when you try to sell it that they can come after you.
I don't think it'd hold up, but one could argue that the first amendment was an amendment, and thus changed the constitution, and therefore removed that ability of congress.
The amendments protect the rights as they existed at the time the amendment was passed. I.e. how would the plain text of the text be interpreted by a reasonable person in 1791. E.g., re 2nd, what did militia mean?
Thus, the 1A locks in speech rights as they existed in 1791. Because there was no right to slander, or threaten, or commit treason, or "share" in 1791, Congress retained the power to regulate.
That's certainly one interpretation. Your parents also has an interpretation. It will be interesting to see what the courts decide.
>Because there was no right to slander, or threaten, or commit treason, or "share" in 1791, Congress retained the power to regulate.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and intentions of the constitution. Slander and fighting words are exceptions to the first amendment that were determined through the legislative process.
Essentially the entire US constitution is negative rights - the right to X when X means government NOT doing something. Right to freedom of movement, right to freedom of religion, right to freedom of speech, right to privacy - these are restrictions on government to protect the liberties of the people. And then you come to the tenth amendment -
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
It seems abundantly clear from even a cursory analysis that the founders explicitly designed the constitution to limit and restrict the power of a centralized federal government, as treasonous, violent disregard for a powerful centralized federal government is quite literally the premiere founding principle baked into the US's history.
Congress has zero power whatsoever whenever they lack the consent of the goverened. The functional legitimacy of the entire federal government is near zero - we're living in the orwellian nightmare where the military industrial complex more or less runs the entire show from behind the scenes - something Eisenhower tried to warn us about over half a century ago.
> Slander and fighting words are exceptions to the first amendment that were determined through the legislative process.
The legislative process can't make exceptions to constitutional provisions. These were recognized as not covered by first amendment protections by jurisprudence, not legislation.
"In interpreting this text, we are guided by the principle that “[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.” United States v. Sprague, 282 U. S. 716, 731 (1931) ; see also Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, 188 (1824). Normal meaning may of course include an idiomatic meaning, but it excludes secret or technical meanings that would not have been known to ordinary citizens in the founding generation." District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008).
Interpreted as an ordinary voter would have interpreted it.
>It seems abundantly clear from even a cursory analysis that the founders explicitly designed the constitution to limit and restrict the power of a centralized federal government, as treasonous, violent disregard for a powerful centralized federal government is quite literally the premiere founding principle baked into the US's history.
Which is why we immediately replaced a loose federation of Strong States with a new government built around an explicitly empowered and strengthened federal government?
The idea that the constitution was built around a very weak federal government is wrong. The founders built a weak federal government, immediately ran into problems with it, and immediately those same founders built a new government with a strong federal government with EXPLICIT and CLEAR authority and supremacy over the states on certain things.
For example, modern conservatives often decry how the federal supremacy on interstate commerce is used to regulate interstate commerce, but the commerce clause was built to tear down all possible protectionism and trade barriers states had erected amount themselves. The strong federal government was also built explicitly to be a single strong bloc for trade negotiations.
There were plenty of anti-federalists around during this time. They got to air their complaints and opinions. Nobody listened to them because the articles of confederation, and the loose, weak federal government it built was just that useless and broken. The founders literally tore up the government to make a new one without the authorization to do so because there was no stability, no long term hope for the existing one.
How can a provision in the base text of the constitution take precedence over an amendment?
I am not convinced that applies to receiving information.
I would expect it to be argued by defendants that since no man (or indeed woman) at Meta actually read the books that were torrented, the First Amendment does not apply here. The question is: does the First Amendment apply to an algorithm?
> The question is: does the First Amendment apply to an algorithm?
No. The first amendment explicitly applies to Congress; by extension it applies to the policy-making authority of the federal government generally, and via the 14th amendment, it applies to the states.
It prohibits the abridgment of freedom of speech by government institutions, without distinction as to the identity of the speaker or the content of the speech.
So I can setup a cable streaming service with ripped vids as long a no one in my company watches it?
You would be distributing the videos. Meta is not distributing the things they torrented. No, LLM weights don't count.
A bit off-topic, but I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship but are perfectly OK with advertising and other forms of propaganda (from social media editorializing, bought newspapers...), that arguably do much more to "control men's minds" than censorship ever would.
It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).
> I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship
Not sure you can make this blanket statement about “Americans” any more. It seems like an increasing number are fine with censorship when they aren’t the ones being censored.
Yes, for many this "free speech absolutism" is just a rhetorical stance they adopt, which do not reflect their actions at all.
American here. We're an incredibly large and incredibly diverse country. This generaliization doesn't really work.
I know, I have friends and family in America. It was just a fun thought I had in my head for a while. I should have added a "Some americans..." in my comment. Sorry for the blanket statement.
> It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).
This seems to describe ‘Murican Freedom pretty well to this particular American, for what it’s worth.
It's very simple, Americans believe that the individual is responsible for themselves while most of the rest of the world wants to be "protected" by a restrictive government. One leads to innovation and one stifles it. We would rather be responsible for discovering the truth on our own, than trust a central authority to decide what is and isn't true(or propaganda). I find it funny how Europeans think their governments are protecting them from propaganda instead of drowning them in propaganda.
Heh. This is not the month to be making that argument.
I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.
I honestly believe we'd be better off with informational hygiene standards, too. The last two decades have taught me this lesson - free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society, and when you find a security hole that big, you patch it.
I recognize there's a balance to be found, and reasonable people will disagree on where the tipping point is.
>free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society
How does this work? What danger represents freedom of speech? With lack of it dangers is understandable: it is a giant "welcome" sign for bloody totalitarian dictatorship.
If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you (which is one of the things that free speech absolutists generally argue for), then you will have no way of knowing if what you buy is going to kill you.
>If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you
But this has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not in any way cancel out responsibility for fraud.
Then you are not a free speech absolutist, and reasonable people will disagree about where the tipping point is.
Fire in a crowded theatre? CP? Threats of violence? Hate speech?
I don't know any "free speech absolutists" who argue that fraud should be legal. Misrepresentation of a product or service you're selling is fraud. We already have laws against that.
This has actually been a fairly common position among American libertarians. Alan Greenspan, for instance, was strongly against fraud laws until some time after the financial crisis. The idea was that the market would sort it out.
(And no, I don't understand how this is a serious position that serious people can seriously hold, but then that is how I feel about libertarianism in general.)
> American libertarians
The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central planning organizations on the planet for so long. If central planning is libertarian then I'm a blue whale.
The term "free market" gets misused just as much. It's not a free market if the government (or the Fed, which is just an arm of the government) has its thumb on the scales.
Then consider yourself lucky, but I've seen that position argued strenuously right here on HackerNews in the past.
> I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.
And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.
Also, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food, I've got some oceanfront property in North Dakota I'd like to sell you. You do know, don't you, that antibiotics in your beef, for example, is done all the time in factory farming with government approval?
> prevent all possible bad things
Well that seems like a bad faith interpretation of my argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Bradford_sweets_poisoning
You included in your argument at least one bad thing that, as I pointed out, is not only not stopped by government regulation, it's explicitly permitted by it. The fact that there was a bad thing that happened before government regulation, which a government regulation was then passed to try to prevent, doesn't make your argument valid.
Which government are we talking about, please?
>And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.
Sure, with reduced life expectancy. If you're fine dying out in your 30's, maybe 40's at best you can eat whatever you want. Your body is pretty resilient to poison short term.
>, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food
Extremist takes aren't doing you a favor here. Like I just said, we can resist a surprising about of poisons short term. Many people indulge in alcohol after all. We have no need to strive for "all bad things" out of our food.
> And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards
Narrator: "Most humans didn't survive past year five due to preventable illnesses and food born contamination, the humans' ancestor's infant mortality rate was rather high before the age of food safety and soap".
> Narrator
Of what? Where are you getting this from?
It's a reference to the Arrested Development television show.
Not sure European governments do much to combat external propaganda anyway.
Sadly very true, I hope the hostility American officials recently showed toward our values and institutions will prompt them to do something. Not to mention America siding with Putin a few days ago.
A ban on X and Meta would be a start.
Hi, American here. Just want to say I'm embarrassed to share a nation with this nutcase. Sorry, friends.
Those who turn discussions about degrees of something into fights about binary extremes are the true problem. Media and politicians included.
This approach is great in theory, the problem is: it does not scale. We are bombarded with a lot of information in the news, ads, social media, and average individual does not have enough time (not to mention access to information, or intelligence to interpret it) to fact check everything on their own. "The last man who knew everything" lived in early 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Man_Who_Knew_Everythi...
