Meta admits using pirated books to train AI, but won't pay for it

“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.

This dataset contains all of bibliotik in plain .txt form, aka 197,000 books processed in exactly the same way as did for bookcorpusopen (a.k.a. books1)

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.

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.

From the article...

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

Oh, NOW corporations are accepting of fair use.

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.

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.

Aaron Swartz was persecuted for less but since he's not a multinational corporation in cahoots with the moneyed death cult cabal he's dead

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

This is why everyone should pirate everything that can be pirated.

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

copying is not theft, stealing a thing leaves one less left, copying it makes one thing more, that's what copying's for

Piracy for me, not for thee!

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

That's so Meta 😂

Its about time tech barons started needing food testers.

The profit margins in AI are fleeting at best. There's no point in squabbling over who's paying for what training data. Very, very soon it's all going to be free anyway.

Given how LLM's work and how nearly everything of value is under a copyright until at least the old age of the creators grandchildren LLMs would probably be pretty useless if they can't disregard copyright for their purposes.

Not that I have any sympathy for the likes of Meta and OpenAI in any of this.

Good to see all the lawyers moved over from Reddit.

ITT: A hilarious combination of people who have no clue what copyright covers and people who think providing a tool that allows a user to generate potentially copy written material is a violation of the aforementioned.

Google literally does this in every image search, but go off I guess...

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

ruin his fun on a collective scale.

There’s a little Jolly Roger in all of us, isn’t there?

You all do a good job at becoming like those wanking arm chair experts in reddit. Keep it up suckers.

I love how everybody here goes from "yay piracy" and "screw copyright" to "I can't believe they violated copyright laws" the second it's somebody they dislike.

🎵 When I want something, man, I don't wanna pay for it, now I walk right through the door. 🎵