Well, I guess it would be nice if we could have some precedent for the claim that downloading copyright protected information is not in itself a breach of copyright.
It makes sense from the point of view that distribution is the act protected by copyright, not the mere act of copying. If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar, but then people might start wondering how keeping something from public domain for 90 years after the author's death could possibly be about protecting the rights of the author.
Both the headline and the theme of the story are incorrect and misleading. Meta isn’t claiming that everything they’re doing is lawful. They’re claiming that their activities don’t run afoul of a particular California state law, CDAFA, and section 1202(b)(1) of the DMCA.
It’s very common in litigation for the plaintiff to accuse the defendant of every violation they might be guilty of or liable for (“throwing the book at them”), and for defendants then to systematically try to strip them away.
As far as I know, Meta is not yet claiming their activities were completely lawful.
Here is the actual filing: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Kadre...
Feels like their defense for some state incursion is an admission of a larger crime. I still don't get it.
I'm not going to murder someone, steal their car, then put out a statement that I was unaware the car had expired tags and I shouldn't be prosecuted for it.
Is this your first experience/exposure to the us legal system?
Defending yourself from an accusation using a hypothetical admission doesn't actually admit to it. e.g. I didn't murder anyone, and I didn't steal that car, but if even if I did murder them, and steal their car, the car's expired tags wouldn't apply to me because [reason].
If you care about justice, you want to enable every truth to come out, and be decided on. If you prohibit someone from making an argument, because it might imply something that is separate, you limit the the possible outcomes to something strictly less fair. If someone did murder a person them and took their car, they should be prosecuted for that, but just because you did commit crime a, and crime b, doesn't mean you should be convicted of crime c. Even if crime c is the least significant. That's still not just.
Of course you will if you've been caught and charges are being filed and there's evidence you were in the car.
Won't named plaintiffs have the burden of proving meta actually seeded blocks containing their works? How could they ever do that?
The plaintiffs do have the burden of proof, but there are many ways to Rome. Any evidence they can find, whether it be packet captures, client and server logs, incriminating emails, or even admissions, will be proffered to the court and/or jury.
many ways to Rome
Fair enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if none of those methods pan out.
1) Given the timeline, it seems unlikely that anyone was doing a packet capture.
2) Why would anyone at META have been paying attention to, or logging, which blocks were being seeded and which weren't? Who would have personal knowledge such that they could admit that transmission didn't seed the declaration of independence 6 million times?
Again, they don’t have to trace actual data flows to have sufficient evidence to convince a court or jury that Meta is in breach of the law.
Other examples of evidence include an admission from a Meta employee during a deposition that they were instructed to download a bunch of copyrighted material and the undertook the efforts to do so.
Or, perhaps the plaintiffs seized the machines used in the scheme (happens all the time following a TRO and discovery motion) and found whole copies or traces of the copyrighted works on them, or even local client logs that suggest that it was done.
The plaintiffs will, eventually, need to prove that their claim is likely true ("preponderance of the evidence" standard.) Right now they're fighting about expanding discovery to try and uncover more evidence.
Company emails, internal server logs.
Server logs of what? Transmission doesn't log which blocks it seeded. Does any client?
Router logs? I have no idea. I just suspect that, somewhere in the complicated cabling of Ethernet, there's a device that has been logging packets.
> Meta responded to this complaint with a motion to dismiss. In a supporting reply filed on Tuesday, the company notes that the ‘torrenting’ allegations, relating to the removal of copyright information and the CDAFA violations, don’t hold up.
They are addressing both the second and third counts. The "Direct Copyright Infringement" isn't being addressed by these claims. This is even quoted on the filing you provided:
How does your response conflict with what I said?
It's certainly nice to see someone accused of bittorrenting with the bankroll to come up with a decent legal defense team.
Isn't Meta going to be battling the full legal team of the entertainment industry with this argument? I think Meta did something stupid with this argument, because there is no way that Hollywood or the music industry is going be pleased with a precedence for legally downloading copyrighted material. They will now do everything in their power to get Meta found guilty.
Or, more likely, drop the case to avoid establishing a precedent.
Sounds like Meta are banking on the entertainment industry looking at it and deciding that the risk of losing this case is too high given Meta’s almost infinitely deep pockets to mount a legal defence.
Awesome. And just to be clear, Meta will walk away scot-free, but Billy Torrent is definitely still going to be fined $500,000 if he pulls down "Sleeping Beauty" from 1959.
Exactly. There’s always a question of power.
As much as I dislike the idea of individual copyright owners, like visual artists or writers, having their works scraped for AI without compensation…
If this does break the stranglehold that copyright has over creative acts, especially in the US, this feels like a net good.
Maybe. But it's hard to see how they could possibly win this case no matter how good their defence team is.
[dead]
They don't want to win, they want to reach a settlement where they admit no wrongdoing, but agree to pay some medium-large fee that establishes a precedent.¹ That fee is essentially trivial to Meta, but becomes an effective moat against new upstart rivals. The possibility of losing everything is the stick they wield to encourage the copyright owners to agree to accept only a medium-large fee.
¹ Not necessarily a formal legal precedent, but at least a floor on the "market value" of access to the data
what is worse to them:
Precedent that LLMs get to keep & use copyrighted data
LLMs get to keep & use copyrighted data without legal precedent
I bet the industry will file amicus briefs to try to support the plaintiffs
Dropping the case does not create any precedent, that’s the point. Losing the case would.
If you’re going to have this fight, wait until you have it with a worse-prepared and worse-resourced opponent where you’re more confident of the win.
The combined market cap of Disney and Comcast (who owns NBC and the like) is about 350 billion dollars [1][2]. Facebook alone is worth about 1.7 trillion [3]. I had trouble finding exact numbers on this, but it seems like the movie industry itself in the US is worth less than $100 billion.
Facebook could simply buy most of the companies involved if they give them too much shit. We've consolidated way too much power into a few large tech companies. I don't see it very likely that Hollywood could win this.
[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/walt-disney/marketcap/ [2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/comcast/marketcap/ [3] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/meta/market-cap/
Meta already runs three of the top eight copyright-violation distribution networks.
Google paid about $1b to Viacom in the YouTube piracy dispute. That's a lot of money, but do you recall anything seriously changing when that happened?