You don't need to fact check the torrent of information you describe. You can just ignore it. None of it is worth the time and effort to fact check anyway. You don't need any of that information to make the decisions you need to make in your daily life.
If you want to argue that you need to fact check all that information to, for example, decide how to vote in elections, none of that information is of any value for that purpose either, because it's basically all propaganda at this point. There are no "independent" sources of information that you can trust, other than your own eyeballs and brain. (Possibly you are lucky enough to have some friends and family whose eyeballs and brain you can also trust.)
First of all, there's a difference between facts and understanding. Thomas Young may have understood the wave theory of light, but he could say nothing with certainty about Queen Victoria's underwear. Secondly, it's getting easier to understand everything, because ideas are becoming more powerful. We are however bombarded with facts, that part is true.
Not even most Americans believe that. I would say paradoxically we have a slice of folks who want liberty from the government and also have plenty of government protections.
Then there is the "liberty at all costs" types, the fringe of which idolizes the David Koresh lifestyle.
There are plenty of folks who also think it is OK to ruin someone's entire life if they post something sexist to Twitter.
Americans are not so easily generalized; they come in many flavors.
Seeing how almost everyone here in France despises our current government, I don't think this propaganda you mention is very effective, if it's as present as you claim.
Meanwhile money basically dictates who gets elected on your side of the pond, whith billionaires being crazy over-represented in your political offices, despite being a tiny minority in your population.
Also, the people advocating for smaller government are often on board with executive power consolidation and increased police and army funding, so I think it's little more than a stance.
You can't "discover the truth" on your own, no one can. Are you able to go everywhere something happens in the wordl to get a first hand account of the event and then build your own conclusions? Of course not, you rely on media (social or legacy) to digest the facts for you, and they might (and do) influence you and how you think about the world. It can't be another way, so fighting obvious lies isn't a bad thing in my book.
Author rights wouldn’t be an accurate term. Copy rights do not necessarily belong to the author, even when they are alive. Distribution rights or “distrights” would make more sense for your argument.
Works fine in Dutch law really, you just have to allow for the option that a company can be an author. A work could also have multiple authors.
I prefer it to a name that's more accurate because it signals what the purpose of the law is, which I consider more important than its implementation.
Now that I think of it that also works quite well when naming things in software. Don't name things after their implementation, when you can help it.
They are called "authorship rights" in Polish. While the right to distribute or make copies doesn't aleways belong to the author they always originate from author. And some are even non transferable or revocable, like the right to say "I, <my chosen name>, made this thing"
In some jurisdictions (e.g. Germany) "copyright" belongs exclusively to the author/creator and is non-transferrable, the German word for "copyright" (Urheberrecht) also literally translates to "author's right"). So instead of transferring copyright to an entity (e.g. the employer) you only grant an "exclusive, transferrable and unrestricted" license to that entity, essentially prohibiting you from using it without their permission while technically still retaining that right. This is also why CC0 exists as a substitute for a public domain declaration because in these jurisdictions it is literally impossible to transfer your copyright to the public domain.
In Germany copyright law there is actually one provision for the real transfer of copyright: death. So as far as copyright is concerned, the transfer of copyright requires literally death of the author - which might get a chuckle out of people into media studies.
In case you didn't chuckle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
I think the equivalent is called author's right in civil law countries
Copy in copyright is not copy like copy in copying some data.
Copy in copyright is a term for the actual writing that gets published on ads, or magazines, or in a news paper. "I need to get the copy from marketing for this campaign." "The editor hasn't approved the copy for the article yet."
Typically, people not in/around the industry aren't familiar with the term, which leads to the confusion.
The word “copy” in the early 1700s when copyright was codified in law meant both a written text and a reproduction of a written text. The meaning you’re using, of text at an intermediate stage of a publishing process, is much later, 19th century. [0] So, the original meaning was a noun (the right to make “a copy” of a book) but meant the book itself, not the abstract text of the book. It would be interesting to research whether there were any rulings in that period about hand-copying a book, which was the only alternative to printing it.
Nowadays of course copyright covers much more than text, and includes such “copies” as the public performance of a theatrical work or reproduction of a sculpture, so the modern copyright clearly doesn’t have the meaning you’re using.
[0] https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/08/copy.html
Any proof that the word copyright was intentionally referring to the noun instead of the verb? The British Statute of Anne in 1710, the first copyright statute, definitely referred to the act of copying a book, not some abstract concept of writing samples.
I always thought that ad copy also came from copy as in copy some data. Like it's the words that get copied when the media is replicated for distribution, as opposed to words that are for some internal communication purpose.
The use of the noun copy probably came from the act of copying, but both uses predated the word copyright, so that doesn't really help answer the question.
This sounds completely false to me. Do you have a reference for it?
In particular, the original Statute of Anne (the first law establishing a copyright) is officially titled:
> An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Copies, during the Times therein mentioned
No doubt people used the word "copy" in the sense you mean, but "copy" in "copyright" is absolutely about copying as in copying some data.
"Well, I guess it would be nice if we could have some precedent for the claim that downloading copyright protected information is not in itself a breach of copyright."
According to Meta's motion the claim about "seeding" (cf. the claim about removing CMI) relates to Cal Penal Code 502(c), the "Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act".
Whether the data accessed is "copyright protected information" is irrelevant to section 502(c). 502(c)(2) applies to "any data".
https://www.calpers.ca.gov/sites/default/files/spf/docs/ca-p...
I’m waiting for this precedent to be set in favor of META and then enjoying all the movie torrents I can get my hands on. Without seeding of course.
With Musk in the White House (who has similar interests) that might actually happen.
A right adversarial move would be to support this and watch the GDP without the entertainment business as part of it. Check what happens next.
Especially considering it would disproportionally harm California, last bastion of Democrats?
I don't know Musk but why would he make this happen? He's for corporate interests is he not?
None of his corporations is a media one, and his social media company probably has some vague interest in not having too much enforcement of copyright.
Actually this is something that has always perplexed me about corporations that want to meddle in our government. Obviously they must know that it is going to involve the government following the interest of… some corporation. The voters are pretty fickle and having the government work for your competition seems like a pretty rough spot.
I guess it is like a prisoner’s dilemma type thing or something.
Also he is big into AI. So he'd want the same as meta.
I don't think Musk's interests are aligned with those of legacy media corporations.
> ...then people might start wondering how keeping something from public domain for 90 years after the author's death could possibly be about protecting the rights of the author.
That's the best part, it's forever copyright! Because the creators are corporations that never die, or a huge number of humans, whomever dies last.
that's not true. the term for works for hire is 95 years from creation https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html
Went the opposite direction here. Copying things for personal use was always legal in Sweden, with some exceptions (notably software, since 1986). That law was amended in 2005 (because of The Pirate Bay, presumably) to say that you are no longer allowed to make a copy from an illegally distributed copy. So if someone is illegally sharing something on the internet you are not allowed to download it.
Sweden is always an edge case - education especially. It’s got a population of 10 million people. My metroplex area in DFW has half that with 75% more diversity. Sweden is cool but a terrible reference point for anything other than homogeneous social studies.
AFAIK, in the US it’s literally about copying. In fact, case law mostly supports the position that just the act of copying a program from disk into memory to run it is protected by copyright (with some statutory exceptions). (Google “RAM copy doctrine”.)
That’s my understanding as well. Duplicating the bytes of a file when you don’t have the rights to the content is technically infringement and grounds for an infringement claim, and then you have to explain in court why it’s “fair use.”
> There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar
that's exactly how it's called in french - droit d'auteur
I remember back in the day when hefty penalties for torrenting music were in the news, they would erroneously describe it as penalties for “downloading” music. I suppose this was intentional in order to spook usenet users, etc.
Would definitely torrent any leaked internal facebook data.
But never seed your honor, that would be illegal!
That is only in english. Other langues uses different words. So not really useful to argue just based on a superficial def of the word.
>If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar
Man, that's such an ignorant type of thing to say. Copy does not only mean the act of making a duplicate. Copy also means the words/text directly. Terms like copy editor refer to those that make edits to the copy=>words/text, not those that make edits to the duplicates. Maybe you are unfamiliar with the use of the word in that manner, but that's not the rest of the world's problem. That's a limited knowledge problem on your end.
Even in the "rules" of copyright, you're allowed to make copies. Back in the days of the olds being young and in school, we had to go to places called libraries to look things up. We could pay the librarians to make copies of things for us to take home to use in whatever task we were assigned. The fee wasn't for any kind of rights usage, but simply to cover the library's expense in providing that copy to you.
