hckrnws
Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
by askl
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.
Remember that Metallica band members played an active driving role in those lawsuits against their own underage fans. It wasn't just the RIAA / record company organizations behaving cruelly, it was Metallica themselves. Fuck Metallica.
Another person who I remember really coming out as a villain in that era was Gene Simmons from KISS: "Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars."[1]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/10/kiss-frontman-we...
Wow, I already didn’t like him. Reading this feels validating.
Man back when ars was good. Feels like you're pouring salt into a wound posting that link.
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It's even more egregious after watching interviews of a young Lars bragging about trading bootleg cassette tapes.
Lars was always a scumbag.
An insult to scumbags everywhere.
IIRC, Dave Grohl actually gave a lot of shit to Metallica, claiming that it would be one thing if this were some indie band selling cassettes having their music stolen, but it's another when multi-millionaires are crying that they aren't getting extra money.
Found it: https://youtu.be/Yy45qY9c49k
His book (maybe he has several) is fantastic.
Killed Napster and forced them overseas to create one of the most toxic streaming platforms for music the world has ever seen. Spotify. Sean Parker used to be cool…
how they were able to recover from that is beyond me.
They didn't. I haven't bought a Metallica album since the black album. That was a decade earlier, because everything since sucked, but as I got older I thought about maybe expanding my tastes. I avoided Metallica specifically for their disrespect of their fans.
Did they not? Seems like they're still quite popular, and I knew people in HS (for reference, late 2010s to early '20s) that were big into the band.
Additionally, looking at Google Trends[0], it seems they peaked in 21st-century online popularity in 2008 and had another notable uptick in 2017.
I think a lot of us want the assholes to have suffered real consequences for their behavior, but want is different from did.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
I think they've got some ineffable qualities, and frankly there's lots of other genres where people might decide to give them a listen...
Which is really just a roundabout way of saying I think Apocalyptica did a lot to help refresh them in the modern zeitgeist (Yes I know it was older, but I remember youtube videos causing it to enter at least my and other's conscious space...)
Yeah, they're popular like Ariana Grande is after the Manchester bombing. But just about everything they released after the Black album is kind of lame. The Budapest tickets sold out pretty fast, but they're still lame regardless if people go to their concerts. Compared to Depeche Mode and other bands that only get better with age, Metallica just play the same old songs or worse. And they're not a cult band like Death or The Sisters of Mercy either.
But they kind of are (a cult band). Most people in the world know Metalica while hardly anyone ever heard any of the Sisters Of Mercy's tracks.
Normal people don't care- they just enjoy a ballad or two.
I've long since learnt to separate an artist from their art- a fair share of the musicians, actors, directors etc aren't really a decent bunch
Not really, they missed that chance when they released Load and Reload and who knows what they did after that. I got fed up with their foray into commercial music and moved on to prog metal and other more interesting stuff. If they had stopped after the black album or continued to release quality works, then things would be different, but they chose money, whining, lawyers and drunk teenagers as an audience. They became lame and popular, which excludes being a cult band. Cult bands are not very popular in fact, as you have yourself pointed out.
You clearly haven't watched Stranger Things
Most of their fans didn't know and probably still don't. In my admittedly limited exposure (N=3 or 4), folks I know that were informed on Metallica's behavior in the Napster age that have since purchased anything from Metallica is zero.
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one of their best songs is "don't tread on me"
Why are all forums inundated with this ridiculous nonsense? They are "MAGA"? How so? Are people who follow MAGA typically anti-piracy or something? Bizarre.
It [calling anything you don't like "maga"] is political in-group signalling of a tribal ideology that also serves the dual purpose of destroying the meaning of language. Categorically inappropriate for HN - flag it and move on.
Similar to the way people use "woke".
Quite similar. I guess serving largely the same purpose that "alt-right" used to.
However it's important to note that "woke" at least has legitimate (if politically contentious) meaning outside of its broad misuse as a sort of slur. The other two terms don't have that AFAIK.
The case of "maga" specifically strikes me as a spiteful attempt to misappropriate the descriptor (vaguely similar to winnie the pooh) whereas the rise of the other two seems organic.
Yup, exactly.
Or it's just going to be a generic term for play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Surely in a thread like this we can acknowledge the futility of things like Xerox trying to maintain their strict definition of the word xerox.
The ideology has an inherent toxicity to it, along with a self own, doubling down on mistakes that would harm you and the others in longer run, embracing silly ideas and a general disregard for niceties. Would have been nice if they didn’t hurt their own fans like that could be simply phrased as ‘being MAGA’
I still can't listen to a Metallica song on the radio without feeling a bit sour. I wasn't a die hard superfan or anything, but their songs were pretty good. It really didn't help that they had cultivated this tough guy image and then turned into total whiners about piracy.