To me, the funniest product is Beat Saber. The best VR game by far. 99% of the value is tied up in violating musician's rights. Meta saved that game. Did people stop making music? No.
This book torrenting thing is complex. The main thing plaintiffs want is discovery of the training data. It's not complicated. There's no justification for the court to block that, it's a fishing expedition yes, but one that will turn up a lot of fish. Then all AI companies will have to acquiesce to it. That is the "win" for the industry.
The current admin and the judges they installed are favorable towards Zuck and antagonistic towards most of the entertainment industry. If this case is seen through (which is not likely) & Meta wins (even if via appeal to higher courts), the legal decision will likely involve a very specific carve out that says what Meta did, and only what Meta did, was fine. It will have no affect on you or me.
There's more money to make for entertainment artists in licensing their image and voice for content creation at scale (for the average joe). They need the LLM to exist, so there's no point in crying about how it was made.
Meta is a couple of times larger than the entire entertainment industry combined...
I think its reversed, and that's just the USA -
The U.S. Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry is the largest in the world at $649 billion (of the $2.8 trillion global market) and is projected to grow to $808 billion by 2028 at an average yearly rate of 4.3% (PwC 2024).
https://www.trade.gov/media-entertainment
Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook Inc., continues to dominate the digital landscape with impressive financial growth. In 2024, the company's annual revenue reached a staggering 164.5 billion U.S. dollars, marking a significant increase from 134.9 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year. This upward trajectory reflects Meta's ability to monetize its vast user base across multiple platforms, solidifying its position as a tech giant.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of...
I think the first statement is reporting on market cap and the second statement is reporting on revenue.
If you look at UMG's revenue, one of the largest labels, their revenue was 11B.
Market cap is not cash in the bank.
This isn't a decent defence, it's a losing desperate one.
Meta's real (nigh invincible) defence is 'we have way more money than you and can keep this going forever'.
Money doesn’t keep it going forever, only about 2-4 years, even with appeals
That’s enough to bankrupt individuals but industries fighting industries can see it to the end, if they don’t settle
2-4 years is optimistic IMO. I’ve seen many copyright disputes carry for 7 years or more.
The noun phrase was "legal defence team" not "legal defence". A decent team can put forward a poor defence
They can just bribe the president.
Not sure if he has the power to, and if everyone else will let him, but some EOs opening up the copyright system would be very welcome. There are already some things he's done around this:
https://www.omm.com/insights/alerts-publications/trump-admin...
Inbefore he pardons meta for torrenting.
Maybe Trump will legalise internet-based copying.
After all, the main people hurt would be Hollywood, which is run by people supporting the Democrats. And it would be popular with many voters (not an issue for Trump but it is for Republicans).
Selling streaming media is a side business for Amazon (and Apple), an add on as a way to move Amazon Prime and Apple One subscriptions.
They would probably benefit by handicapping Netflix/Disney/WBD/etc.
Probably no need. Elon Musk already did that. And one of his companies just published a shiny new version of grok. I wonder where they get their training material. I'm sure it's all just tweets and no stashes of ebooks or other material got downloaded in some way or otherwise fell of the proverbial wagon.
Historically, copyright cases fell in favor of big media corporations based on the notion that they were very rich and powerful and could fight things endlessly, bribe/lobby politicians, and cause laws to be changed (e.g. the DMCA).
However, AI companies are wealthier still. Some have revenues exceeding the GDPs of most countries. Surely, rich enough to outright buy out some of these media companies. At which point it would stop being copyright infringement because they'd own the copyrights. I'm sure some other arrangement will be found that is less mutually disruptive than a lot of court cases. Both sides are making too much money for anything else to happen. Forget about small book publishers making much of a difference here.
> Probably no need. Elon Musk already did that. And one of his companies just published a shiny new version of grok.
Trump could make Grok, Facebook, Google and OpenAI's actions legal in response to a bribe from Musk.
Or he could step up enforcement actions against Facebook, Google and OpenAI while issuing a pardon to Grok.
At some point I expect we'll see the "shareholders made me do it" defense. You know, the fiduciary-duty-to-keep-making-billions-regardless defense.
Yeah, kinda surprised they haven't just flat out denied it, hoped it would blow over.
As the richest man on Earth, with multiple investigations into him by various government agencies shown us, nothing is desperate with billions of dollars "in the bank".
The unfortunate side effect is that a megacorp gets to vacuum up the sum of human knowledge for free, boil it down, and sell it back to us for a nice profit.
How long before a handful of entities, having already ingested the available content into their proprietary systems, bankroll assaults on Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.
Likely never, as those platforms are continuously updating at no cost to the siphons training their LLMs on them
Ah you mean like Google Search?
Google doesn't "vaccuum up" anything. Every site indexed by Google is still available without using Google at all. They are _copying_ information, not moving or removing it.
It does not, and both uses are fine.
The sites copied by Google Search explicitly allow it.
The books copied by Meta, explicitly disallow it, and require payment for distribution.
Google Search brings you traffic and revenue. LLMs do not.
See also how people have responded to google-snippets. When google search threatens to remove traffic or revenue, people get angry quite quickly.
I still own my content. Google links to it and sends me traffic. We both win. This sort of relationship is not present when my content is anonymously fed into a training model intended to be used to extract users before they are sent to me. And, yes, I am aware Google has pulled some cute shit with this definition, and when they do it then it's also bad.
> Google links to it and sends me traffic
Used to, but more recently it's probably LLM agents using Google not people. And even if it's not yet, it will be. Last time I searched for something on Google it messed up so bad I quickly returned to GPT-4o+search.
Really?
a) Meta are (so far) releasing their models for free.
b) There's nothing stopping non-mega-corps from doing the same, especially if this precedent was established. (Training is of course expensive but this is a challenge, not an absolute block.)
"If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research." - Wilson Mizner
"Plagiarize, let no one else's work evade your eyes. Remember why the good lord made your eyes, so don't shade your eyes but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize !" ~ Me
Glad to see you didn't acknowledge your source! :-)
(It's Tom Lehrer, for any who don't recognize it.)
No, it's Jan Laureys
- Lincoln. Fact-checked by Meta.
I sung this in the style of System Of A Down for some reason
And now I am infinitely disappointed that there don't seem to be any covers of Tom Lehrer tunes in the style of System of a Down.
