alt Hacker NewsUploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
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> Anyone who uses BitTorrent to transfer files automatically uploads content to other people, as it is inherent to the protocol. In other words, the uploading wasn’t a choice, it was simply how the technology works.
What an argument to make in court. It can be proved false in minutes by the plaintiffs.
The world has become so strange. In my pirate youth, I would have never imagined the big companies to argue in courts like this, basically pro piracy. And the activists are now against it, because the big guys are doing it.
I wonder if big companies will now start paying shadow libraries like annas archive for direct access, to minimize publicity of how training data was acquired, like Nvidia supposedly did?
Few tens of thousands of dollars is a rounding error in Meta's bottom line but if this case goes anything like the Anthropic one, I would see it likely.
Of course it wouldn't prevent authors from asking LLM's for content from their books and suing Meta again but I imagine authors would be less likely to with less evidence.
This is a desperate defense. They're making it because they have to try something, but I doubt the court will buy it. This is a class action brought by authors, so while Meta has deep pockets, I expect this will actually settle, with named plaintiffs getting payouts authors will find big and the rest of the class getting scraps. If a major media company were the plaintiff, I'd expect this to get very expensive quickly.
I'm a little surprised Meta is even bothering to fight this. I mean the argument looks farcical to me be IANAL and weirder things have happened. If they do end up losing they'll have to pay however many millions to their law firms plus whatever the in or out of court settlement end ups being.
And you just know that whatever they end up paying will be so tiny that it will just be seen as the cost of doing business. From a corporation's perspective it's always better to break the law and maybe pay a tiny fine (if you get caught and can't argue your way out of it) than it is to follow the law and miss out on profit/revenue/strategic advantage etc.
Everyone's pointing out the obvious hypocrisy here, but I think it's more interesting if Meta succeeds in making this argument: can I just steal any book I want and share it with anyone? Does the same apply to music, movies, TV shows, and video games?
it's interesting that meta is at the forefront of any legal battles for AI when they're not at the forefront of the technological race
At some point, the contradiction of "law as something impartial" and "law bends to the whims of power" will need to be resolved.
I remember in the 90s and 2000s, the FBI would go after homeless people selling bootleg VHS and DVDs on the street lol
Courts lose respect when their rules are not consistent and almost always favouring a legal fiction of a corporation being a person and a real person or any non-human specie on this planet as the lesser and a commodity. There must be a better way to maintain order and ensure progress.
Can Meta fight Nintendo, too? Would love to see two legal Leviathans fight each other.
Is it weird that I'm on Meta's side for this?
This is the real reason the ultra rich are buying media companies. They expect the existing copyright laws to prevail in court and to either make significant revenue licensing IP for training or to take large stakes in AI companies in return for the IP.
Only data is a moat, not algos, not compute.
Feeling very conflicted right now.
On the other hand, it'd be absolutely hilarious if they succeeded with this argument. VPN vendors would not find that as hilarious I bet.
And on another the hypocrisy is mindboggling. I guess you can't blame the lawyers from going after every angle, but this is quite creative.
But really I do just want to find out if money continues to buy justice.
I sincerely hope Facebook loses and is found to have knowingly infringed on copyright of all the books in the lawsuit. At $150K per violation, I'd almost feel bad for the poor shareholders. Zuck would probably take full responsibility and fire tens of thousand of workers.
Oh, how the tables have turned...
> the company argued that uploading pirated books to other BitTorrent users during the torrent download process also qualifies as fair use ... as it is inherent to the protocol. In other words, the uploading wasn’t a choice, it was simply how the technology works.
as someone that's disabled upload when I'm downloading copyrighted material via bittorrent for decades, it is absolutely a choice
so there's that
We're reaching levels of "move fast and break things" previously only thought possible under laboratory conditions.
Seriously? They couldn't be bothered setting upload speed to 0?
A related case:
"Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B US to settle author class action over AI training"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/anthropic-ai-copyright-sett...
I wonder how many of the torrent site whales are backed by big tech or industry. Some people share like petabytes of data on multiple sites. It's an insane amount.
"i shoot them as it was fair use to taking their wallet. that's how the protocol work."
how much you have to bribe a judge to even begin to consider saying that in a defense?
Gut reaction: Judge needs to upload Meta's lawyers to jail cells, explaining "that's simply how the technology works".
Literally admitting to theft & whining about the modus which got them caught lol
piracy is not wrong, no matter who does it.
Some of us are old enough to remember when the RIAA sued children for downloading Metallica albums on filesharing networks. They sued for $100,000 per song, an absurd amount when you consider that even stealing a physical album would amount only to around $1 per song. What was bizarre was that courts took the figure seriously, even if they typically settled cases for around $3,000, still around 30x actual damages. The legal maximum was $150,000 per infringement: when a staffer leaked an early cut of the Wolverine movie, the studio could only sue for that much.