It's amazing how quickly information is lost from the lack of use
> Man, that's such an ignorant type of thing to say. Copy does not only mean the act of making a duplicate. Copy also means the words/text directly. Terms like copy editor refer to those that make edits to the copy=>words/text, not those that make edits to the duplicates. Maybe you are unfamiliar with the use of the word in that manner, but that's not the rest of the world's problem. That's a limited knowledge problem on your end.
Do you think freedom of the press involves the right to make any kind of juice you want?
what does that even mean? your sarcasm is so strained it can't even be followed.
Why do you think that the meaning "text" is relevant to the element in copyright? The fact that a word has a particular sense doesn't mean that that sense appears in every use of the word.
And in this case we know that copyright refers to the production of copies, not of copy:
> the Statute of Anne is formally titled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Copies, during the Times therein mentioned"
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne#Text )
There are no controls other than on making printed copies.
Both the headline and the theme of the story are incorrect and misleading. Meta isn’t claiming that everything they’re doing is lawful. They’re claiming that their activities don’t run afoul of a particular California state law, CDAFA, and section 1202(b)(1) of the DMCA.
It’s very common in litigation for the plaintiff to accuse the defendant of every violation they might be guilty of or liable for (“throwing the book at them”), and for defendants then to systematically try to strip them away.
As far as I know, Meta is not yet claiming their activities were completely lawful.
Here is the actual filing: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Kadre...
Feels like their defense for some state incursion is an admission of a larger crime. I still don't get it.
I'm not going to murder someone, steal their car, then put out a statement that I was unaware the car had expired tags and I shouldn't be prosecuted for it.
Is this your first experience/exposure to the us legal system?
Defending yourself from an accusation using a hypothetical admission doesn't actually admit to it. e.g. I didn't murder anyone, and I didn't steal that car, but if even if I did murder them, and steal their car, the car's expired tags wouldn't apply to me because [reason].
If you care about justice, you want to enable every truth to come out, and be decided on. If you prohibit someone from making an argument, because it might imply something that is separate, you limit the the possible outcomes to something strictly less fair. If someone did murder a person them and took their car, they should be prosecuted for that, but just because you did commit crime a, and crime b, doesn't mean you should be convicted of crime c. Even if crime c is the least significant. That's still not just.
Of course you will if you've been caught and charges are being filed and there's evidence you were in the car.
A YouTube video I saw talked about the charges faced by the accused killer of the United Healthcare CEO.
Aside from murder , he faced:
- criminal possession of a weapon
- illegal possession of a silencer
- illegal possession of an automatic weapon (it wasn't full auto, but somehow due to the large capacity magazine, NY state considers it an automatic weapon)
So had he used a hammer or a knife, he might be able to get out again because murderers in NYS can be out in as little as 20 years. But all the firearms charges can effectively double his sentence.
Won't named plaintiffs have the burden of proving meta actually seeded blocks containing their works? How could they ever do that?
The plaintiffs do have the burden of proof, but there are many ways to Rome. Any evidence they can find, whether it be packet captures, client and server logs, incriminating emails, or even admissions, will be proffered to the court and/or jury.
many ways to Rome
Fair enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if none of those methods pan out.
1) Given the timeline, it seems unlikely that anyone was doing a packet capture.
2) Why would anyone at META have been paying attention to, or logging, which blocks were being seeded and which weren't? Who would have personal knowledge such that they could admit that transmission didn't seed the declaration of independence 6 million times?
Again, they don’t have to trace actual data flows to have sufficient evidence to convince a court or jury that Meta is in breach of the law.
Other examples of evidence include an admission from a Meta employee during a deposition that they were instructed to download a bunch of copyrighted material and the undertook the efforts to do so.
Or, perhaps the plaintiffs seized the machines used in the scheme (happens all the time following a TRO and discovery motion) and found whole copies or traces of the copyrighted works on them, or even local client logs that suggest that it was done.
The plaintiffs will, eventually, need to prove that their claim is likely true ("preponderance of the evidence" standard.) Right now they're fighting about expanding discovery to try and uncover more evidence.
Company emails, internal server logs.
Server logs of what? Transmission doesn't log which blocks it seeded. Does any client?
Router logs? I have no idea. I just suspect that, somewhere in the complicated cabling of Ethernet, there's a device that has been logging packets.
> Meta responded to this complaint with a motion to dismiss. In a supporting reply filed on Tuesday, the company notes that the ‘torrenting’ allegations, relating to the removal of copyright information and the CDAFA violations, don’t hold up.
They are addressing both the second and third counts. The "Direct Copyright Infringement" isn't being addressed by these claims. This is even quoted on the filing you provided:
https://torrentfreak.com/images/seedingprecautions.jpg.webp
How does your response conflict with what I said?
It's certainly nice to see someone accused of bittorrenting with the bankroll to come up with a decent legal defense team.
Isn't Meta going to be battling the full legal team of the entertainment industry with this argument? I think Meta did something stupid with this argument, because there is no way that Hollywood or the music industry is going be pleased with a precedence for legally downloading copyrighted material. They will now do everything in their power to get Meta found guilty.
Or, more likely, drop the case to avoid establishing a precedent.
Sounds like Meta are banking on the entertainment industry looking at it and deciding that the risk of losing this case is too high given Meta’s almost infinitely deep pockets to mount a legal defence.
Awesome. And just to be clear, Meta will walk away scot-free, but Billy Torrent is definitely still going to be fined $500,000 if he pulls down "Sleeping Beauty" from 1959.
Exactly. There’s always a question of power.
As much as I dislike the idea of individual copyright owners, like visual artists or writers, having their works scraped for AI without compensation…
If this does break the stranglehold that copyright has over creative acts, especially in the US, this feels like a net good.
What's your test for when a use is ok and being held back by copyright law versus when it's damaging? Why is one ok but not the other?
I've seen the most people take the most issue with the insane "authors life + Xx years" that copyright lasts for, not really components of fair use.
I love the idea. The problem is that we never even tried to establish some standard licensing system that encourages rewarding the creator while using their copyright. Most people would rather work around and re-invent a slightly bumpoer wheel.
Maybe. But it's hard to see how they could possibly win this case no matter how good their defence team is.
So, if Meta were found to have been seeding or making copyrighted materials available to others without permission, that's a slam dunk, I think.
But Meta's contention is 'you don't have any proof of that'.
I think there is enough existing case law and ambiguity in the law as it's written that Meta stand a reasonable (although not a good) chance of being able to argue that they did not commit any crime because a.) they did not create the infringing copy (or that the infringing copy that they received was a technical copy, and they did not create an infringing copy themselves) b.) they did not infringe for private or financial gain (the models they trained on this material were released to the public for free). There's an argument that copyright infringement occurs only upon distribution, and as far as I'm aware, there's no case law that just downloading a copy is illegal.
Meta may also be able to argue that their use of the material could be considered 'fair', as it is non-commercial, transformative, and that the use of the material does not harm the market for the original work.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not arguing about the merits of these arguments, just that they seem to me to be plausible.
> a.) they did not create the infringing copy (or that the infringing copy that they received was a technical copy, and they did not create an infringing copy themselves)
Copyright protects against making copies of the work, which they definitely did.
> There's an argument that copyright infringement occurs only upon distribution
Not in most countries. Certainly not in America.
> b.) they did not infringe for private or financial gain (the models they trained on this material were released to the public for free).
They definitely gained from it. If their argument rests on that then they're screwed.
> Meta may also be able to argue that their use of the material could be considered 'fair', as it is non-commercial, transformative, and that the use of the material does not harm the market for the original work.
Probably their best bet but it's hard to see how that would fly given that it is commercial even if they released it for free, and fair use normally depends on how much of the work you use; they used all of everything.
[dead]
They don't want to win, they want to reach a settlement where they admit no wrongdoing, but agree to pay some medium-large fee that establishes a precedent.¹ That fee is essentially trivial to Meta, but becomes an effective moat against new upstart rivals. The possibility of losing everything is the stick they wield to encourage the copyright owners to agree to accept only a medium-large fee.
¹ Not necessarily a formal legal precedent, but at least a floor on the "market value" of access to the data
what is worse to them:
Precedent that LLMs get to keep & use copyrighted data
LLMs get to keep & use copyrighted data without legal precedent
I bet the industry will file amicus briefs to try to support the plaintiffs
Dropping the case does not create any precedent, that’s the point. Losing the case would.
If you’re going to have this fight, wait until you have it with a worse-prepared and worse-resourced opponent where you’re more confident of the win.
The combined market cap of Disney and Comcast (who owns NBC and the like) is about 350 billion dollars [1][2]. Facebook alone is worth about 1.7 trillion [3]. I had trouble finding exact numbers on this, but it seems like the movie industry itself in the US is worth less than $100 billion.