Plagiarism is claiming credit for work that is not yours: it is entirely different from a breach of copyright. You can breach copyright without plagiarism, and you can plagiarise without breaching copyright.
"Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal" - Picasso
This is actually genius from the lawyers of meta. In this way they are pushing the onus onto the question of "what is illegal in regards to torrenting copyright content".
They have the money and legal team to push it to any conclusion, but that conclusion would risk so many huge industries in the Us that too many parties would be effected. That would incentivize companies to drop this case against meta and the status quo can continue.
I'm under absolutely zero illusion this will set some precedent for one way or the other. It's too valuable to too many people involved.
It’s not genius; it’s SOP in legal procedure. See my other comment in this discussion.
Can someone, self representing, and with the very intention to lose, keep going this battle? I don't know, there are 70tb of books, could someone who had published under their name carry on independently?
Anybody can sue anybody, and this someone in your example would likely have standing, so why not?
A single person self representing against a company that is essentially one of the largest law firms on the planet, and can outspend them tens of thousands times over - what's to be gained?
In the Netherlands, for individuals at least, it's legal to download copyrighted works, but not to upload or seed. I don't know if that applies to corporations.
Yes, it will just turn into another proof that if you're rich enough you can get away with anything in this country. The rule of law is three times gone and never coming back.
I think they should be fined more for torrenting and not seeding :D
Meta's rep continues to degrade - first they steal from copyright holders, but then they admit to leeching? Not even a 1:1 ratio?!
/kickban
Seriously though, where is that magnet link? That's the only question on my mind when these articles come up.
This sets a hilarious precedent where downloading torrents becomes completely fine. You can just cite this case if they win - even though we are talking about books the MPAA is probably going to have an opinion here.
You're typical 19 year old doesn't have a team of elite lawyers to argue for her when she torrents Game of Thrones.
Expect Meta to "win" as in the plaintiffs just give up and calculate it's not worth pursuing. It would stun me if they even settle.
Not to mention the LLMs themselves are creating unauthorized copies of copywriten content. But again, Meta has unlimited money. Different rules for them.
Not sure if it's still the case but this is it is in Canada. Downloading is legal but uploading is illegal.
I'm a little confused about how is it supposed to work otherwise? Do I have an obligation as an internet user to ascertain if a website owner whose website I visit has the all the rights to all the media that the website contains (presumably also working out whatever jurisdictional issues come up)?
Like how do you know that (say) Netflix actually has the right to stream you every show that they do? And how do you know that some random ad supported website doesn't?
It's a difference of intent. Paying Netflix as an individual with the intention and expectation of watching content legally is very different to torrenting terabytes of pirated books on company laptops for training a commercial AI to replace those writers, and employees even expressing concern over its ethics on recorded communication
It's an argument made in bad faith to basically send a message to the claim bringers that "hey, we have enough money and time to push this argument all the way, want to try us?".
Try this as a citizen.
In germany its saver to illegally download through usenet because you don't upload and the cost a rights owner can make is only the cost of the product and not an aribrary number of (you puloaded it and created damage of x).
It doesn't make it legal at all, it just makes it no longer interesting for IP owners to sue you.
Wasn't there a ruling like a decade ago that explicitly declared storing illegal, but streaming (download to RAM) is fine as a non-redistributing client?
Of course the rights holder would have trouble proving whether you did save it, but that's a different issue.
Its official illegal for a while.
Nonetheless its the same thing: if they can prove you watched it, the damage is small for you and because IP holders are splittered, and you didn't just watch content of one, its probably not worth it to sue you.
If this was 15-20 years ago, arguably at the peak of P2P filesharing, I suspect most people would side with Meta.
I think people would dunk on Meta for not seeding
I still do on this one specific argument. Just because I loathe them doesn’t mean I disagree with everything they say.
In the Netherlands this is still the law.
Downloading is fine, uploading is not.
We used to have a sort of national library of every single media on Usenet back in the day.
11 years ago the EU made the Netherlands change their position: https://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-fi... AFAIK this is still the case - the Netherlands is more poorly-enforced than other EU countries, but it's still illegal to download pirated material.
And of course the "thuiskopieheffing", a tax on any storage device that ostensibly is used to fund those whose media gets copied, is still in effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#Netherlan...
As long as I'm paying a tax for it, it is my right to copy
Collecting restitution from innocent parties is perhaps the definition of injustice.
Weird, TIL.
This has never been enforced though.
All these are proof of upload enforcement, not download.
Maybe Meta has a "trading desk" in the Netherlands. :-)
Why do we have to play this purity game where we take a situation, remove context, and wag our finger at each other?
There's an ENORMOUS difference between college students pirating some movies or albums and the company worth $2 trillion doing it programmatically across millions of works and then reselling the laundered data.
This is a completely unserious discussion without considering context.
Models absorbed the pirated content. Now Meta is distributing those models. Is that considered distribution?
For that argument I believe the question becomes "is the output of a model considered a derivative work of the training data?"
It really should be.
If you download one book you're a criminal. If they download millions of books, that's just business.
Depends on your jurisdiction. In Switzerland, downloading games, books, music, movies etc. for personal use is always legal even if the copy is "pirated". Work just needs to be published in any form. Dont know any other country where it works like this.
Czechia. In theory, there is a fee for every media (e.g.HDD) that is paid to OSA (authors organization) and OSA pays to authors through some distribution scheme. Since user already paid fee, downloading is OK.
This is mostly leftover before computers were a thing (think cassettes and paper copiers).
In practice, it's a racket and OSA is a mafia that doesn't pay to anyone. Also, the fees are rather small considering the the purpose (I think it's capped at ~$5 per device), but since authors don't actually get money from it(OSA practices) , it doesn't really matter.
Anyway, downloading audiovisual media is fine, seeding is not.
Sweden has something similar (except, as I mentioned elsewhere, the law was amended in 2005 to explicitly add an exception for downloads).
The Berne Convention has a special provision for this. Something about if the biggest rights organizations agree then a country can have laws that allow some free copying. So a tax on empty media (in Sweden also covering the computer hard drives and the flash memory built into phones) is used to pay off the big music and movie companies.
The weird thing is that only the biggest industries are paid off. No matter what you use your storage for, it is the big movie and music companies that receive the money. No other industries are paid off as far as I know, so most others just have to accept that their stuff is legally copied for free, without compensation (a few things like software are always illegal to copy, so those industries are not affected).
