Further, “Whether another user actually downloaded the content that Meta made available” through torrenting “is irrelevant,” the authors alleged. “Meta ‘reproduced’ the works as soon as it made them available to other peers.”

A “peer” in bittorrent is someone else who is downloading the same file as you. This is opposed to a “seeder” which is also a peer but is only sending data, no longer receiving.

You don’t have to finish the file to share it though, that’s a major part of bittorrent. Each peer shares parts of the files that they’ve partially downloaded already. So Meta didn’t need to finish and share the whole file to have technically shared some parts of copyrighted works. Unless they just had uploading completely disabled, but they still “reproduced” those works by vectorizing them into an LLM. If Gemini can reproduce a copyrighted work “from memory” then that still counts.

Now, to be clear, fuck Meta but also fuck this argument. By the same logic, almost any computer on the internet is guilty of copyright infringement. Proxy servers, VPNs, basically any compute that routed those packets temporarily had (or still has for caches, logs, etc) copies of that protected data.

I don’t think copyrights and open global networks are compatible concepts in the long run. I wonder which the ruling class will destroy first? (Spoilers, how “open” is the internet anymore?)