Facebook could simply buy most of the companies involved if they give them too much shit. We've consolidated way too much power into a few large tech companies. I don't see it very likely that Hollywood could win this.
[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/walt-disney/marketcap/ [2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/comcast/marketcap/ [3] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/meta/market-cap/
Market cap is not money in the bank.
The current admin and the judges they installed are favorable towards Zuck and antagonistic towards most of the entertainment industry. If this case is seen through (which is not likely) & Meta wins (even if via appeal to higher courts), the legal decision will likely involve a very specific carve out that says what Meta did, and only what Meta did, was fine. It will have no affect on you or me.
“… the full legal team of the entertainment industry with this argument …”
Is that a problem for them ?
Doesn’t meta make more money than the entire industry of Hollywood including all home entertainment revenue ?
I am certain they do.
EDIT: 2024 full year revenue for meta is ~160B as compared to (roughly) 140B for the entirety of the film industry .
There's more money to make for entertainment artists in licensing their image and voice for content creation at scale (for the average joe). They need the LLM to exist, so there's no point in crying about how it was made.
Meta is a couple of times larger than the entire entertainment industry combined...
I think its reversed, and that's just the USA -
The U.S. Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry is the largest in the world at $649 billion (of the $2.8 trillion global market) and is projected to grow to $808 billion by 2028 at an average yearly rate of 4.3% (PwC 2024).
https://www.trade.gov/media-entertainment
Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook Inc., continues to dominate the digital landscape with impressive financial growth. In 2024, the company's annual revenue reached a staggering 164.5 billion U.S. dollars, marking a significant increase from 134.9 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year. This upward trajectory reflects Meta's ability to monetize its vast user base across multiple platforms, solidifying its position as a tech giant.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of...
I think the first statement is reporting on market cap and the second statement is reporting on revenue.
If you look at UMG's revenue, one of the largest labels, their revenue was 11B.
Meta's market cap is over $1.7 trillion. Over twice as large as the whole media and entertainment industry.
Market cap is not cash in the bank.
Meta already runs three of the top eight copyright-violation distribution networks.
Google paid about $1b to Viacom in the YouTube piracy dispute. That's a lot of money, but do you recall anything seriously changing when that happened?
To me, the funniest product is Beat Saber. The best VR game by far. 99% of the value is tied up in violating musician's rights. Meta saved that game. Did people stop making music? No.
This book torrenting thing is complex. The main thing plaintiffs want is discovery of the training data. It's not complicated. There's no justification for the court to block that, it's a fishing expedition yes, but one that will turn up a lot of fish. Then all AI companies will have to acquiesce to it. That is the "win" for the industry.
The unfortunate side effect is that a megacorp gets to vacuum up the sum of human knowledge for free, boil it down, and sell it back to us for a nice profit.
Ah you mean like Google Search?
Google doesn't "vaccuum up" anything. Every site indexed by Google is still available without using Google at all. They are _copying_ information, not moving or removing it.
And how does downloading a torrent differ from that?
It does not, and both uses are fine.
It doesn't, unless the torrent later becomes unavailable. Then the AI trained with is the only "copy" left.
If anything, the law should require that they seed their training data so that the competitive landscape converges on actual technological innovation and not moat building through data destruction.
The sites copied by Google Search explicitly allow it.
The books copied by Meta, explicitly disallow it, and require payment for distribution.
The sites indexed often don't explicitly allow it. I can see my website in the index of web search engines that I never opted in to.
I'm not unhappy about it; but was never consulted.
Linking is different from copying, and fortunately the last case I remember allows it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster_Corp._v._Tickets.....
But how did can Google index a site without copying it to their servers?
Tell me you've never googled lyrics without telling me.....
Sources are linked below the lyrics though!
Information wants to be free.
Perhaps. However, information won't be produced, if the already tenuous financial positions of authors is removed.
Things should be free, as in speech, not as in beer. Especially in this case. The giants of Silicon Valley could in fact purchase these rights.
Few authors care about people personally enjoying a product through otherwise means. They do care about mass distribution without attribution, without royalty, and without regard.
Information isn't copyrightable, at least in the US. Only creative works. But I get what you are saying.
That's fine and dandy as part of a free as in beer ethos. When 'information' wants to pad the quarterly earnings statement of a gigantic corporation that exists only by grinding the suffering of fellow humans into a fine marketable paste I am somewhat less sympathetic. Information should be free. To people, for non-commercial use.
Google Search brings you traffic and revenue. LLMs do not.
See also how people have responded to google-snippets. When google search threatens to remove traffic or revenue, people get angry quite quickly.
I still own my content. Google links to it and sends me traffic. We both win. This sort of relationship is not present when my content is anonymously fed into a training model intended to be used to extract users before they are sent to me. And, yes, I am aware Google has pulled some cute shit with this definition, and when they do it then it's also bad.
> Google links to it and sends me traffic
Used to, but more recently it's probably LLM agents using Google not people. And even if it's not yet, it will be. Last time I searched for something on Google it messed up so bad I quickly returned to GPT-4o+search.
If that's the case, Google should go away. I use kagi and it works pretty well for me.
The answer to bad products is not to throw away the idea of people getting to control their own content.
How long before a handful of entities, having already ingested the available content into their proprietary systems, bankroll assaults on Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.
Likely never, as those platforms are continuously updating at no cost to the siphons training their LLMs on them
Really?
a) Meta are (so far) releasing their models for free.
b) There's nothing stopping non-mega-corps from doing the same, especially if this precedent was established. (Training is of course expensive but this is a challenge, not an absolute block.)
This isn't a decent defence, it's a losing desperate one.
Meta's real (nigh invincible) defence is 'we have way more money than you and can keep this going forever'.
Money doesn’t keep it going forever, only about 2-4 years, even with appeals
That’s enough to bankrupt individuals but industries fighting industries can see it to the end, if they don’t settle
2-4 years is optimistic IMO. I’ve seen many copyright disputes carry for 7 years or more.
The noun phrase was "legal defence team" not "legal defence". A decent team can put forward a poor defence
They can just bribe the president.
Not sure if he has the power to, and if everyone else will let him, but some EOs opening up the copyright system would be very welcome. There are already some things he's done around this:
https://www.omm.com/insights/alerts-publications/trump-admin...
Inbefore he pardons meta for torrenting.
Maybe Trump will legalise internet-based copying.
After all, the main people hurt would be Hollywood, which is run by people supporting the Democrats. And it would be popular with many voters (not an issue for Trump but it is for Republicans).
That seems an oversimplification.
Counter example: ownership of Amazon MGM Studios and its parent Amazon.
Selling streaming media is a side business for Amazon (and Apple), an add on as a way to move Amazon Prime and Apple One subscriptions.
They would probably benefit by handicapping Netflix/Disney/WBD/etc.
Probably no need. Elon Musk already did that. And one of his companies just published a shiny new version of grok. I wonder where they get their training material. I'm sure it's all just tweets and no stashes of ebooks or other material got downloaded in some way or otherwise fell of the proverbial wagon.
Historically, copyright cases fell in favor of big media corporations based on the notion that they were very rich and powerful and could fight things endlessly, bribe/lobby politicians, and cause laws to be changed (e.g. the DMCA).
However, AI companies are wealthier still. Some have revenues exceeding the GDPs of most countries. Surely, rich enough to outright buy out some of these media companies. At which point it would stop being copyright infringement because they'd own the copyrights. I'm sure some other arrangement will be found that is less mutually disruptive than a lot of court cases. Both sides are making too much money for anything else to happen. Forget about small book publishers making much of a difference here.
> Probably no need. Elon Musk already did that. And one of his companies just published a shiny new version of grok.
Trump could make Grok, Facebook, Google and OpenAI's actions legal in response to a bribe from Musk.
Or he could step up enforcement actions against Facebook, Google and OpenAI while issuing a pardon to Grok.
At some point I expect we'll see the "shareholders made me do it" defense. You know, the fiduciary-duty-to-keep-making-billions-regardless defense.
As the richest man on Earth, with multiple investigations into him by various government agencies shown us, nothing is desperate with billions of dollars "in the bank".
Yeah, kinda surprised they haven't just flat out denied it, hoped it would blow over.
"If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research." - Wilson Mizner
"Plagiarize, let no one else's work evade your eyes. Remember why the good lord made your eyes, so don't shade your eyes but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize !" ~ Me
Glad to see you didn't acknowledge your source! :-)
(It's Tom Lehrer, for any who don't recognize it.)