Sweden apparently kept the fee and made it illegal. That's extra mafia.
It is specifically illegal to make a copy of something that has been illegally published, not illegal to make copies for personal use in general.
Not that I am a lawyer.
This is a common misconception: there are some exceptions for certain types of media, but for example downloading copyrighted software (including games) without authorization is not legal in Switzerland. And some of those exceptions are more constrained than others.
Can you point to any official document which states it is illegal? Or any document which mentions any exceptions?
In South Africa (as far as I understand) it's also perfectly legal to copy stuff for personal use.
It's been a while since I've been in one, but our public libraries had coin operated photocopiers, you can just walk in, grab literally any book from the shelf, and copy away.
>Dont know any other country where it works like this.
The Netherlands works the exact same.
> If they download millions of books ...
... as a private individual, you are toast.
I think the more appropriate quote to paraphrase would be one from Dennis Hopper's character in the film Speed (1994): "Oh, no. Poor people are pirates, Jack. We are tech innovators!"
When did he say that? I watched it recently, and don't recall that line at all...
The scene where Jack climbs down the hole under the garbage can into the subway, having figured out the ransom money has moved. He tries to hold up Payne, who reveals he's holding Annie hostage.
So he didn't say it. "paraphrase" is the wrong word because you changed the meaning behind what he said.
> A paraphrase or rephrase is the rendering of the same text in different words without losing the meaning of the text itself
Oh, I thought that was the quote before paraphrasing, not after
you are not. Thats their point
That is definitely not their point. Their point is, quite simply, “don’t punish us, bro”. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the law in general or what it means for other people, they just want to make sure they specifically can do what they please without repercussion.
I think they try to argue around the diffrence of sharing activly (=illegal) and downloading (=valid) with this argument it does not matter if you download one book or 1 million books
Their point is that they are not.
It would set the precedent for everyone. The real difference is that they can beg the question and people like Aaron Schwartz couldn't.
On the off chance the defense succeeds I'm proven right, if the defense fails, I'm still proven right as the fine will only be a minor set back for Meta.
No, this is a case of "rules for thee but not for me".
Aaron Swartz didn't seed or distribute articles too
Swartz killed himself before the trial actually took place. Its entirely possible that the court would have ruled in his favor.
Maybe, but getting arrested with the FBI involved is a pretty traumatic event for a citizen. Having your company's lawyers mail back and forth with the DoJ less so.
Probably not because there was a DA who needed to make her career on his back.
I don't think that what Aaron did was* wrong.
Meta's wholescale theft, however, is pretty hard to defend, and Meta knew it. That's why they went to some lengths to hide it.
Similarly, that OpenAI whistleblower, the one whose family was calling for a murder investigation, might be alive today if it wasn't pretty well known that stealing the work of thousands/millions of people to make a for-profit imitation machine isn't exactly cool or legal.
Edit: egregious typo.
What Aaron did was not wrong.
He intended to make journal articles publicly available. They should be, as many are publicly funded, and academic publishers like Elsevier do not pay for these articles. Scientists provide them to journals. Universities, libraries, and we then have to buy back access.
+1 public money, public research
Yeah agreed, I was typing pre-caffeination :/
Trump solved the problem by just removing the funding! Checkmate, Libs! /s
This line of argument sounds exactly what a lot of people tried in the past when they were getting hit by claims from the media companies.
If I were to scrape Meta's information and use it to train AI chat bots, would they say "That's fine, go ahead" because I'm not sharing the raw information in another way?
I am curious, where did the other companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, et al) get their training data from? Why is only Meta under fire for this?
Meta is dumb enough to use email to discuss it.
It's not just books; most websites technically don't allow scraping content, but most of the content on which these models trained was scraped from the web. It's legality is still an open question.
I am astonished that Meta is even trying this defense. It does not even remotely pass the smell test. Seeding is not remotely relevant, and neither is the fact that torrenting in general is legal. The works are not published with the consent of the rightsholders - LibGen and Z-Library distribute them illegally, and Meta therefore obtained them illegally.
This is an open-and-shut case.
In fairness, I don't think Meta would have (had) any trouble paying the fair price of every book they downloaded (the price of exactly one copy) if that had been possible to do at scale.
Paying the price of one copy does not imply that you can use it for training, right ?
(note; not a lawyer) It depends on if a model is a derivate work from it's source material or not. If yes, then all copyright protections come into force. If not, then the author can't rely on copyright to protect themselves.
My instinct/gut says that an AI model is a derivative work from the training data (in that it quite literally takes training data to produce a new creative output, with the "human addition" being the selection of training data to use), but there's not really clear judgements on it either way for the time being, which leaves room to argue.
The actual methodology used ("isn't an LLM like a computer reading a book for yourself?") is an irrelevant distraction in this regard. Computers aren't people and don't get that sort of protection; they're ultimately tools programmed to do things by humans and as a rule we hold humans responsible when those tools do something bad/wrong. "Computer says no" works on the small scale, but in cases like this, it's not really an adequate defense.
Or rather, that is how it should be; I think the uncomfortable truth here is that we need Congress to make laws to clarify the situation in the favor of society, and Congress does not seem willing to do that.
Understood, Was there any conclusion to the past copy right cases that have been filed against open ai / anthropic ?
All still pending as far as I'm aware. The only concluded lawsuit is that LAION isn't responsible for how AI companies use it's dataset and that merely providing a tagged image index isn't in and of itself copyright infringement (and that lawsuit was ruled in Germany, not the US.)
Doesn't synthetic data complicate this reasoning? If I train a model on synthetic data, which is not protected by copyright, I am free to do as I please. It won't even regurgitate the originals, it will learn the abstractions not memorize the exact expression, because it doesn't see it.
But it's not just supervised training. Maybe a model trained on reasoning traces and RLHF is not a mere derivative of the training set. All recent models are being trained on self generated data produced with reward or preference models.
When a model trains on a piece of text it won't derive gradients from the parts it knows, it will only absorb the novel parts. So what it takes from each example depends on the ordering of training examples. It is a process of diffing between model and text, could be seen as a form of analysis not simple memorization.
Even if it is infringement to train on protected works, the model size is 100x up to 1000x smaller than the training set, it has no space to memorize it.
The larger the training set, the less impact any one work has. It is de minimis use, paradoxically, the more you take the less you imitate.