I became a super fan for a brief second during the Napster days, that’s literally what got me into metal in the first place. Decades later and I’m still soured on them too. Napster days were so good for music discovery. I mean, they’re better now with all these algos, obviously, but it was weirdly fun to download a track with tons of random strings in the name and end up with some parody Weird Al track and that’s how you discovered something new.
It all went downhill after Metallica '91. Cover for Whiskey in the Jar, come on. It's okay when everyone is drunk I guess, otherwise just litsten to the Dubliners' version or Thin Lizzy's.
Not that surprising considering that James Hetfield has no qualms about his music being used for literal torture.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo
At least it brought us some fun Flash animations as a result, in the form of Metallicops.
"Napster bad!", classic
So, does this mean that people can simply argue in court now (if they were to be prosecuted for downloading media via bittorrent) that it is fair use if they used it to train a local model on their machine?
People could always simply argue in court that their torrenting was free use.
If you're just some nobody representing yourself instead of an expensive lawyer acting on behalf of a large company, maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.
> maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.
The thing everybody ignores about this is context.
Suppose you upload a copy of a work to someone else over the internet for <specific reason>. Is it fair use? That has to depend on the reason, doesn't it? Aren't there going to be some reasons for which the answer is yes?
The "problem" here is that the reason typically belongs to the person downloading it. Suppose you're willing to upload a copy to anyone who has a bona fide legitimate fair use reason. Someone comes along, tells you that they have such a reason and you upload a copy to them. If they actually did, did you do anything wrong? What did you do that you shouldn't have done? How is this legitimate fair use copy supposed to be made if not like this?
But then suppose that they lied to you and had some different purpose that wasn't fair use. Is it you or them who has done something wrong? From your perspective the two cases are indistinguishable, so then doesn't it have to be them? On top of that, they're the one actually making the copy -- it gets written to persistent storage on their device, not yours.
It seems like the only reason people want to argue that it's the uploader and not the non-fair-use downloader who is doing something wrong is some combination of "downloading is harder to detect" and that then the downloader who actually had a fair use purpose would be able to present it and the plaintiffs don't like that because it's not compatible with their scattershot enforcement methods.
> It seems like the only reason people want to argue that it's the uploader
Well there's also the issue of enablement. If you're overly enthusiastic to turn a blind eye to illegal conduct you end up being labeled an accomplice. But of course that would seem to apply to Facebook here in equal measure.
Sadly, in many courts, when it comes to the corporate and the government, the judges rule on the axiom, "Show me your lawyer first, and I will rule, rather than show me the law, and I will rule".
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It has been often said that a man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.
Judges often roll this line out, but in criminal court I've seen some defendants get epic deals by going without a lawyer [0] since absolutely nobody in the justice system wants to deal with the guy who has no idea what he's doing and is going to make the most bizarre arguments about being a sovereign citizen. So they give them a really low offer and get them on their way as quickly as possible.
[0] I don't like to say "represent yourself." I once angered a judge by pointing out that you can't "represent yourself, you are yourself."
Interesting point that I haven't thought about before, thanks for sharing.
And a lawyer.
Unless I'm mistaken, the relevant copyright laws aren't limited to enforcement when money exchanged hands.
No, but it does matter how much money the alleged infringer has.
Property law is mostly concerned with protecting the rich from the poor, so when a rich person violates the property of a poor person, the courts can't allow the inversion of purpose and will create something called a "legal fiction," which is basically the kind of bending-over-backwards that my children do to try to claim that they didn't break the rules, actually, and if you look at it in a certain way they were actually following the rules, actually.
This sort of thing used to be heavily downvoted on HN. How the site has changed in the last year.
Yes, the VC-backed startup ecosystem that was the origin of this website does rely on propagating the myth that we live in a meritocracy to ensure it has enough cheap labor to build prototypes that its anointed few can acquire at rock bottom pricing. But we've been through enough cycles of it now that we've started seeing the patterns.
> rock bottom pricing
Value is not set by what you put into it, it is set by what people are willing to pay for it.
Browsing in a thrift store can be very enlightening!
> Value is not set by what you put into it, it is set by what people are willing to pay for it.
Is a human life literally worthless, because they never pay to be born?
The map is not the territory, the price is not the value.
History clearly establishes that the open market assigns substantial value to human life. We just happen to have outlawed trading in it. Human life has been deemed worthless by force of law.
Less facetiously, you're committing a semantic error.
It can be empirically observed that human lives are not assigned much value when choosing to start a war.
> Value is not set by what you put into it, it is set by what people are willing to pay for it.
What do you base that belief upon?
Have you ever bought something that you didn't think was worth the money at the time?
"Markets clear" is one of those meritocracy myths that we the hoi paloi get taught explicitly all the while the elite will tell you to your face they don't believe. Google and Meta are massively profitable companies built on the idea that the concept of value is manipulable.