No, it's Jan Laureys
- Lincoln. Fact-checked by Meta.
I sung this in the style of System Of A Down for some reason
And now I am infinitely disappointed that there don't seem to be any covers of Tom Lehrer tunes in the style of System of a Down.
Plagiarism is claiming credit for work that is not yours: it is entirely different from a breach of copyright. You can breach copyright without plagiarism, and you can plagiarise without breaching copyright.
"Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal" - Picasso
This is actually genius from the lawyers of meta. In this way they are pushing the onus onto the question of "what is illegal in regards to torrenting copyright content".
They have the money and legal team to push it to any conclusion, but that conclusion would risk so many huge industries in the Us that too many parties would be effected. That would incentivize companies to drop this case against meta and the status quo can continue.
I'm under absolutely zero illusion this will set some precedent for one way or the other. It's too valuable to too many people involved.
It’s not genius; it’s SOP in legal procedure. See my other comment in this discussion.
Can someone, self representing, and with the very intention to lose, keep going this battle? I don't know, there are 70tb of books, could someone who had published under their name carry on independently?
Anybody can sue anybody, and this someone in your example would likely have standing, so why not?
A single person self representing against a company that is essentially one of the largest law firms on the planet, and can outspend them tens of thousands times over - what's to be gained?
In the Netherlands, for individuals at least, it's legal to download copyrighted works, but not to upload or seed. I don't know if that applies to corporations.
Yes, it will just turn into another proof that if you're rich enough you can get away with anything in this country. The rule of law is three times gone and never coming back.
I think they should be fined more for torrenting and not seeding :D
Meta's rep continues to degrade - first they steal from copyright holders, but then they admit to leeching? Not even a 1:1 ratio?!
/kickban
Seriously though, where is that magnet link? That's the only question on my mind when these articles come up.
>This torrent list is the “ultimate unified list” of releases by Anna’s Archive, Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, and others. By seeding these torrents, you help preserve humanity’s knowledge and culture. These torrents represent the vast majority of human knowledge that can be mirrored in bulk.
>These torrents are not meant for downloading individual books. They are meant for long-term preservation. With these torrents you can set up a full mirror of Anna’s Archive, using our source code and metadata (which can be generated or downloaded as ElasticSearch and MariaDB databases). We also have full lists of torrents, as JSON.
https://annas-archive.org/torrents
annas archive has a whole section on torrenting
This sets a hilarious precedent where downloading torrents becomes completely fine. You can just cite this case if they win - even though we are talking about books the MPAA is probably going to have an opinion here.
You're typical 19 year old doesn't have a team of elite lawyers to argue for her when she torrents Game of Thrones.
Expect Meta to "win" as in the plaintiffs just give up and calculate it's not worth pursuing. It would stun me if they even settle.
Not to mention the LLMs themselves are creating unauthorized copies of copywriten content. But again, Meta has unlimited money. Different rules for them.
Not sure if it's still the case but this is it is in Canada. Downloading is legal but uploading is illegal.
I think you’re right but I don’t think this is the case in the US? I’ve certainly read many stories over the years of the hammer coming down on downloading on its own.
I'm a little confused about how is it supposed to work otherwise? Do I have an obligation as an internet user to ascertain if a website owner whose website I visit has the all the rights to all the media that the website contains (presumably also working out whatever jurisdictional issues come up)?
Like how do you know that (say) Netflix actually has the right to stream you every show that they do? And how do you know that some random ad supported website doesn't?
It's a difference of intent. Paying Netflix as an individual with the intention and expectation of watching content legally is very different to torrenting terabytes of pirated books on company laptops for training a commercial AI to replace those writers, and employees even expressing concern over its ethics on recorded communication
So your position is that it is illegal for me to watch a movie on Netflix that they don't have the rights to? Just that I wouldn't be prosecuted because I didn't intend to break the law? Unless perhaps I knew they didn't have the rights to it but watched it anyway?
That the judge will say you did not break the law because you reasonably believed you were following the law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
Copyright infringement is a strict liability offence, so not having intent isn't a defense.
However, in this scenario you'd very likely have a good "innocent infringement" defense, which would allow the judge to lower the statutory damages to as low as $200. Since the damages available are so low it wouldn't be worth suing over.
It's an argument made in bad faith to basically send a message to the claim bringers that "hey, we have enough money and time to push this argument all the way, want to try us?".
Try this as a citizen.
If this was 15-20 years ago, arguably at the peak of P2P filesharing, I suspect most people would side with Meta.
I think people would dunk on Meta for not seeding
It's today and everyone on HN still should side with them.
It's a travesty that we let the RIAA and MPAA sue defenseless kids and elderly for impossibly large sums, forced them to settle out of court to avoid expensive legal fees, and then use those acts of terrorism to establish the insane idea that filesharing was tantamount to "theft" or should be restricted.
I hope Meta wins. I hope we see a reversal of the attacks on fair use and the end of abusive fraudulent DMCA takedowns, and I'm happy to finally have a powerful ally in the resistance against oppression from the copyright cartel.
I still do on this one specific argument. Just because I loathe them doesn’t mean I disagree with everything they say.
In the Netherlands this is still the law.
Downloading is fine, uploading is not.
We used to have a sort of national library of every single media on Usenet back in the day.
11 years ago the EU made the Netherlands change their position: https://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-fi... AFAIK this is still the case - the Netherlands is more poorly-enforced than other EU countries, but it's still illegal to download pirated material.
And of course the "thuiskopieheffing", a tax on any storage device that ostensibly is used to fund those whose media gets copied, is still in effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#Netherlan...
As long as I'm paying a tax for it, it is my right to copy
No, it is not your right to copy! If you want to keep using euros and have free travel to other Eurozone countries, you need to respect EU law. The tax does not respect EU law because it makes no effort to actually offset losses to copyright holders.
Your comment doesn't even make sense! The intention was never to make piracy okay, it was to offset a tiny fraction of the financial losses. These financial losses are still occurring even now that piracy is formally illegal, so the tax is still justified.
More generally this seems a form of freeloading: picking the parts of the EU that you like, ignoring the parts that don't. Who cares about society, it's just me me me. Pure selfishness.
Collecting restitution from innocent parties is perhaps the definition of injustice.
Not sure what you're on about but it was permitted by law, and the tax exists because of that reason. The EU bullied the NL into changing some laws (which aren't enforced), but the NL is still charging this tax.
None of that really has anything to do with me, I'm not a bureaucrat. But they chose to still tax me, so as far as I'm concerned I have the moral right to download as much as I want.
Anyway, feel free to lobby the NL to drop this tax and then we can talk.
Weird, TIL.
This has never been enforced though.
It certainly has!
https://stichtingbrein.nl/largest-ever-criminal-action-again...
https://piracymonitor.org/netherlands-odido-is-ordered-to-bl...
https://piracymonitor.org/netherlands-brein-reports-two-pira...
All these are proof of upload enforcement, not download.
These days for books at least Anna's Archive is the place to go.
https://annas-archive.org/activity
Maybe Meta has a "trading desk" in the Netherlands. :-)
Why do we have to play this purity game where we take a situation, remove context, and wag our finger at each other?
There's an ENORMOUS difference between college students pirating some movies or albums and the company worth $2 trillion doing it programmatically across millions of works and then reselling the laundered data.
This is a completely unserious discussion without considering context.
The difference being... what? Just scale?
To be clear, Meta didn't "[resell] the laundered data": or at least they're claiming there's no proof of seeding.
Yes, scale matters, a lot. I can feed my neighbor some rycin and I'm a murderer. If I poison the state's water supply with rycin and millions die, I'm not just a murderer any more. I'm now a terrorist and an entirely new set of laws apply to me. Same with blowing up my neighbors barn vs blowing up a large building. Scale matters and these "what's the difference except the scale" comments seem unconsidered or naive to me.
The difference is scale AND that META does it for profit, violating plenty of licensing terms in the process as well.
If you download one book you're a criminal. If they download millions of books, that's just business.
Depends on your jurisdiction. In Switzerland, downloading games, books, music, movies etc. for personal use is always legal even if the copy is "pirated". Work just needs to be published in any form. Dont know any other country where it works like this.
Czechia. In theory, there is a fee for every media (e.g.HDD) that is paid to OSA (authors organization) and OSA pays to authors through some distribution scheme. Since user already paid fee, downloading is OK.
This is mostly leftover before computers were a thing (think cassettes and paper copiers).
In practice, it's a racket and OSA is a mafia that doesn't pay to anyone. Also, the fees are rather small considering the the purpose (I think it's capped at ~$5 per device), but since authors don't actually get money from it(OSA practices) , it doesn't really matter.