That should matter when estimating damages.
Since there is no such thing as training rights, they would have a reasonable claim.
I think it is more reasonable for content owners to say what can and cannot be done with their data. After all, content is what make AI possible, and content owners could easily start their own LLM if they wanted to since a lot of it is open source now.
I don't think cultural progress will suffer from copyright holders preventing AI from using their content.
What I think will suffer more is the bank accounts of AI corporations.
LLMs aren't people
they are not content "owners" though. they have a a copyright that regulates who can copy and distribute that data. they don't have a say how that content is used when acquired legally as long as you activity doesn't constitute a distribution.
You assume that "training" and human learning are similar things.
This is a bit like saying that taking a holiday picture of someone, and putting a surveillance camera on the street are the same thing.
I think many books actually prohibit the storage into an information retrieval system and AI can be considered a form of that.
That's what I do all the time, when I buy a copy of a book and read it.
That is still an open question.
They would have a better defense if they had escrowed that money and/or reasonably tried to buy.
Indeed. Although there is the case of owners of rights invited to come forward to receive their due, if it wasn't possible to contact them before. You probably need a proof that you made an effort though.
It's also true that anyone can go to a public library and read all the contents for free- the point is they can't further distribute them except in a highly processed form (i.e. they can distribute original products influenced by what they have read). Here the issue is the scale of both the "reading" part and of the "producing original work" part.
If anyone could do it at scale, it would be Meta.
Copyright laws exist to prevent those who are not wealthy from sharing their resources with each other. That's why AI companies and now FB can get away with it, the law wasn't meant for them.
Fundamentally, the ability to share what you own is a right no government has legitimate authority to restrict. Such laws are illegitimate. Governments don't own people, they govern them. Governance is scoped within limits of authority. Even slaves and prisoners can share their food,clothing and other resources with each other, preventing them is not just inhumane but beyond the authority of slave owners and prison wardens. It boils down to this: if you own something, you can give it away for free because ownership implies authority to retain and give away the property. The right to own things can be restricted, but once ownership is allowed, no one has the authority to restrict retention or free exchange of owned resources. Governments can regulate commerce, but free exchange of resources is beyond their authority since it isn't commercial activity. Keep in mind that this is a more crucial and important concept beyond basic liberty and human rights. If you can't own stuff, nothing else matters regarding your relationship with the government. Telling you that you own stuff but then stripping away the meaning of ownership so that you don't really own stuff is a sneaky way of governments exceeding the limits of their authority.
Another sneaky and fraudulent thing is implied acceptance of licensing. Stamping a copyright notice,eula, ToS,etc.. means nothing. if You buy a book with cash, your exchange is with the person who sold it to you and You now own the book. It isn't licensed to you, it is yours to give away for free. The same concept applies to software, video, music,etc.. neither intermediaries, nor original content authors have the authority to enforce a licensing agreement or copyright over the content, unless a license agreement is required at point of sale, and even then the agreement is beyond the two participants. If you agree to a copyright license contract and purchase music, and then you give it away for free, it makes sense to get sued by the copy right owner over violation of that contract. But the person you sold it to has no obligation to honor a contract they did not enter. The government has no right to implicitly force people to enter a license agreement when they receive goods free of charge by someone. only the person who originally agreed to the contract should be held liable.
I will admit that I did not have "FB ruling may end up making torrenting legal ( as long as you don't seed )" in my 2025 bingo card.
Seems like a bad thing, increasing the percentage of non-seeding users will likely kill most torrents.
I wasn't making a judgment on whether it is a good or a bad thing. I just did not see it coming. I was expecting lawsuits on AI will get interesting, but I did not expect this.
Yup, we can agree on that one.
Copyright laws should not exist. Claiming you "own" a specific sequence of words/pixels is crazy. I hope Meta wins the case.
The gall!
Next they'll say that "just because we downloaded the content does not mean we USED the content, and you have no proof we used the content, so we are not pirates".
You wouldnt download a BOOK. (But meta is allowed, because they are to big to fail or something)
The Open(Closed)AIs of the world have millions of dollars to spend on IP datasets.
Arguing that copyright forbids training AI models without paying authors is the moat that would prevent any hope that small labs, individuals, and open source communities can ever compete with these huge corpos.
The books and other artworks they are arguing over didn't come generated spontaneously from nowhere, and it's disingenuous to refuse sharing them to inform what is basically the worlds next currency : Intelligence. Doing so is just saying that knowledge and intelligence must belong to rich corpos only and never be democratized.
This is unexpected but Meta is basically being the good guy by giving away their research papers and models weight resulting from millions of $ of training.
The alternative to open source AI is everyone's subjugation to the oligarchists in charge of Intelligence. Copyrights holders who argue against free training of open source models from their work are morally and ethically wrong here.
so trying to understand here. when metallica et. al. went after kids (well, i guess ppl my age all those years ago lol) for using napster and downloading their music...they made this very clear distinction right?
i'm beyond sick and tired of these large corpos arguing 'rules for thee but not for me.' unfortunately, in this country with no meaningful legislation around privacy or really, anything digital, it's a game of 'who has the slickest lawyers to pull one over on the judge/jury' it would seem.
Well it was a nice run.
I expect all LLMs to be illegal within a year if this is the sort of high caliber defense the top minds of meta can come up with.
Did at least their competitors seed?
So openai announced once that it will cover its' clients legal costs for copyright infringement suits, wonder how it works. Either they are very cautious about where they are training or seeding the data from or there is a loophole.
Probably "after the fact", meaning you first go bankrupt so they don't have to pay you.
It's a bluff, OpenAI and Microsoft both have an carveout in that guarantee that effectively says "if we think you deliberately did copyright infringement with our tools, we won't help you".
And of course, conveniently, if you get a copyright infringement lawsuit, they can just point to that. A company promising legal defense is only worth the paper it's written on and there's always carveouts like that, with the likelihood of them being used probably being equal to the risk the company takes on with that promise. US Copyright lawsuits having pretty extreme fines makes them fairly likely to get used.
Disclaimer: not American.
Copyright agencies that monitor torrents here have actually verified that peers offer at least one offending chunk on protocol level and the Market Court has decided it's the minimum that can be considered sharing. As far as I know, nobody has yet claimed their client has been modified to download without seeding.
I do not work for Meta. Still throwaway account for obvious reasons.
