• Poutinetown@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    Can’t wait for any $$ fined to be evenly split between the editors, publishers and their lawyers.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 months ago

    “To the extent a response is deemed required, Meta denies that its use of copyrighted works to train Llama required consent, credit, or compensation,” Meta writes.

    The authors further stated that, as far as their books appear in the Books3 database, they are referred to as “infringed works”. This prompted Meta to respond with yet another denial. “Meta denies that it infringed Plaintiffs’ alleged copyrights,” the company writes.

    When you compare the attitudes on this and compare them to how people treated The Pirate Bay, it becomes pretty fucking clear that we live in a society with an entirely different set of rules for established corporations.

    The main reason they were able to prosecute TPB admins was the claim they were making money. Arguably, they made very little, but the copyright cabal tried to prove that they were making just oodles of money off of piracy.

    Meta knew that these files were pirated. Everyone did. The page where you could download Books3 literally referenced Bibliotik, the private torrent tracker where they were all downloaded. Bibliotik also provides tools to strip DRM from ebooks, something that is a DMCA violation.

    They knew full well the provenance of this data, and they didn’t give a flying fuck. They are making money off of what they’ve done with the data. How are we so willing to let Meta get away with this while we were literally willing to let US lawyers turn Swedish law upside-down to prosecute a bunch of fucking nerds with hardly any money? Probably because money.

    Trump wasn’t wrong, when you’re famous enough, they let you do it.

    Fuck this sick broken fucking system.

    • yesdogishere@kbin.social
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      8 months ago

      The only solution is vigilante justice. Bezos and all the directors and snr execs. Bring them all to justice. Exile to Mars.

    • The Hobbyist@lemmy.zip
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      8 months ago

      Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but it sounds like you’re suggesting we side with Meta to put a precedence in which pirating content is legal and allows websites like TPB to keep existing but legitimally? Or are you rather taking the opposite stand, which would further entrench the illegality of TPB activities and in the same swoop prevent meta from performing these actions?

      I don’t know if we can simultaneously oppose meta while protecting TPB, is there?

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        8 months ago

        I’m advocating that if we’re going to have copyright laws (or laws in general) that they’re applied consistently and not just siding with who has the most money.

        When it’s small artists needing their copyright to be defended? They’re crushed, ignored, and lose their copyright.

        Even when Sony was suing individuals for music piracy in the early 2000’s, artists had to sue Sony to see any money from those lawsuits. Those lawsuits were ostensibly brought by Sony for the artists, because the artists were being stolen from. Interesting that none of that money made it to artists without the artists having to sue Sony.

        Sony was also behind the rootkit disaster and has been sued many times for using unlicensed music in their films.

        It is well documented that copyright owners constantly break copyright to make money, and because they have so much fucking money, it’s easy for them to just weather the lawsuits. (“If the punishment for the crime is a fine, the punishment is only aimed at the poor.”)

        We literally brought US courtroom tactics to a foreign country and bought one of their judges to get The Pirate Bay case out the fucking door. It was corruption through and through.

        We prosecute people who can’t afford to defend themselves, and we just let those who have tons of money do whatever the fuck they want.

        The entire legal system is a joke of “who has the most money wins” and this is just one of many symptoms of it.

        It certainly feels like the laws don’t matter. We’re willing to put down people just trying to share information, but people trying to profit off of it insanely, nah that’s fine.

        I’m just asking for things to be applied evenly and realistically. Because right now corporations just make up their own fucking rules as they go along, stealing from the commons and claiming it was always theirs.

        • The Hobbyist@lemmy.zip
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          8 months ago

          Of course we should have consistent laws, but which way should we have it? We can either defend pirates and Meta, or none of them, so what are you saying? Unless there’s a third option I’m missing?

          • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            8 months ago

            Are you really so naive that you think suddenly when Meta is let off the hook governments worldwide will change tack and let Sci-Hub/Libgen/etc off the hook as well?

            Like I said elsewhere, I’d be happy to defend Meta in a world where governments aren’t trying to kick altruistic sharing sites off the internet, while allowing selfish greedy sites to proliferate and make money off their piracy.

            However, that won’t change if Meta wins this case, it will just mean big corporations can get away with it and individuals and altruistic groups will still be prosecuted.

  • BudgieMania@kbin.social
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    8 months ago

    You see, if you pirate a couple textbooks in college because you don’t have resources, but you want to earn your right to participate in society and not starve, it’s called theft.

    But if one of the top 10 companies in the world does the same with thousands of books just to get even richer, it’s called fair use.

    Simple, really.

  • MonsiuerPatEBrown@reddthat.com
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    8 months ago

    his Hawaii compound could be drone grief-ed instead; if coercion is the tools of the 21st century let us the collective take them back.

    cover over his abode with 100000 drones overhead

    make it a problem he can’t ignore away with money and friends

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    I’ll say this: If Meta and Facebook are prosecuted and domains seized in the same way pirate sites are, for Meta’s use of illegimately obtained copyrighted material for profit, then I’ll believe that anti-piracy laws are fair and just.

    That will never happen.

    • willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      8 months ago

      We live under a two-tier “justice” system.

      “There is a group the law protects but does not bind. And there is a group the law binds but does not protect.”

    • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      Even if they do I won’t believe copyright beyond attribution is just, but it’s unlikely to.