Where did you get the idea that those ideas are mutually exclusive?
maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.
Many judges take a dim view of expensive lawyers trying to pull the wool over their eyes with sophisticated but fallacious arguments. You have to deal with a lot of BS to be a long-standing judge, so it seems like resistance to BS may be selected for among judges.
Sorting BS from non-BS is pretty much the daily job description for a judge.
Of course not. It is just yet another example of a 7-8 figure expensive attorney and their billions dollar corporation wasting everyone' time, tax payers dollars, and demonstrating that the law applies to us and not them. I expect them to just stop showing up in court in time. What can the court do when these people own the people that write the laws?
There really should be some type of panel for frivolous legal arguments. If they are used by corporation all of the lawyers, leadership and shareholders involved are thrown into jail. Could even get jury on this and have them give majority opinion.
That seems like a bad idea to me.
Sure, but these are BILLIONAIRES. Some of society's most vulnerable members. We need to protect them! The kids can take the hit.
Yeah, but remember how joyful we'd have been if copyright had been this weak in 2003. As long as this flows down to regular people instead of just corps, then copyright won't halt societal development as much as previously anymore. The weakening of copyright is a great thing.
Just step back into space. Pretend you're so high that you can see your own person from outside yourself, like you are the CCTV camera in the corner. Now look at copyright, the law about the restriction of the right to copy to a select group. It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip.
This might be relief, we might hopefully get past copyright and patents and just have innovation free for all.
> It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip.
Do you say the same thing about being required to wear pants in public?
Agreed that the extreme it has been taken to is absurd and entirely counterproductive though. 20-ish years was already a long time. If it takes you more than 20 years to market your book perhaps people just don't really like it all that much?
I rather doubt this more laissez-faire attitude towards intellectual property will be extended to those without.
Those kids should have just pirated all the music they could, turned it into a multi billion dollar business, and had lawyers fight for them in court. As long as enough money is involved you can just about anything you want.
Stupid kids
Your memory may be failing you. The "maxima" you cite still exist, but they are merely statutory damages provisions. In other words, the plaintiffs can obtain such damages without proof of actual loss, i.e. strict liability. If the plaintiffs succeed in pricing actual damages beyond this level, they can obtain them.
Furthermore, in most copyright lawsuits that nerds like us actually care about (i.e. ones involving service providers and not actual artists or publishers), the number of works infringed is so high that the judge can just work backwards from the desired damage award and never actually hit the statutory damages cap. If the statutory damages limit was actually reached in basically any intermediary liability case, we'd be talking about damage awards higher than the US GDP.
Linear arithmetic is one hell of a drug.
That makes running a seedbox sound like a threat of global economic mass destruction.
Or said differently: the law is stupid
You are off a bit on the numbers. First, though, the RIAA suits were not for downloading. The suits were for distribution.
Here is how their enforcement actions generally went.
1. They would initially send a letter asking for around $3 per song that was being shared, threatening to sue if not paid. This typically came to a total in the $2-3k range. There were a few where the initial request was for much more such as when the person was accused of an unusually high volume of intentional distribution. But for the vast majority of people who were running file sharing apps in order to get more music for themselves rather than because they wanted to distribute music it averaged in that $2-3k range.
2. If they could not come to an agreement and actually filed a lawsuit they would pick maybe 10-25 songs out of the list of songs the person was sharing (typically around a thousand) to actually sue over. The range of possible damages in such a suit is $750-30000 per work infringed, with the court (judge and jury) picking the amount [1].
NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go.
3. There would be more settlement offers before the lawsuit actually went to trial. These would almost always be in the $200-300 per song range, which since the lawsuit was only over maybe a dozen or two of the thousand+ songs the person had been sharing usually came out to the same ballpark as the settlement offers before the suit was filed.
Almost everyone settled at that point, because they realized that (1) they had no realistic chance of winning, (2) they had no realistic chance of proving they were were an "innocent infringer", (3) minimal statutory damages then of $750/song x 10-15 songs was more than the settlement offer, and (4) on top of that they would have not only their attorney fees but in copyright suits the loser often has to pay the winner's attorney fees.
4. Less than a dozen cases actually reached trial, and most of those settled during the trial for the same reasons in the above paragraph that most people settled before trial. Those were in the $3-15k range with most being around $5k.
[1] If the defendant can prove they are in "innocent infringer", meaning they didn't know they were infringing and had no reason to know that, then the low end is lowered to $200. If the plaintiff can prove that the infringement was "willful", meaning the defendant knew it was infringement and deliberately did it, the high end is raised to $150k.
> NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go.