I wrote a modified torrent client that fake seeds. No data (not even a byte) of the content itself is ever uploaded to another peer.
I'm aware this is an asshole move, but it made the lawyers happier.
That's actually really interesting, thanks for sharing.
I've genuinely been wondering if someone building these models has done exactly that, precisely after discussing with lawyers. It seems like the obvious move, legally.
Could some disgruntled employee offer proof of seeding and collect a whistleblower reward?
by the way they say "we didn't seed after the download" but what about while downloading in progress?
In any case it's really easy to configure a BitTorrent client to never seed. It would be dumb not to when torrenting for work.
The claim is that they "took precautions not to 'seed' any downloaded files" - that probably means blocking all upload actions which is possible with many torrent clients. They may also have used a custom hacked client that didn't even connect to other nodes that didn't claim to have 100% already.
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This lawsuit may have impact on legality of open AI models like LLAMA 3, if outcome makes it illegal this may prevent businesses utilizing these models directly in their project.
Unless they actively modified a bittorrent client, even leeches upload and share some chunks.
It's not hard. I've done it.
Right, but did they? It being easy doesn't mean data scientists moving fast and breaking things bothered while they were already doing something illegal.
> Evidence instead shows that Meta "took precautions not to 'seed' any downloaded files," Meta's filing said. Seeding refers to sharing a torrented file after the download completes, and because there's allegedly no proof of such "seeding," Meta insisted that authors cannot prove Meta shared the pirated books with anyone during the torrenting process.
Are they actually claiming only that they didn't share after the torrent completed? Or is the journalist just confused?
My understanding with bittorrent is that normally during download you are also uploading. "Seeding" is just what the uploading part is called when you're not also downloading.
I think it is possible to download without doing any uploading at all, but I feel like the onus of proof should be on them to show that they actually did that.
You're right that torrent clients typically share during downloading, although one might limit this by limiting the upload bandwidth.
However, while we have no idea the lengths that Meta went to (or not), I suspect they have the engineering chops to fork and tweak their own 'download-only' torrent client.
But that’s not quite how the law works. Meta’s response here is “you have no evidence of any wrongdoing”.
The fact we’re even discussing this shows that there’s at least some doubt that Meta could be successfully prosecuted for downloading alone.
With regards to uploading, legally speaking, it sounds like they’re right. Generally, the presumption of innocence means that whoever’s doing the accusing carries the burden of proof, and without any evidence that Meta did anything wrong, it also sets a worrying precedent that Meta would proactively have to prove their innocence in the face of no evidence to the contrary.
I think it's possible with the optimistic unchoking feature of BT but it would be slow and rely on generous clients.
But at the end of the day I don't think Meta care enough. They see themselves as being above the law and likely didn't seed 'more than necessary' only because it didn't benefit them.
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Pirating used to be the worst. The law is awfully flexible when large companies want it to be.
The law doesn't punish those who break it. It punishes those who can't afford expensive legal teams and those who hurt people who can afford expensive legal teams.
In the end it's it about the money? ie the loss to the copyright holder.
One of the reasons people sharing were gone after is you could aggregate the loss to one lawsuit - the person sharing was responsible for every lost sale - rather than chasing the thousands of individual lost sales, one at once, for each download. Not sure that actually made the best sense from a legal perspective as the sharer wasn't necessarily benefiting - but it was pushed for practical reasons.
In this case I'm assuming Meta downloaded as many pirated books as it could get it's hands on in order to avoid paying for them.
Seems common sense what they did is/should be illegal.
Burning tires in Meta's offices isn't illegal without proof of having set the tires on fire.
So I'm allowed to torrent all the games and apps for their VR headsets? Good that they clarified this.
Only if you leech it, I guess.
Corporate advocating for internet piracy, even better for torrents surely was not on my 2025 bingo card.
Pirates around the world agree!
This amounts to a claim of fair use, since copying occurs. Pretty disingenuous of them to make a claim that an individual user would make.
The outcome of a fair use claim by one of the world's largest corporations to ingest wholesale an entire corpus and use it for commercial purposes is probably not the same as one by an individual person who wanted to watch a movie.
It's not the same use, and is much more likely to be found unfair.
The author of the linked piece identifies as a "reporter," however it reads like an opinion piece. We should demand better from ALL journalists.
Torrenting without seeding is a new low even for Meta.
I guess that might be good for everyone else?
Yeah, the difficulty of tracking is a huge factor. Plus, with torrenting, the "making available" part is pretty blatant. With Usenet or direct downloads, it's a grayer area unless you're running the server. I've always wondered about the legal nuances of just passively receiving copyrighted data – like if a misconfigured server pushes something to you without you requesting it.
So not only did they pirate all those books, they were also jerks about it? Meta's seeding ratio would've gotten them kicked off of most private trackers back in the day.
Did they really need a photo of a leech in the article? I get the connection, but it's gross and reminds me of a Taboola/Outbrain chumbox.
my teenager self the trillion dollars company
Meta may not be re-seeding the titles in the original form, but Meta ARE definitely redistributing the content in altered form — it is the specific intent of their bulk-downloading — to ingest the content into their LLM to redistribute it as their product.
The question I see for someone sitting in the judge's chair is whether this is fair use, sufficient alteration to constitute a new work, or a derivative work requiring compensation.
That was my understanding too for a long time. I thought everyone who got sued for using BitTorrent was sued because they were "distributing" copies. Downloading isn't distributing. I also don't think anyone has ever been sued in America for using websites which stream movies they don't have the rights to to you.
If only every copyright lawyer in the world could suddenly band together and descend on them in a horde. This is such a disgusting abuse of book authors, who are usually not the big guys. As a non-author myself, I don’t care about the publishers and whatnot but most people who are authors only have written one book and should get the royalties they deserve from their work.
We'll see if small scale piracy is bad but massive scale corporate piracy is fine.
“It's only illegal if you get caught”
We have TV culture not recognizing the Internet culture.
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Just more proof that laws only exist for poor people, if you are the 1% you get away with virtually anything.
Semantic details aside (I was just downloading/leeching, bro!1! I pinky promise). Clearly a PR campaign.
It’s abhorrent that a multibillion dollar company is not just pirating the content for personal use (? wtf how can a for profit company download it for _personal_ use ?) but also _profits_ on the pirated content by using it for training material.