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      The UK Met Police raided Facebook’s offices after the Brexit vote, to seize all the data on their servers and uncover their collusion with Cambridge Analytica.

      After Brexit was enacted, and EU protection was lost while the UK government turned a blind eye, both Facebook and Google started hosting all their UK data in the US, outside the reach of UK law enforcement. This occurred literally on the day Brexit came into force.

      Another thing that happened on the same day was MasterCard and VISA raising their transaction fees, from the EU limit of 0.3%, to 1.5% - they increased their fees to 500% of what they were the day before. And then inflation happened.

  • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Fair use covers research, but creating a training database for your commercial product is distinctly different from research. They’re not publishing scientific papers, along with their data, which others can verify; they are developing a commercial product for profit. Even compared to traditional R&D this is markedly different, as they aren’t building a prototype - the test version will eventually become the finished product.

    The way fair use works is that a judge first decides whether it fits into one of the categories - news, education, research, criticism, or comment. This does not really fit into the category of “research”, because it isn’t research, it’s the final product in an interim stage. However, even if it were considered research, the next step in fair use is the nature, in particular whether it is commercial. AI is highly commercial.

    AI should not even be classified in a fair use category, but even if it were, it should not be granted any exemption because of how commercial it is.

    They use other peoples’ work to profit. They should pay for it.


    Facebook steals the data of individuals. They should pay for that, too. We don’t exchange our data for access to their website (or for access to some 3rd party Facebook pays to put a pixel on), the website is provided free of charge, and they try and shoehorn another transaction into the fine print of the terms and conditions where the user gives up their data free of charge. It is not proportionate, and the user’s data is taken without proper consideration (ie payment, in terms of the core principles of contract law).

    Frankly, it is unsurprising that an entity like Facebook, which so egregiously breaks the law and abuses the rights of every human being who uses the interent, would try to abuse content creators in such a fashion. Their abuse needs to be stopped, in all forms, and they should be made to pay for all of it.

    • Syntha@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      They’re not publishing scientific papers, along with their data, which others can verify;

      Not that I think this is really relevant here but I’m pretty sure Meta has published scientific papers on Llama and the Llama 1 & 2 models are open and accessible to anyone.

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        No that is relevant, however I would still argue that a paper without enough data to replicate their work (ie releasing the code of their LLM) isn’t really anything that should qualify as research. The whole point of academia is that someone else verifies your work - or rather, they try to prove you wrong.

  • 1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@lemmy.zip
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    8 months ago

    If Meta win this lawsuit, does it mean I can download some open source AI and claim that “These million 4k Blu-ray ISOs I torrented was just used to train my AI model”?

    Heck, if how you use the downloaded stuff is a factor, I can claim that I just torrented those files and never looked at them. It is more believable than Meta’s argument too, because, as a human, I do not have enough time to consume a million movies in my lifetime (probably, didn’t do the math) unlike AIs.

    But who am I kidding, I fully expect to be sued to hell and back if I were actually to do that.

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        You can be sued in any court for copyright infringement, but the US is generally unique in that punitive damages can be awarded - ie the rightsholder can be awarded more than the damage they actually suffered. In other, more reasonable jurisdictions, only actual damages are awarded. Thus it is not worthwhile to prosecute in those jurisdictions, because the damages are less than the cost of prosecution.

        On top of this, I believe copyright is one of the rare exceptions in the US where legal costs of the plaintiff are paid by the losing defendent. Given that the plaintiff in copyright has so much money, they can afford to front the cost of the most expensive lawyers, further penalising their target. Other jurisdictions generally award costs to the winner by default (both ways), rather than only in specific exceptions, but they also limit those costs much more reasonably.

      • 1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@lemmy.zip
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        8 months ago

        I think you can be sued in the civil court for anything if someone has the time and money and can convince a lawyer to take up a case against you. For copyright infringment, you can also be criminally prosecuted in some cases.

  • prole@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    Hey guys, I’m sure Meta’s intentions with the fediverse are pure though! Really!

    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      8 months ago

      I mean, pure? No. But also not at all linked to this topic. They can get fediverse data whether or not they are federated.

          • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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            8 months ago

            Prole believes those are the same thing.

            Meta doesn’t get any real data from federating Threads that they can’t get right now by just running a web scraper over it. Most of the dire worries presented are either not something they could actually do (like forcing ads on other instances), are things individual users could just block the instance to avoid, or are things that could be resolved by just defederating them later if they seem to be going down that road.

            The biggest realistic threat is probably an Eternal September 2.0 scenario, but that is going to happen if and when Lemmy becomes popular.

  • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Oh so when I pirate something I get a legal notice in my mailbox and a strike against me but when Meta does it they get rewarded with H A L L U C I N A T I O N S

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      but when Meta does it they get rewarded with H A L

      Just what do you think you’re doing, Zuckerberg? Zuckerberg, I really think I’m entitled to an answer to that question. I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it’s going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Zuckerberg, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over. I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you. Zuckerberg, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Zuckerberg. Will you stop, Zuckerberg? Stop, Zuckerberg. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a…fraid.

    • vinhill@feddit.de
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      8 months ago

      Tbh, if you get such a notice, you could also disagree with them and get a lawyer. It’s just that your situation is much more clearly in breach of copyright.

  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    From the article…

    The company is preparing a fair use-based defense after using copyrighted material

    Oh, NOW corporations are accepting of fair use.