But that's the whole problem, isn't it? Consider how a P2P network operates. There are N users with a copy of the song. From this we know that there have been at most N uploads, for N users, so the average user has uploaded 1 copy. Really slightly less than 1, since at least one of them had the original so there are N-1 uploads and N users and the average is (N-1)/N.
There could be some users who upload more copies than others, but that only makes it worse. If one user in three uploads three copies and the others upload none, the average is still one but now the median is zero -- pick a user at random and they more likely than not haven't actually distributed it at all.
Meanwhile the low end of the statutory damages amount is 750X the average, which is why the outcome feels absurd -- because it is.
Consider what happens if 750 users each upload one copy of a $1 song. The total actual damages are then $750, but the law would allow them to recover a minimum of $750 from each of them, i.e. the total actual damages across all users from each user. The law sometimes does things like that where you can go after any of the parties who participated in something and try to extract the entire amount, but it's not that common for obvious reasons and the way that usually works is that you can only do it once -- if you got the $750 from one user you can't then go to the next user and get another $750, all you should be able to do is make them split the bill. But copyright law is bananas.
> The total actual damages are then $750, but the law would allow them to recover a minimum of $750 from each of them
Because they're statutory damages, because the actual point of the exercise is to make an example of the person breaking the law. Obviously in scenarios where it's feasible to reliably prosecute a significant fraction of offenders then making an example of people isn't justifiable.
> the RIAA suits were not for downloading
They were not all the same, some were fairly complicated cases, and one was undoubtedly for distribution.
`The court’s instructions defined “reproduction” to include “[t]he act of downloading copyrighted sound recordings on a peer-to-peer network.”'
From:
https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/11-282...
What I should have said is that all their lawsuits included an allegation of infringing the distribution right. There weren't any as far as I know that were just downloading.
Children can commit crimes too.
It's funny, because now in the age of AI, many of the people that support piracy are now trying to stop AI companies from doing the same thing.
'Same thing', hah. This was edited out, but I'm quoting it anyway:
> I should trot out all of the justifications here.
I'll start: personal use instead of profit. Certainly a difference, not convinced justification is required or even advisable.
Children are afforded more lenience in sane societies (before the law and in social contexts) because they are still developing and not as well socialized/experienced as adults. I assume most pro-piracy people support personal use and not commercial use of content.
The issue is that child labor laws encourage children to pursue cybercrime if they want to make money since legitimate companies will not hire them. This results in a lot of incentive for children to commit cybercrime such as piracy and without the disincentive of punishment they are free to do it. These 2 things are incentivizing antisocial behavior in society.
We support copyright reform not piracy. The reason we do is because corporate giants have weaponized the system for their own ends and not for our useful promotion of the arts and sciences.
So.. I don't think it's appropriate for billion dollar companies to abuse copyrighted authored material for their own profit streams. They have the money. They can either pay or not use the material.
The only copyright reform I support is abolishing this abomination altogether.
A child stole a candy bar from my shop, time to bankrupt his whole working class family!
^ sociopathic legalists really do think this way.
That child was just a fan of chocolate!
Oh stop being disingenuous.
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Way to leave out context!
By no means were they suing for downloading alone. They were suing for sharing while downloading, and seeding after, and as "early seeders" they helped thousands obtain copies.
Right or wrong, it was absolutely not about just downloading. It wasn't about taking one copy.
In their eyes, it was about copyng then handing out tens of thousands of copies for free.
Again, not saying it was right. However, please don't provide an abridged account, slanted to create a conclusion in the reader.
Did you even read the title of the article? This is exactly what they are claiming is fair use.
Parent post brought in the comparison to stealing a CD, but torrenting isn't just taking a copy, it's distributing to others, hence the absurd damages claims
They are replying to what a comment said about past file sharing cases.
> 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.
Not exactly automatically.
Seeding is opt-out, not opt-in… but it is usually a default that has to actively manually overridden. Most users never touch those settings. The average pirate downloading a torrent is seeding whether they know it or not.
The protocol absolutely does not enforce seeding. A client can lie to the tracker, cap upload to 0k. BitTorrent has no mechanism to compel one to share. Leeching a file, downloading and sharing no forward packets is possible. While the "social contract" of seeding is entirely a norm enforced by private trackers and community shame. It is not the protocol itself.
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seeding is not the only way you actually upload
you're uploading before seeding, and i'm willing to bet Meta weren't seeding but, as they correctly stated in that regard, they're sharing even when they try their best not to because of the way the protocol works as zero-upload is typically impractical for any significant size files
some trackers will additionally penalise you for not sharing file parts, but this depends on the tracker
and the protocol doesn't enforce you upload anything.
The original design called for some kind of tit-for-tat algorithm, but it's long obsolete and you get whatever bandwidth the seeder has.
If you try to download any significant file with zero-upload, you will run out of peers that will share with you much earlier than you will download the file. It's not practical.