Anyway, downloading audiovisual media is fine, seeding is not.
Sweden has something similar (except, as I mentioned elsewhere, the law was amended in 2005 to explicitly add an exception for downloads).
The Berne Convention has a special provision for this. Something about if the biggest rights organizations agree then a country can have laws that allow some free copying. So a tax on empty media (in Sweden also covering the computer hard drives and the flash memory built into phones) is used to pay off the big music and movie companies.
The weird thing is that only the biggest industries are paid off. No matter what you use your storage for, it is the big movie and music companies that receive the money. No other industries are paid off as far as I know, so most others just have to accept that their stuff is legally copied for free, without compensation (a few things like software are always illegal to copy, so those industries are not affected).
Sweden apparently kept the fee and made it illegal. That's extra mafia.
It is specifically illegal to make a copy of something that has been illegally published, not illegal to make copies for personal use in general.
Not that I am a lawyer.
This is a common misconception: there are some exceptions for certain types of media, but for example downloading copyrighted software (including games) without authorization is not legal in Switzerland. And some of those exceptions are more constrained than others.
Can you point to any official document which states it is illegal? Or any document which mentions any exceptions?
Art. 19, Paragraph 4 of the Copyright Act (CopA [1]).
The article lists the "Published works [that] may be used for private use" and that paragraph closes it with:
> This Article does not apply to computer programs.
[1] https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1993/1798_1798_1798/en#ar...
In South Africa (as far as I understand) it's also perfectly legal to copy stuff for personal use.
It's been a while since I've been in one, but our public libraries had coin operated photocopiers, you can just walk in, grab literally any book from the shelf, and copy away.
>Dont know any other country where it works like this.
The Netherlands works the exact same.
> If they download millions of books ...
... as a private individual, you are toast.
I think the more appropriate quote to paraphrase would be one from Dennis Hopper's character in the film Speed (1994): "Oh, no. Poor people are pirates, Jack. We are tech innovators!"
When did he say that? I watched it recently, and don't recall that line at all...
The scene where Jack climbs down the hole under the garbage can into the subway, having figured out the ransom money has moved. He tries to hold up Payne, who reveals he's holding Annie hostage.
Here: https://youtu.be/ntTY_Q005Ic?t=128
So he didn't say it. "paraphrase" is the wrong word because you changed the meaning behind what he said.
> A paraphrase or rephrase is the rendering of the same text in different words without losing the meaning of the text itself
Oh, I thought that was the quote before paraphrasing, not after
you are not. Thats their point
That is definitely not their point. Their point is, quite simply, “don’t punish us, bro”. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the law in general or what it means for other people, they just want to make sure they specifically can do what they please without repercussion.
I think they try to argue around the diffrence of sharing activly (=illegal) and downloading (=valid) with this argument it does not matter if you download one book or 1 million books
Their point is that they are not.
It would set the precedent for everyone. The real difference is that they can beg the question and people like Aaron Schwartz couldn't.
Aaron Schwartz's lawyer could have posed exactly the same claim.
It wouldn't have succeeded, just like this won't.
Lawyers will deploy any possible argument, just in case, even if it has a 0.1% chance of working because why wouldn't you?
On the off chance the defense succeeds I'm proven right, if the defense fails, I'm still proven right as the fine will only be a minor set back for Meta.
No, this is a case of "rules for thee but not for me".
Aaron Swartz didn't seed or distribute articles too
Swartz killed himself before the trial actually took place. Its entirely possible that the court would have ruled in his favor.
Maybe, but getting arrested with the FBI involved is a pretty traumatic event for a citizen. Having your company's lawyers mail back and forth with the DoJ less so.
Probably not because there was a DA who needed to make her career on his back.
I don't think that what Aaron did was* wrong.
Meta's wholescale theft, however, is pretty hard to defend, and Meta knew it. That's why they went to some lengths to hide it.
Similarly, that OpenAI whistleblower, the one whose family was calling for a murder investigation, might be alive today if it wasn't pretty well known that stealing the work of thousands/millions of people to make a for-profit imitation machine isn't exactly cool or legal.
Edit: egregious typo.
What Aaron did was not wrong.
He intended to make journal articles publicly available. They should be, as many are publicly funded, and academic publishers like Elsevier do not pay for these articles. Scientists provide them to journals. Universities, libraries, and we then have to buy back access.
+1 public money, public research
Yeah agreed, I was typing pre-caffeination :/
Trump solved the problem by just removing the funding! Checkmate, Libs! /s
Models absorbed the pirated content. Now Meta is distributing those models. Is that considered distribution?
For that argument I believe the question becomes "is the output of a model considered a derivative work of the training data?"
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
What else could it be?
An original composition based on a statistical analysis of the training data. Statistical data about a copyrighted work obviously isn't necessarily a derivative of that work. Otherwise Tolkien could sue me for telling you how many times The Lord of the Rings uses the word "the".
Can it reproduce training data? Then its not analysis but compression, lossy compression.
The industry is banking on Author's Guild v. Google to be precedent in such a way that it's functionally transformative enough to be a completely new work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
I think they have about a coin flip of a chance that it passes muster in the courts.
Of course not.
I listened to other people's music and learned some of their songs before writing my own music, that doesn't mean my songs are distribution of theirs.
I read other people's books and short stores and news articles before writing my own, that doesn't mean my writing is distribution of theirs.
How about if I play your song at just the right speed with just the right EQ and I can get an exact reproduction of some of the songs you claim to have written? Because we can get large excerpts of exact copies of short and long form content as demonstrated clearly by the New York Times research on chatbots and their own content.
I don't know what the legal answer will be, but I believe it should be considered distribution. A model is basically a highly lossy and extremely compressed copy of its training data, available as a content-addressable database. To anthropomorphize, the model is trying to perfectly replicate its training set, its brain just isn't big enough to do so.
It really should be.
In germany its saver to illegally download through usenet because you don't upload and the cost a rights owner can make is only the cost of the product and not an aribrary number of (you puloaded it and created damage of x).
It doesn't make it legal at all, it just makes it no longer interesting for IP owners to sue you.
Wasn't there a ruling like a decade ago that explicitly declared storing illegal, but streaming (download to RAM) is fine as a non-redistributing client?
Of course the rights holder would have trouble proving whether you did save it, but that's a different issue.
Its official illegal for a while.
Nonetheless its the same thing: if they can prove you watched it, the damage is small for you and because IP holders are splittered, and you didn't just watch content of one, its probably not worth it to sue you.
In fairness, I don't think Meta would have (had) any trouble paying the fair price of every book they downloaded (the price of exactly one copy) if that had been possible to do at scale.
Paying the price of one copy does not imply that you can use it for training, right ?
(note; not a lawyer) It depends on if a model is a derivate work from it's source material or not. If yes, then all copyright protections come into force. If not, then the author can't rely on copyright to protect themselves.
My instinct/gut says that an AI model is a derivative work from the training data (in that it quite literally takes training data to produce a new creative output, with the "human addition" being the selection of training data to use), but there's not really clear judgements on it either way for the time being, which leaves room to argue.
The actual methodology used ("isn't an LLM like a computer reading a book for yourself?") is an irrelevant distraction in this regard. Computers aren't people and don't get that sort of protection; they're ultimately tools programmed to do things by humans and as a rule we hold humans responsible when those tools do something bad/wrong. "Computer says no" works on the small scale, but in cases like this, it's not really an adequate defense.
Or rather, that is how it should be; I think the uncomfortable truth here is that we need Congress to make laws to clarify the situation in the favor of society, and Congress does not seem willing to do that.
Doesn't synthetic data complicate this reasoning? If I train a model on synthetic data, which is not protected by copyright, I am free to do as I please. It won't even regurgitate the originals, it will learn the abstractions not memorize the exact expression, because it doesn't see it.
But it's not just supervised training. Maybe a model trained on reasoning traces and RLHF is not a mere derivative of the training set. All recent models are being trained on self generated data produced with reward or preference models.
When a model trains on a piece of text it won't derive gradients from the parts it knows, it will only absorb the novel parts. So what it takes from each example depends on the ordering of training examples. It is a process of diffing between model and text, could be seen as a form of analysis not simple memorization.
Even if it is infringement to train on protected works, the model size is 100x up to 1000x smaller than the training set, it has no space to memorize it.
The larger the training set, the less impact any one work has. It is de minimis use, paradoxically, the more you take the less you imitate.
That should matter when estimating damages.
Understood, Was there any conclusion to the past copy right cases that have been filed against open ai / anthropic ?