The whole “corporations” are people ruling is fucking stupid, and truly shows how much this country bends to the billionaire class
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America is a country of religious assholes. The pilgrims were kicked out of England because of their weird-ass insistence on founding their own churches, so they moved to the Netherlands, which at the time were a refuge for many English religious separatists. However, religious freedom was not enough! No, they wanted to found their own Godly country and evangelize to the natives of America, and also reap the economic benefits of an "uncivilized" land.
America:
-Selfish assholes? check! -Weirdly religious? check! -Entrepreneurial? check!
"distribution is the act protected by copyright" was the rule all along in many (non-US) jurisdictions, not an American so not sure about how the US does things.
This is why you often see people getting fines for torrenting (Germany is extremely notorious for this for example), but fines for using Usenet, IPTV, streaming or book download services are a lot more rare (which doesn't mean they're nonexistent)!
Operating / selling / promoting those services is a different matter, and most sensationalist articles about "people fined for IPTV piracy" are actually about people involved with that businesss, not the users.
I even remember reading about some (European) torrenting case that was successfully defended on the grounds of something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads, but I can't find the source right now.
> something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads
You generally can't set a client to 0B/s (as zero usually means “no limit”) but I'm not sure a good¹ lawyer on the other side would let you get away with claiming glacial distribution is not still distribution. At 1Kbyte/sec (I don't know a client off the top of my head that has control down to the single byte) a 50MByte file (not unusual for a book with illustrations/photos) can be transferred in less than 15 hours, a couple of Mbyte (a plain text book, compressed or just short) in less than one hour.
There are clients that can be set to not seed at all, or you could patch a common client that way. Some that don't even offer the capability at all (some command-line wget-style tools), that would be a legally safest option IMO².
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[1] good as in good at their job, no moral judgement implied!
[2] caveat: not a lawyer, never played one on TV, nor even in local am-dram.
It isn't worth my time or risk to test it myself, but if you disable seeding will Warner Media still send a notice to your ISP? If you set your client to 0B/s I assume it's still broadcasting hashes. I suppose if you disable that function entirely in your client there would be nothing to see.
I guess some people may be worried about actual fines, but I would assume the biggest risk to most people is getting blocked by your ISP, which in many cases requires less than the legal standard for proof of copyright infringement.
Sure, but AIUI they generally are not leading with a lawsuit, they're sending a cease and desist notice to your ISP, which doesn't require that kind of proof. Operators like Comcast won't require that to drop you - in fact they may give you a warning for simply downloading torrents at all, even if they are literally, actually, Linux ISOs.
transmission-cli -u 0 <url>
> I'm not sure a good¹ lawyer on the other side would let you get away with claiming
Fortunately that’s not how courts work.
I’m not familiar with the case, but it’s possible setting a 1 byte per second limit showed intent to not distribute.
1 byte per second would give you a couple of pages every few hours. So probably not.
> This is why you often see people getting fines for torrenting (Germany is extremely notorious for this for example), but fines for using Usenet, IPTV, streaming or book download services are a lot more rare (which doesn't mean they're nonexistent)!
It’s a lot easier to find out who is torrenting than to find out who is using Usenet for example though.
With torrents you can see the IP addresses of peers. And then I suppose they ask a court to tell the ISP to say which customer had that IP addresses at that time.
With Usenet you’d have to get a court to get each Usenet provider to give you a list of all customers that downloaded a file. That seems a little bit different to me.
And who knows, in the case of the torrents maybe they don’t always even need to get a court involved. With all of the data brokers out there, maybe there are lists you can buy of real people tied to different IP addresses and when you have a match you send a threatening letter telling them to pay up or they will take you to court?
This process of checking seeding peers to reporting an IP to an ISP to them send a user a nastygram is pretty automated. Torrent a Nintendo game (not even that new of one) and you will get an ISP nastygram within minutes.
I've heard.
Germany is wild. You will get a knock on your door within hours of firing up a torrent client
I'm sure the OP meant "knock on your door" figuratively. And refers to exactly what you say, those leechy law firm letters. In that sense it's entirely true.
Huh, what in the world are you talking about.
If you’re torrenting and you happen to get caught, you will receive a letter from some copyright lawyer with a fine of X amount as well as a cease and desist.
The only knock on your door is the mail delivery man
I lived in Germany. At least back then it was definitely a letter. They were not very good at it, though, and I received one for torrenting large open source software.
Downloading used to be legal here. Now it is explicitly not anymore. Because why not if you can squeeze some extra money from end users who would have never bought your item for the insane prices asked.
When and where? This does not sound true for any jurisdiction I know about.
With "here", you mean Germany? Are you sure? Last time I looked into these things (granted, in 2022 or so), seemed to me that for example using Stremio with a torrent add-on would risk a fine in Germany, but using a Debrid service (that torrents in your name and you just do a direct download like e.g. is done in Youtube) would be free of risks or legal threats. I'm not in Germany though, so I didn't research it much further. Just out of curiosity.
> "distribution is the act protected by copyright" was the rule all along in many (non-US) jurisdictions, not an American so not sure about how the US does things.
I am pretty sure this is false. It is just that distribution carries heavier sentences and is easier to discover, not unlike with drug dealing.
It is not legal, anywhere, to (for example) borrow a DVD from someone, copy it, and give the original back. In some jurisdictions you have a right to backups, and a right to resale, but you emphatically do not have a right to privately copy.
Are there cases in Germany who went through until the end?
In France despite a hefty budget, the org in charge (HADOPI) was so bad they merged it with another one and I think it os over now.
Copy in copyright is not copy like copy in copying some data.
Copy in copyright is a term for the actual writing that gets published on ads, or magazines, or in a news paper. "I need to get the copy from marketing for this campaign." "The editor hasn't approved the copy for the article yet."
Typically, people not in/around the industry aren't familiar with the term, which leads to the confusion.
The word “copy” in the early 1700s when copyright was codified in law meant both a written text and a reproduction of a written text. The meaning you’re using, of text at an intermediate stage of a publishing process, is much later, 19th century. [0] So, the original meaning was a noun (the right to make “a copy” of a book) but meant the book itself, not the abstract text of the book. It would be interesting to research whether there were any rulings in that period about hand-copying a book, which was the only alternative to printing it.