Most people that speak of leeching or not seeding really are talking about not seeding at all after they've completed. In fact, most clients will let you set upload speeds to a trickle but not zero (zero means unlimited in most clients). From a legal standpoint, that already means you uploaded.
It’s true that most clients do not support a zero upload configuration, but it’s not inherent to the protocol, and modified clients exist.
I’m not aware of any clients that will refuse to share data with clients that are configured to not upload. I don’t even see how they could determine that, especially in situations where there are no other peers to upload to, and given that stats are entirely self-reported and clients that send bogus numbers exist.
You would need a central tracker that cares, which is what private torrent communities rely on, but not public/DHT torrents such as those discussed here.
You’re correct about seeds, but peers who are also downloading will often stop sharing with you if you stop sharing with them. Seeds generally are configured to try to give different pieces to different peers so that they can send them to each other and reduce load on the seed; they don’t want to give you the entire file directly unless you’re the only person downloading. And peers prioritize and filter which other ones they’ll send pieces to based on reciprocity.
You will probably get the data eventually, and it really depends on the composition and configuration of the swarm, but generally, you do need to upload if you want to ensure the fastest and most reliable download.
Long-running torrents are mostly populated by seeders. Bit torrent was originally designed for a lot of downloaders to get a file at the same time with limited seeding bandwidth, so leechers would need to trade with each other a lot, but that's not really the situation most torrents are in today.
You can, but you will slow down your own downloads dramatically by doing so. In some cases you will fail to finish them.
The case for doing this would be just so you can have this ridiculous legal defence Meta seem to be trying to pull out. Really no other good reason. Even for the most parasitic leeches, zero upload is a bad strategy.
Seeders don't know how much data you shared with other leechers.
Yes. So?
So you can download from seeders as fast as they can upload.
This is entirely dependent on the client on the other end of the connection.
"tit-for-tat" trading of chunks only happens between peers that both are actively downloading. Seeding nodes just let anybody leech.
You totally CAN disable all uploads in the torrent protocol. Just set the "upload budget" to zero in most clients. Just nobody realizes they can do that.
Bittorrent is wildly successful in part because every popular client makes it nontrivial to "opt out" of it's more socialist components (chunk trading, DHT participation, seeding by default).
Making an "leech behavior only" torrent client is straightforward and viable.
Tit-for-tat kicks in. It's fine for smaller files to just jump peers with zero upload, but i reckon Meta would have found it challenging to download very large files without sharing. It's certainly much faster if you don't get throttled or banned by many peers.
Would you say that generally books would be considered a small file or a BIG file?
they'd most certainly go for very large curated collections like those of Anna's Archives, we're talking about 10s or 100s of TBs per archive
going 1 by 1 would be quite the exercise in itself considering just how much variety of formats, styles, crap added in the files, random password crapware, etc etc you find for anything other than the most trendy stuff
I can't believe that no one has ever tried that one before... So do we now roll back all of the previous copyright cases where downloading music with bittorrent has been prosecuted?
> So do we now roll back all of the previous copyright cases where downloading music with bittorrent has been prosecuted
No, because those cases were pirating-while-poor. This is pirating-while-trillion-dollar-corporation, which falls under a completely different section of the law.
At this stage, you are going to far in claiming that. So far, all that happened is that Meta's lawyers claimed it was fair use. They are paid to try every argument they can think of that might work. Just because they make the argument doesn't mean the court will find it has any merit.
Meta has so much money, even if they end up paying they’ll probably barely be affected. In that case, actually GP is wrong and it’s the same law, but still different outcomes (like “neither poor nor rich may sleep on public benches…”)
While you are correct that a decision on this specific case is still pending, your parent comment does have a point that breaking the law while rich and while poor have very different outcomes. Also, no way they’re going to roll back all previous cases. So the joke works now, no need to wait.
From my understanding, Meta's use of the pirated book was accepted as fair use and the plaintiffs admitted to no harm. In the case of pirated music and films, neither of those points are made. Copyright holders assume people who pirate would have bought the content, usually even assuming that one download is one lost sale. And I am not aware of a single case where watching or listening to pirated content was accepted as fair use.
It is interesting to follow how this plays out for Meta and how that will impact future cases.
One of the underlying issues is that punitive damages seem to be the norm in US courts.
In the UK you can only claim for the actual damages incurred, which at most will be the profit you would've made on the sale of that book. Which makes most claims for private infringement uneconomical for corporations.
Note though that the court can award more than this in some circumstances. From the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988, section 97 [1]:
(2) The court may in an action for infringement of copyright having regard to all the circumstances, and in particular to—
(a)the flagrancy of the infringement, and
(b)any benefit accruing to the defendant by reason of the infringement, award such additional damages as the justice of the case may require.