All still pending as far as I'm aware. The only concluded lawsuit is that LAION isn't responsible for how AI companies use it's dataset and that merely providing a tagged image index isn't in and of itself copyright infringement (and that lawsuit was ruled in Germany, not the US.)
That's what I do all the time, when I buy a copy of a book and read it.
Since there is no such thing as training rights, they would have a reasonable claim.
I think it is more reasonable for content owners to say what can and cannot be done with their data. After all, content is what make AI possible, and content owners could easily start their own LLM if they wanted to since a lot of it is open source now.
You're taking an "everything not permitted is forbidden" approach, which contradicts the common law principle of residual freedom.
This would automatically outlaw any new use of information (eg music sampling) by default.
If all novel uses were banned from the outset, cultural progress would suffer immeasurably.
I don't think cultural progress will suffer from copyright holders preventing AI from using their content.
What I think will suffer more is the bank accounts of AI corporations.
So to be clear, you're arguing this one specific use (machine learning) should be knocked on the head? And not all novel uses?
Because "content owners to say what can and cannot be done with their data" is quite broad.
No, that's not what I said.
If we want to use data owned by others and make money with it, we can do two things:
(1) just grab the data
(2) ask the content owners
I think what is fair is closer to (2) than to (1). Especially since the data was originally intended for human consumption. What you call "training" is what another person might call "mechanized processing", and would not fall within fair use of the data.
I'm honestly at a loss here. I can't figure out what your position is.
> If we want to use data owned by others and make money with it [...] ask the content owners
So is it "no commercial use without permission" you're arguing for?
> mechanized processing
Or are you arguing that training should fall under the existing mechanical license provisions for songs? I don't think you are, because those licenses are compulsory, and you seem to want an element of choice for the copyright holder.
Ok, put the chatbots aside for the moment. If [brand new use] for a book is invented, and I buy a copy of that book and want to do [that new thing] with it, should the copyright holder of that book be able to block me?
they are not content "owners" though. they have a a copyright that regulates who can copy and distribute that data. they don't have a say how that content is used when acquired legally as long as you activity doesn't constitute a distribution.
That is not reasonable, should a child heed the restrictions placed on the 1st grade math book later in life, when they become PhD?
LLMs aren't people
LLMs aren't the ones making the decision to use the copyrighted information as training data, and it's that decision that is at issue here.
No, but people are the one's training the models.
>I think it is more reasonable for content owners to say what can and cannot be done with their data.
They lose that right as soon as they sell it to other people.
No, you can't sell a book to someone and then sue anyone who reads the book, upside down.
That would be ridiculous. If you don't want someone reading your book upside down, or training on it, then don't sell books.
You assume that "training" and human learning are similar things.
This is a bit like saying that taking a holiday picture of someone, and putting a surveillance camera on the street are the same thing.
I think many books actually prohibit the storage into an information retrieval system and AI can be considered a form of that.
> You assume that "training" and human learning are similar things.
No I don't. Because a human is choosing to enact the training regardless.
Just like if a human held a book up to a rock. It would be ridiculous that an author could ban a human from "training" a rock from a book. Its their book, and they can show it to a rock if they want!
If you buy a DVD and show it at work, then that's also ok, because it is your DVD and you can do with it whatever you want?
Turns out, nope, that's not ok.
That is still an open question.
They would have a better defense if they had escrowed that money and/or reasonably tried to buy.
Indeed. Although there is the case of owners of rights invited to come forward to receive their due, if it wasn't possible to contact them before. You probably need a proof that you made an effort though.
It's also true that anyone can go to a public library and read all the contents for free- the point is they can't further distribute them except in a highly processed form (i.e. they can distribute original products influenced by what they have read). Here the issue is the scale of both the "reading" part and of the "producing original work" part.
If anyone could do it at scale, it would be Meta.
I am curious, where did the other companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, et al) get their training data from? Why is only Meta under fire for this?
Meta is dumb enough to use email to discuss it.
It's not just books; most websites technically don't allow scraping content, but most of the content on which these models trained was scraped from the web. It's legality is still an open question.
Its funny because courts are split on the making available theory since it was pushed during the napster/grokster days. So I do think this is a decent approach of attack since they are saying there can be no proof they made anything available and I'm not so sure meta wants to settle this at all.
You wouldnt download a BOOK. (But meta is allowed, because they are to big to fail or something)
I believe that at least in the past the entertainment industry would try to detect someone seeding a file before going after them. The idea being that someone downloading is receiving a copy (not illegal), and the act of making the copy (illegal) was done by the seeder. I'm not sure to what degree this was an established requirement vs them trying to avoid ambiguity, but my point is that this framing by Meta isn't novel. I'm not expressing a judgment on whether it's correct or if it's good.
The Open(Closed)AIs of the world have millions of dollars to spend on IP datasets.
Arguing that copyright forbids training AI models without paying authors is the moat that would prevent any hope that small labs, individuals, and open source communities can ever compete with these huge corpos.
The books and other artworks they are arguing over didn't come generated spontaneously from nowhere, and it's disingenuous to refuse sharing them to inform what is basically the worlds next currency : Intelligence. Doing so is just saying that knowledge and intelligence must belong to rich corpos only and never be democratized.
This is unexpected but Meta is basically being the good guy by giving away their research papers and models weight resulting from millions of $ of training.
The alternative to open source AI is everyone's subjugation to the oligarchists in charge of Intelligence. Copyrights holders who argue against free training of open source models from their work are morally and ethically wrong here.
Did at least their competitors seed?
I'm picturing some lawyers pulling up at the front of the court building in their clown car - a vehicle with the tight turning circle needed after all these years of hearing lawyers argue piracy is theft.
Copyright laws exist to prevent those who are not wealthy from sharing their resources with each other. That's why AI companies and now FB can get away with it, the law wasn't meant for them.
Fundamentally, the ability to share what you own is a right no government has legitimate authority to restrict. Such laws are illegitimate. Governments don't own people, they govern them. Governance is scoped within limits of authority. Even slaves and prisoners can share their food,clothing and other resources with each other, preventing them is not just inhumane but beyond the authority of slave owners and prison wardens. It boils down to this: if you own something, you can give it away for free because ownership implies authority to retain and give away the property. The right to own things can be restricted, but once ownership is allowed, no one has the authority to restrict retention or free exchange of owned resources. Governments can regulate commerce, but free exchange of resources is beyond their authority since it isn't commercial activity. Keep in mind that this is a more crucial and important concept beyond basic liberty and human rights. If you can't own stuff, nothing else matters regarding your relationship with the government. Telling you that you own stuff but then stripping away the meaning of ownership so that you don't really own stuff is a sneaky way of governments exceeding the limits of their authority.
Another sneaky and fraudulent thing is implied acceptance of licensing. Stamping a copyright notice,eula, ToS,etc.. means nothing. if You buy a book with cash, your exchange is with the person who sold it to you and You now own the book. It isn't licensed to you, it is yours to give away for free. The same concept applies to software, video, music,etc.. neither intermediaries, nor original content authors have the authority to enforce a licensing agreement or copyright over the content, unless a license agreement is required at point of sale, and even then the agreement is beyond the two participants. If you agree to a copyright license contract and purchase music, and then you give it away for free, it makes sense to get sued by the copy right owner over violation of that contract. But the person you sold it to has no obligation to honor a contract they did not enter. The government has no right to implicitly force people to enter a license agreement when they receive goods free of charge by someone. only the person who originally agreed to the contract should be held liable.
so trying to understand here. when metallica et. al. went after kids (well, i guess ppl my age all those years ago lol) for using napster and downloading their music...they made this very clear distinction right?
i'm beyond sick and tired of these large corpos arguing 'rules for thee but not for me.' unfortunately, in this country with no meaningful legislation around privacy or really, anything digital, it's a game of 'who has the slickest lawyers to pull one over on the judge/jury' it would seem.
I will admit that I did not have "FB ruling may end up making torrenting legal ( as long as you don't seed )" in my 2025 bingo card.
Seems like a bad thing, increasing the percentage of non-seeding users will likely kill most torrents.
I wasn't making a judgment on whether it is a good or a bad thing. I just did not see it coming. I was expecting lawsuits on AI will get interesting, but I did not expect this.
Yup, we can agree on that one.
So openai announced once that it will cover its' clients legal costs for copyright infringement suits, wonder how it works. Either they are very cautious about where they are training or seeding the data from or there is a loophole.
Probably "after the fact", meaning you first go bankrupt so they don't have to pay you.
It's a bluff, OpenAI and Microsoft both have an carveout in that guarantee that effectively says "if we think you deliberately did copyright infringement with our tools, we won't help you".
