alt Hacker NewsZuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
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All those lawsuits against students who downloaded but didn't even redistribute mp3s. Less than a fair use transformation. Just the file download itself. ... Lesson learned: those students should have stolen millions instead!
I had to block meta's ASN on my personal cgit server a few weeks ago because they were ignoring robots.txt and torching it. Like hundreds of megabytes of access logs just from them, spread around different network blocks to clearly try and defeat IP based limiting. I couldn't believe it.
Funny how people are suddenly on Elsevier's side. It's clear to me that AI training is transformative fair use under existing law. Maybe this will be the case to prove it.
Looking forward to the personal liability.
I've wondered what the legalese justification for letting liability evaporate as it does so often with corps. So far the reasons I'm left with are 'shrugs' and 'the relevant provision (seemingly? apparently?) simply don't apply', neither of which are any good.
I was going to make a joke about how we should attach magnets to Aaron Swartz' corpse, since that'd make for a pretty potent energy source, given how fast he must be spinning. But honestly, I think he would have seen this sort of thing coming, given how his case was handled and how things really haven't gotten any better.
I should hope that if Zuckerberg isn't severely punished for this, it at least sets a legal precedent for every other person to do the same with immunity.
All the Aaron Schwartzes of the future could freely share scientific papers with the world.
I know personally a case of a engineer who was told to do something despite all the legal problems because the company had lawyers for a reason
Why is there only a fine and not also the seizure/forfeiture of the stolen property and the derivative works/products built on it?
Like the fine means nothing to meta, and they'll still be the beneficiaries of their infringement.
In this current state, you really just need to have enough money to bypass this lawsuit and be on your way.
Does it matter? The company's liability would (i assume) not change if the ceo authorized it or some other high level figure authorized it.
The question to answer is, did it happen and if so is this copyright infringement (not covered by fair use), not which company official authorized it.
Just gonna say... Aaron Swartz faced years of prison time and ultimately decided to take his own life... for downloading scientific journal articles... to share freely with the world (aka not even profiting from it).
But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that data set? Meh, sounds like Silicon Valley disruption, give the man a medal!
Based. If i read a book from a piracy site, i can still cite that book publicly. This should also apply to AI models. I am also opposed to copyright at all, but that’s another question
Can someone explain why are we reading this instead of "Meta was fined for copyright infrigement" news?
Rules for thee but not for me.
> a Meta spokesperson said, “AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use. We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
> Authors have sued AI companies for copyright infringement before - and lost.
So, basically nothing will come out of this
Shouldn't this stuff trigger RICO? Why do torrent site operators get led off in cuffs for running operations that usually lose money, but Zuck doesn't?
RICO specifically cites "criminal infringement of a copyright" as laid out in 18 U.S. Code § 2319. If the CEO tells his employees to download hundreds of thousands of works illegally in order to carry out his money-making scheme, how is that not organized crime even if (dubiously) LLM training on the material is fair use?
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RICO: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-96
Definitions: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961
> As used in this chapter — (1) “racketeering activity” means (A)[...]; (B) any act which is indictable under any of the following provisions of title 18, United States Code: [...], section 2319 (relating to criminal infringement of a copyright),[...]
18 U.S. Code § 2319 - Criminal infringement of a copyright: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2319
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edit:
> 18 U.S. Code § 1962 - Prohibited activities
> (c) It shall be unlawful for any person employed by or associated with any enterprise engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce, to conduct or participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise’s affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity[...].
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1962
From the lawsuit:
“Meta — at Zuckerberg’s direction — copied millions of books, journal articles, and other written works without authorization, including those owned or controlled by Plaintiffs and the Class, and then made additional copies of those works to train Llama,” the suit says. “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement. Meta also stripped [copyright management information] from the copyrighted works it stole. It did this to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.”
Who will be the first to implement a one-layer three-weight model and add it to BitTorrent? Let it “train” on all downloaded files. That makes it fair use. Am I doing this right?
"They then copied those stolen fruits"
How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?
Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
And you would be hard pressed to prove that LLM's haven't advanced the arts and sciences, so at bare minimum transformative, ie fair use.
I love how there's not even a class action lawsuit against AI companies that stole the work of everyone to train their models on.
Who gave permission to Anthropic/ClosedAI to scan hundreds of thousands of books to feed to their systems which they commercially sell. Why is this the new normal. Even GitHub a month ago was like if you don't opt out we will read even your private repos for AI training.
Tech is turning into next level BS, I don't know if it always was like this but this has pierced even the very bottom.
And thus sparked the entire sector of open weight LLMs...
"You can be unethical and still be legal that’s the way i live my life"
- Mark Zuckerberg
Cant wait for absolutely no consequences. Consequences are for peasants like us.
I don't have strong opinions on Zuck needing to be punished for this, because I have friends and family doing the same thing, although perhaps not at the same scale. I myself do not download copyrighted content. I think "rules for thee, not for me" goes both ways.
Waiting for the perp walk.
Tired of the double standard that CEOs get away when bad things happen (because they can’t be everywhere all the time) but all the benefits when the company makes a great profit (because they’re personally driving results!).
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
> "81.7TB"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
> "approximately 70 gigabytes"
The behavior will continue until a consequence is imposed.
Except, as the article says.... it's not copyright infringement. Whether it should be or not is another issue.
Remember when nerds loved saying "information wants to be free"?
I would rather Zuckerberg do 6 months in jail and probation than fine Meta.
this dude got in over his head with the evil empire, it is interesting how he learned judo and tried to surf, that being said I despise social media and what it did to society
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Good.
I know people really hate AI training on their work - but is it really any different than a human reading it?
I know there's a complaint that AI can verbatim repeat that work. But so can human savants. No one is suing human savants for reading their books.
Producing copyrighted material, of course. Training on copyrighted material... I just don't see it.
EDIT: Making a perfectly valid point, but it's unpopular, so down I go.
HN really loves the copyright lobby when it's against someone they hate, huh
I take issue with the use of tense used in this framing. Its not 'infringed' its 'infringing' and to say that it happened is wrong, its happening and happening continuously in these models that are in use. To say a one time payment settles it is missing the whole scope of this theft.
Royalties are owed and continuously owed as these models are deployed and doing inference. How is it any different to paying a small pittance to someone every time a song is played?
A lot of people would be very pleased if this leads to Zuckerberg getting even the statutory minimum damages ($750?) on each infringement.
The previous infringement case with Anthropic said that while training an AI was transformative and not itself an infringement, pirating works for that purpose still was definitely infringement all by itself. The settlement was $1.5bn, so close to $3k for each of the 500k they pirated, so if Zuckerberg pirated "millions" (plural) it is quite plausible his settlement could be $6bn.