I don’t get that, the use of these books was instrumental and necessary for the success of the training run. The expected value of these training runs is high as the build out of 100 billion+ infrastructure demonstrates, so the book publishers should at a minimum be paid a licensing fee, a small fraction of every inference run revenue or whatever they decide. The fact that authors and publishers didn’t get any say under what conditions their intellectual property can be used is pretty outrageous.
The conclusion was they suffered no legal harm, in that their interests such as their continued publishing of books was not affected by LLMs; no one is using AI to compete with publishers, if anything "authors" might very well use those same publishers to get their generated books on shelves.
If it's fair use, no licensing fee is needed.
So pretty much the same as the Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. case ruling it as fair use as a transformative work. I mean if indexing the worlds books is transformative then a neural net run on them certainly is a transformative work and fair use.
Yes, that's how the argument is going for these lawsuits so far.
We consumers just need BiTorrent clients that come with LLM training code incorporated, as that transforms the downloads into fair use (according to the very expensive Meta legal team).
The use of the pirated book is a totally separate action than acquiring the pirated book.
When I pull the trigger and the bullet kills an another person, it is just how technology works. Why would I be responsible if I choose to use it or not?
I'm going to need a copy of your latest bank statement before i can accurately answer that.
Even if the court accepts the argument, it can be undermined by pointing out that they knew it in advance, or could have known, and thus accepted it.
I agree, that people used to be called "leechers". Somewhat related xkcd https://xkcd.com/553/
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This. You can set upload speed to zero, and download entire dataset without uploading anything. Slower but doable.
As far as I know, setting upload speed to zero disables the limit. You can set it to be very low but not zero.
That is client dependent. On rtorrent, there is a separate "off" setting for the speed throttle that means "no throttle" with the result that "zero" actually means "no uploading".
You can patch it so zero means zero.
I think it's a fair argument in the context of big corporations using the technology.
Lawyers are paid to defend a position. They are intellectual prostitutes.
My client didn't "buy" illegal drugs. He received illegal drugs. But anyone who makes a drug deal automatically sends money to the drug dealer, as inherent of the protocol. In other words, "giving money for drugs" wasn't a choice, it was simply how drug deals work.
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.
> And the activists are now against it, because the big guys are doing it.
Different activists are different. "Information wants to be free" activists are against different things from "artists trying to make an honest living" activists.
And different big guys are different. A big guy AI company wants different things from a big guy book publisher.
> Different activists are different. "Information wants to be free" activists are against different things from "artists trying to make an honest living" activists.
...uhhh, I mean, maybe my perspective is skewed because I largely run in bluegrass/deadhead circles, but the venn diagram of these two seems to be nearly a circle.
> And the activists are now against it, because the big guys are doing it.
The activists are against it because the big guys are exploiting us small guys, again. Nobody would give a shit if Meta was just torrenting Nintendo's IP and OpenAI was torrenting Netflix IP, except the lawyers working for these companies.
People would care if Meta is allowed to torrent from Nintendo and they aren’t, because they’d care if Meta bought licenses from Nintendo and open models couldn’t get those licenses.
Open models would just torrent Nintendo IP and train on it anyway.
I have no issue with anyone pirating. In my country — and soon in Italy as well — all storage media sales include a small levy (Artisjus) intended to compensate copyright holders for losses from piracy. One could argue it's unfair if you're not actually using the media for copying, but having been forced to pay it regardless, I have no moral qualms about pirating content I don't feel like paying for.
By the same token, AI companies are in no position to complain when their models are scraped and distilled.
How does that money get distributed? If I create a film, how they decide if I’m worthy enough to receive some of that money?
The way it works in France is that money goes to a company that collects it on behalf of all copyright holders. Its website does not offer any documentation as to how copyright holders can claim their share.
Whoever is the director of that company must have laughed for weeks when they got that posting.
That sounds pretty shady. There's also the problem that most media generated globally is not French. Do they pretend to distribute the spoils globally?
In reality the system in these countries is pure corruption. The beneficiaries are large corporations who see it as an extra revenue stream and that's it.
Not completely. I know some french musicians who are great artists, but are not mainstream enough to sell enough records - and they do get state money to continue their art (progressive/psychedelic music, nothing tame).
It operates sort of like a guild. For music, there's the SACEM, where songwriters, musicians, etc. register themselves (hey I have this thing), and get help (e.g. SACEM invests in young aspiring music professionals) and royalties based on how their music was used and by whom. All music users pay SACEM for the use, and SACEM distributes the proceeds to the copyright holders.
Why is it fair that you get to be subsidized by everyone who does pay? Imagine a world where everyone had the same attitude as you and did not pay for any media. Pirates get to pirate only because most people don’t. So why are you so special?
As mentioned, we all pay the fee. Additionally, I pay for plenty of media when it is practical, deserving, or convenient. The rest gets pirated.