And of course, conveniently, if you get a copyright infringement lawsuit, they can just point to that. A company promising legal defense is only worth the paper it's written on and there's always carveouts like that, with the likelihood of them being used probably being equal to the risk the company takes on with that promise. US Copyright lawsuits having pretty extreme fines makes them fairly likely to get used.
by the way they say "we didn't seed after the download" but what about while downloading in progress?
The claim is that they "took precautions not to 'seed' any downloaded files" - that probably means blocking all upload actions which is possible with many torrent clients. They may also have used a custom hacked client that didn't even connect to other nodes that didn't claim to have 100% already.
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In any case it's really easy to configure a BitTorrent client to never seed. It would be dumb not to when torrenting for work.
This line of argument sounds exactly what a lot of people tried in the past when they were getting hit by claims from the media companies.
If I were to scrape Meta's information and use it to train AI chat bots, would they say "That's fine, go ahead" because I'm not sharing the raw information in another way?
I was a university student in golden age of libgen so Glass Houses and all - but it's crazy that this was approved from the top of a company that could maybe have even legally purchased the bulk of this collection without hurting quarterly returns
This lawsuit may have impact on legality of open AI models like LLAMA 3, if outcome makes it illegal this may prevent businesses utilizing these models directly in their project.
Well it was a nice run.
I expect all LLMs to be illegal within a year if this is the sort of high caliber defense the top minds of meta can come up with.
Disclaimer: not American.
Copyright agencies that monitor torrents here have actually verified that peers offer at least one offending chunk on protocol level and the Market Court has decided it's the minimum that can be considered sharing. As far as I know, nobody has yet claimed their client has been modified to download without seeding.
I do not work for Meta. Still throwaway account for obvious reasons.
I wrote a modified torrent client that fake seeds. No data (not even a byte) of the content itself is ever uploaded to another peer.
I'm aware this is an asshole move, but it made the lawyers happier.
That's actually really interesting, thanks for sharing.
I've genuinely been wondering if someone building these models has done exactly that, precisely after discussing with lawyers. It seems like the obvious move, legally.
Unless they actively modified a bittorrent client, even leeches upload and share some chunks.
It's not hard. I've done it.
Right, but did they? It being easy doesn't mean data scientists moving fast and breaking things bothered while they were already doing something illegal.
> Evidence instead shows that Meta "took precautions not to 'seed' any downloaded files," Meta's filing said. Seeding refers to sharing a torrented file after the download completes, and because there's allegedly no proof of such "seeding," Meta insisted that authors cannot prove Meta shared the pirated books with anyone during the torrenting process.
Are they actually claiming only that they didn't share after the torrent completed? Or is the journalist just confused?
My understanding with bittorrent is that normally during download you are also uploading. "Seeding" is just what the uploading part is called when you're not also downloading.
I think it is possible to download without doing any uploading at all, but I feel like the onus of proof should be on them to show that they actually did that.
You're right that torrent clients typically share during downloading, although one might limit this by limiting the upload bandwidth.
However, while we have no idea the lengths that Meta went to (or not), I suspect they have the engineering chops to fork and tweak their own 'download-only' torrent client.
But that’s not quite how the law works. Meta’s response here is “you have no evidence of any wrongdoing”.
The fact we’re even discussing this shows that there’s at least some doubt that Meta could be successfully prosecuted for downloading alone.
With regards to uploading, legally speaking, it sounds like they’re right. Generally, the presumption of innocence means that whoever’s doing the accusing carries the burden of proof, and without any evidence that Meta did anything wrong, it also sets a worrying precedent that Meta would proactively have to prove their innocence in the face of no evidence to the contrary.
I think it's possible with the optimistic unchoking feature of BT but it would be slow and rely on generous clients.
But at the end of the day I don't think Meta care enough. They see themselves as being above the law and likely didn't seed 'more than necessary' only because it didn't benefit them.
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In the end it's it about the money? ie the loss to the copyright holder.
One of the reasons people sharing were gone after is you could aggregate the loss to one lawsuit - the person sharing was responsible for every lost sale - rather than chasing the thousands of individual lost sales, one at once, for each download. Not sure that actually made the best sense from a legal perspective as the sharer wasn't necessarily benefiting - but it was pushed for practical reasons.
In this case I'm assuming Meta downloaded as many pirated books as it could get it's hands on in order to avoid paying for them.
Seems common sense what they did is/should be illegal.
Meta can afford to buy copies of the books / whatever it's scraping.
Could some disgruntled employee offer proof of seeding and collect a whistleblower reward?
Burning tires in Meta's offices isn't illegal without proof of having set the tires on fire.
So I'm allowed to torrent all the games and apps for their VR headsets? Good that they clarified this.
Only if you leech it, I guess.
Corporate advocating for internet piracy, even better for torrents surely was not on my 2025 bingo card.
Copyright laws should not exist. Claiming you "own" a specific sequence of words/pixels is crazy. I hope Meta wins the case.
Pirates around the world agree!
This amounts to a claim of fair use, since copying occurs. Pretty disingenuous of them to make a claim that an individual user would make.
The outcome of a fair use claim by one of the world's largest corporations to ingest wholesale an entire corpus and use it for commercial purposes is probably not the same as one by an individual person who wanted to watch a movie.
It's not the same use, and is much more likely to be found unfair.
Torrenting without seeding is a new low even for Meta.
So not only did they pirate all those books, they were also jerks about it? Meta's seeding ratio would've gotten them kicked off of most private trackers back in the day.
Yeah, the difficulty of tracking is a huge factor. Plus, with torrenting, the "making available" part is pretty blatant. With Usenet or direct downloads, it's a grayer area unless you're running the server. I've always wondered about the legal nuances of just passively receiving copyrighted data – like if a misconfigured server pushes something to you without you requesting it.
Pirating used to be the worst. The law is awfully flexible when large companies want it to be.
The law doesn't punish those who break it. It punishes those who can't afford expensive legal teams and those who hurt people who can afford expensive legal teams.
my teenager self the trillion dollars company
The author of the linked piece identifies as a "reporter," however it reads like an opinion piece. We should demand better from ALL journalists.
I guess that might be good for everyone else?
Meta may not be re-seeding the titles in the original form, but Meta ARE definitely redistributing the content in altered form — it is the specific intent of their bulk-downloading — to ingest the content into their LLM to redistribute it as their product.
The question I see for someone sitting in the judge's chair is whether this is fair use, sufficient alteration to constitute a new work, or a derivative work requiring compensation.
That was my understanding too for a long time. I thought everyone who got sued for using BitTorrent was sued because they were "distributing" copies. Downloading isn't distributing. I also don't think anyone has ever been sued in America for using websites which stream movies they don't have the rights to to you.
Did they really need a photo of a leech in the article? I get the connection, but it's gross and reminds me of a Taboola/Outbrain chumbox.
We'll see if small scale piracy is bad but massive scale corporate piracy is fine.
We have TV culture not recognizing the Internet culture.
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If only every copyright lawyer in the world could suddenly band together and descend on them in a horde. This is such a disgusting abuse of book authors, who are usually not the big guys. As a non-author myself, I don’t care about the publishers and whatnot but most people who are authors only have written one book and should get the royalties they deserve from their work.
Using LLMs trained on copyright books should be banned anywhere downloading copyright books is illegal
I am astonished that Meta is even trying this defense. It does not even remotely pass the smell test. Seeding is not remotely relevant, and neither is the fact that torrenting in general is legal. The works are not published with the consent of the rightsholders - LibGen and Z-Library distribute them illegally, and Meta therefore obtained them illegally.
This is an open-and-shut case.
Just more proof that laws only exist for poor people, if you are the 1% you get away with virtually anything.
“It's only illegal if you get caught”
Semantic details aside (I was just downloading/leeching, bro!1! I pinky promise). Clearly a PR campaign.
It’s abhorrent that a multibillion dollar company is not just pirating the content for personal use (? wtf how can a for profit company download it for _personal_ use ?) but also _profits_ on the pirated content by using it for training material.
The whole “corporations” are people ruling is fucking stupid, and truly shows how much this country bends to the billionaire class
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America is a country of religious assholes. The pilgrims were kicked out of England because of their weird-ass insistence on founding their own churches, so they moved to the Netherlands, which at the time were a refuge for many English religious separatists. However, religious freedom was not enough! No, they wanted to found their own Godly country and evangelize to the natives of America, and also reap the economic benefits of an "uncivilized" land.
America:
-Selfish assholes? check! -Weirdly religious? check! -Entrepreneurial? check!
The gall!
Next they'll say that "just because we downloaded the content does not mean we USED the content, and you have no proof we used the content, so we are not pirates".