8mo ago

Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations

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8mo ago

Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations

www.tomshardware.com /tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-staff-torrented-nearly-82tb-of-pirated-books-for-ai-training-court-records-reveal-copyright-violations

25 comments

If Meta gets away with this or gets off lightly, I'd love for this to set a future legal precedent for future piracy cases.
Unless they just straight up want to say "Piracy and copyright laws only apply to poor people" in a court of law.
- I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't pirate media. I'm just slowly gathering a collection of AI training data.
  
  My AI is enjoying a lot Severance. Very recommend... For training porpoises.
- I’ll just spin up an llc and do all of my torrenting for market research
- If When
Arrests? Like for other copyright violators?
Oh, lordy. This is a fight I really hope happens. Meta vs the combined DMCA lobby.
Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease
- Meta vs the combined DMCA lobby
  One of those fights where I’m rooting for both sides to lose.
- Copyright violation doesn't get you arrested.
  
  It does if you do it a lot and then resell it. Which is what happened to a bunch of people in the days of Napster, and is exactly what these fuckers are doing.
Jammie Rasset got tagged for $1.9M for sharing 24 songs, so if we extend the per instance to this case I'm pretty sure Meta owes more money than has existed in human history...
- Let's do some math. Some searching suggests the average size of an e-book is about 3 MB. 82 TB means they pirated about 27 million e-books. At the rate of Russet's fine, that would come to damages of $2.2 trillion. So not more money than has ever is about 4x Meta's entire market cap.
  I hope the book publishers sue Meta and end up owning Facebook and Instagram. Not that I expect one evil megacorp to inevitably fix all the ills of another. But it would be hard to make Facebook any worse than it currently is.
  
  This needs a theydidthemath comm to post to. 🙂
  
  3Mb is mostly the cover art.
  The text is usually only 100-150kb. So if they only got text, it could be 20x higher.
  $44T, now we are talking about real money.
- There is a book, Year Zero, that covers this idea. I didn't much care for the writing, but the plot was a fun idea. Aliens discovered Earth, and Humans had a unique talent for creating music. So the entire universe started sharing human music before they realized their mistake. Intergalactic law says they have to respect our copyright law, but they didn't know such a crazy concept existed until they owed practically the entire universe to Earth. Some alien races decided the solution was to just blow up Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(Reid_novel)
  
  That's one of those things that fridge logic really hits hard. Because there are no fixed prices under Earth's laws. So in exchange for quintillions of dollars of Earth's music, the aliens could just sell us technology at the same or similar price.
I'm going to be so pissed if this AI bullshit ends up drawing too much attention to the best shadow libraries and they get bopped because of it.
- And the only one with a backup is Facebook.
Quick, fine them exactly in the same manner as a regular Joe would've been, plus take into account that he used them for financial gains.
Judge got it give me 1/2 a push-up.
This court case is why the US government needed to invest billions into AI. Cover the legal fees. /s
Can't say I feel bad about this, nor for piracy. IMO, copyright shouldn't be a thing, or least limited to a small chunk of a human lifespan.

25 comments