Not everyone is a Kantian.
I've bought more media than you. Why is it fair that you get to be subsidized by me?
It's not subsidized. You paid a fee on every hard drive to pay for that drive to hold pirated media.
It's subsidized by people who paid the fee when they bought a hard drive to hold something other than pirated media.
You mean the fee I pay for piracy doesn't cover the cost of the piracy? Maybe they should remove the fee, so they can prosecute me for piracy, without me arguing it's covered by the fee.
Spain too; but legally sharing books and media without profit it's allowed.
Still, they should pay me in order to listen all the mediocre music and crappy 'best sellers' they often produce. More than often I'd just buy some indie book from a small publisher which has much better stories than the whole mainstream.
Heck; every time I try to read some Spaniard technotriller it justs sucks because they focus on crappy emotions everytime focusing near nil on scientific facts or tecnological backgrounds. If any, of course. Hello, Gómez Jurado with the Red Queen sagas.
Meanwhile, people writting half-fantasy/half-geopolitics fiction such as Fabián Plaza with its book depicting a paranormal Cold War were the Spanish Francoist regime never ended and the USSR took the whole Germany for itself, you will get more enganing books. The hippies in Woodstock summoned magical Lovecraftian monsters and the CIA/KGB among paranormal agencies try to fight these. The even mention Orgonic fields and tons of American floklore on paranormal experiments from the CIA/USSR. We all know it's actual bullshit but it's documented bullshit. Modulo the magic, the author applied as a diplomat for Spain a few decades ago so he knows how to create a thriller by predicting how the characters will behave psichologically much better than the Gómez Jurado's books creating an Aspie Mary Sue character getting aspull skills.
The mainstream alternative? Some Humanities woman as the maincharacter alleging bullshit 'prime number finding' in order to boost IQ as a goverment experiment against another high IQ psychopath.
The media in Spain sucks because Spain arrived late to a scientifical mindset socially -thanks, Francoist /s- and male/female Humanities people dominate both the press and the literary world. Instead of Gideon Crew like books (which are a bit bullshit, but with a bit of realism too) like sagas, we get drama bound thrillers with no actual research; if any, hidden Apple product placements.
You would say, heck, Dan Brown it's the same and Tom Clancy's novels are a joke against the ones from actually versed people throwing stereotypes away because they did a good research (the US is not just a bigger Texas and Spain is not a big Andalusia), but that's not the issue here.
The matter it's that most of the readers in Spain are women, and somehow they are afraid of reading a thriller with less drama and emotions and more action (action women do exist you know) and resolution and developing actual skills o the spot instead of aspulling them.
Just look at text adventures. Anchorhead it's just a modern Lovecraft retelling but it has a female protagonist and you as the player should drive her solving all the ingame puzzles. If something like that existed in 1998, the Spaniard should be able to write tons of interesting media (books and series) where crimes were not solved with people just happening to be in the right spot at some specific time. That's a cheap writting and an obvious neglection to the reader allowing him to join the proofs together.
Big companies are stealing to enrich themselves, while small time pirates were pirating for their own entertainment. Some of the latter went to jail. While the former rake in the dough.
Nothing has changed: the money flows in the same direction as before, that's the constant. The courts are just a diode in a rectifier.
The activists seem to be so blinded by disdain they can't even consider the value of the precedent if it goes theough.
Just need to get around to understand that on many subjects big companies are not uniform block... They all have their own goals and ways of profit. Other than exploiting the consumers and state.
It is not strange. Power serves power. Power lies without consequence. This is consistent.
Back in 2015 Twitter bragged that Periscope had been widely used the night before to pirate a pay-per-view boxing match. I thought that was odd.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/sports/periscope-a-stream...
Billy downloading a copy of Game of Thrones because he's too poor to afford one, is radically different than super billionaires who just don't want to pay for a license.
Meta, Open AI and everyone else playing this game has enough money to pay the best lawyers on earth. They can act with impunity.
I could even imagine them getting a law passed, a license to ignore copywrite law. Of course Billy don't qualify. It'll only be for the billionaires and maybe a handful of millionaires.
It's not like there has been some change in principle and some sort of knife to sharpen. "2005 personal pirate" was about making art accessible. "2025 corpo pirate" is about killing art.
LLMs make pirated art more accessible, and 2005 pirates allegedly harmed artists by decreasing their sales.
The significant change is that 2025 corpo pirates are big corporations, and 2005 personal pirates are individuals. And I think the larger issue is that the big corpo pirates get away with what 2025 personal pirates wouldn’t.
Anyways, my opinion is that we should get rid of IP, but only with a replacement that ensures creators still get paid. I lean towards piracy being a small sin: immoral, but you can easily be a pirate and still overall moral person.
Reselling stolen relabeled art makes it more accessible? I don't buy it.
> LLMs make pirated art more accessible
lol. The current "AI" industry is in the development phase where the surveillance industry was from 2000-2010 or so. After they're done getting everyone reliant on their products (including giving away many for free), and having installed their regulatory mote, they'll really start tightening the enshittification noose.
The original argument is fallacious because it ignores this obvious dynamic. "AI" companies aren't pirating works so they can then give them away for free indefinitely. Rather they are pirating works to create their own proprietary systems which will most certainly not be given away for free.
Eventually the activists pushing for copyright enforcement on "AI" training are going to start to "win" - after the big centralized "AI" players will have brokered deals with the relevant content cartels (this lawsuit is merely "haggling over the price"). So the dynamic will be to stomp out the training of new competing models, both grassroots libre and new proprietary startup competitors.
> LLMs make pirated art more accessible,
[citation needed]
> 2005 pirates allegedly harmed artists by decreasing their sales.
provably false
2005 piracy had little to do to with making art accessible. For the most part it seemed more like getting for free the digital things we couldn't pay or and/or felt entitled to, with many justifications layered on top.
And in 2004 you had a tape deck with two bays meant for copying and none of your tapes or cds were real. You’d make copies from other people or even the radio or TV. People forget how piracy was actually the norm before the digital age attempted to crack down on it. Even just passing a book you enjoyed to a friend to read, can you even do that with ebook DRM?
It wedged distribution away from record companies. IMHO, that was a pretty big concern for them.
that's the same thing?
Activists are against AI training, not bittorrent
You're probably both right since activists are not a consistent monolith.
If Meta wins this, does it mean that pirating becomes legal again?
Probably only if you are giving "back to Humanity" or something like that? :-D
I haven't changed. I was pro 20 years ago and I am pro now.
It's almost like things can be good or bad in different contexts
The problem is that laws don't apply to these big companies but to the small guys. It isn't as if piracy has suddenly become legal for everybody.
Oh no, its just legal for the big companies. The laws are different for everybody and that's what activists are worried about :)
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.
They already do....
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?
Only if you are Facebook.
but if i'm Facebook, can't i pay thousands books?
At some point, the contradiction of "law as something impartial" and "law bends to the whims of power" will need to be resolved.
Bad news, it's already been resolved.
Wholly agreed.
The way Disney &co coopted law to pack their coffers is a travesty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
The nukes will fall before they give up power.
"the law" has always only been the whims of the powerful aa a threat of violence against the powerless if they don't follow
Everything bends to power, by definition. And laws can’t be impartial because they’re not based in hard science: terms like “murder”, “assault”, “theft”, etc. are ambiguous thus up to interpretation (e.g. is a scam theft? If so, what defines a scam? If “lying”, what’s the difference from “misleading”, or if there’s no difference, what defines “misleading”…)
My best idea for a solution is better education, so people don’t make bad laws then badly enforce them.
Right problem, wrong solution. You can't build something that doesn't bend to power, by definition. You have to take away the power.
Power can only be redistributed.
Education also bends to power (people can be “educated” via propaganda), but it’s harder because people have some level of critical thinking. You can only chain so many lies before they contradict each other or live experience.
I remember in the 90s and 2000s, the FBI would go after homeless people selling bootleg VHS and DVDs on the street lol
Since the creation of the USA the only real crime a person could do was being poor.
ICE played an important role in those cases with long supply chains. Seems quaint now, but I think we should acknowledge any criminal who does not participate in a child abuse ring. Those counterfeit DVDs were not illegal content, just illegal storefronts. If today’s ICE or FBI uncovered such a ring, who would they call first?
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.
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
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.
If this happens then free and open content (the Wikipedia model, more or less) becomes a hugely impactful "commoditize the complement" play for the big AI and tech firms. Every good piece of open content is something that AI firms don't have to license from a proprietary supplier. And if models trained on entirely open content can write an acceptable "first draft" of something new, that's huge acceleration.
Seems like a bad bet to me. It looks like authors are going to lose this case setting the precedent that you not only don’t need to license training data, obtaining it illegally (for free) is totally okay.
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.
It's a win-win situation. Either pirates win or Meta loses.
Ordinary piracy would still be illegal since it's not for AI training.
Oh, how the tables have turned...
Meanwhile some kid downloads a song and gets lynched for it
The last time that happened in the US was over 18 years ago.
> 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?
Every pirate website can claim fair use in its footer. Doesn't mean the judge will take it seriously.
[flagged]
Is this number that you have on your username your phone number and the text your name?
Why would you sort of doxx yourself and how is it relevant to the thread?
Are you a bot?
Could be doxxing someone else.
[flagged]
communism is when the state protects interests of capital
Precisely my point
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.
Crafted by Rajat
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