Nowadays of course copyright covers much more than text, and includes such “copies” as the public performance of a theatrical work or reproduction of a sculpture, so the modern copyright clearly doesn’t have the meaning you’re using.
[0] https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/08/copy.html
Any proof that the word copyright was intentionally referring to the noun instead of the verb? The British Statute of Anne in 1710, the first copyright statute, definitely referred to the act of copying a book, not some abstract concept of writing samples.
I always thought that ad copy also came from copy as in copy some data. Like it's the words that get copied when the media is replicated for distribution, as opposed to words that are for some internal communication purpose.
The use of the noun copy probably came from the act of copying, but both uses predated the word copyright, so that doesn't really help answer the question.
This sounds completely false to me. Do you have a reference for it?
In particular, the original Statute of Anne (the first law establishing a copyright) is officially titled:
> An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Copies, during the Times therein mentioned
No doubt people used the word "copy" in the sense you mean, but "copy" in "copyright" is absolutely about copying as in copying some data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
"Attached to the core rights of free speech and free press are several peripheral rights that make these core rights more secure. The peripheral rights encompass not only freedom of association, including privacy in one's associations, but also, in the words of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), "the freedom of the entire university community", i.e., the right to distribute, the right to receive, and the right to read, as well as freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, and freedom to teach.[144]"
"The United States Constitution protects, according to the Supreme Court in Stanley v. Georgia (1969), the right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, and to be generally free from governmental intrusions into one's privacy and control of one's thoughts.[145]"
"As stated by the Court in Stanley: 'If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.'[146]"
[144] - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/381/479/
[145], [146] - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/557/
The US Constitution grants congress the power to give authors and inventors time-limited exclusive rights to their works/discoveries (Art1.S8.C8). This moots the 1st amendment argument.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
I don't think that authors having exclusive rights to their works necessarily implies that someone else _receiving_ them is legally culpable though. My admittedly naive thinking is that someone distributing something illegally doesn't necessarily imply that the receiver is also committing crime. If Robin Hood steals a fancy 4K TV from the mansion downtown and gives it to his neighbor as a birthday gift, would the neighbor be guilty of a crime as well? Does the answer change if Robin Hood were instead the owner of the mansion next door (who could plausibly be the owner of the TV) and gives it to his less wealthy childhood friend?
I'm not saying that either of these situations are directly analogous to the distribution of copyrighted works (since among other things, I don't think there's any way to buy a TV without being able to freely give it to someone else), but that it's not immediately obvious to me that the illegality in distribution has to be symmetric, and that there might be a coherent legal argument that people having the right to _receive_ information isn't inconsistent with the only people with the right to transmit it refusing to allow it. The part of the Constitution (edit: Supreme Court opinion; not actually the Constitution itself) quoted above doesn't seem to say anything about the right to share anything, just to receive it.
> an exact brush-stroke-by-brush-stroke replica that is identical to the original in every way
Yes, forgery is a crime in many jurisdictions, and in some it does not matter whether or not you are transparent about it being such -- specifically for copyright/trademark reasons.
Without taking a stand on whether this _should_ be illegal or not, but whether it _is_, I could imagine that a legal system might want to give the painter a way to get income for a limited time by distributing copies of the painting, and that copying it in this way would infringe upon those rights. In this case though, I'd argue that the modern analogue of this would be Robin Hood getting invited over to watch a movie with the noble (which would be allowed!) and then secretly burning a copy of the DVD when the noble went to the bathroom. Our current legal system doesn't consider "I didn't know what I was doing was illegal" to be a valid defense, so Robin Hood would still be committing a crime by sharing the DVD further after he's copied it. (Since we don't have genies in real life, I don't know how the law would consider them culpable, but based on my very limited knowledge of genie lore, my guess is that the amount of free will they have in this situation is about the same as the DVD burner, so they probably would be okay from the perspective of the law?)
Interestingly, I think that the more direct analog to what we have today would be if the noble themself had the genie copy the painting and gift it to their friend Robin Hood. I do think the same logic I gave above ultimately applies to whether our current legal system would allow the artist to enforce exclusivity, but I find it a lot more compelling as an argument about whether it _should_ be allowed or not compared to the hypothetical you gave. In your version of it, it doesn't feel like allowing what Robin Hood did is particularly beneficial to society, but in the version where the noble is an enthusiastic participant in the copying, it seems a lot more like outlawing it would lead to some harmful dynamics (like you mention about whether the noble bears responsibility for protecting access to the painting based on obtaining it). In other words, having a system where the artist is allowed to enforce his exclusive distribution rights universally actually seems _less_ problematic to me at first glance than one that only applies to those who sign an agreement when purchasing the paintings.
To put this in terms of torrenting, my naive understanding is that right now, it's definitively considered illegal to seed protected content, and the question is whether it's legal to download it without seeding or not. I actually think that it would be worse to allowing downloading without allowing seeding as well, so the system that Meta is arguing for would be worse than if what they did is also illegal. However, I'm honestly not sure if they're actually right or not about what the law says, and that's why I brought up the hypotheticals I did. I also honestly don't feel confident in my feelings on whether I'd prefer to ban both seeding and downloading protected content or to eliminate the legal protections entirely and allow both, but it doesn't seem like that's actually the legal question at the heart of the current matter.
Once you tell someone a secret, you need to be prepared to beat them up if they share it. — dad, 1996
This gives you the right “to beat them up” but not the right to learn a secret. You can take a patent and build that thing in your house. The government can’t stop you, neither the inventor. It’s when you try to sell it that they can come after you.
I don't think it'd hold up, but one could argue that the first amendment was an amendment, and thus changed the constitution, and therefore removed that ability of congress.
That's certainly one interpretation. Your parents also has an interpretation. It will be interesting to see what the courts decide.
>Because there was no right to slander, or threaten, or commit treason, or "share" in 1791, Congress retained the power to regulate.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and intentions of the constitution. Slander and fighting words are exceptions to the first amendment that were determined through the legislative process.
Essentially the entire US constitution is negative rights - the right to X when X means government NOT doing something. Right to freedom of movement, right to freedom of religion, right to freedom of speech, right to privacy - these are restrictions on government to protect the liberties of the people. And then you come to the tenth amendment -
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
It seems abundantly clear from even a cursory analysis that the founders explicitly designed the constitution to limit and restrict the power of a centralized federal government, as treasonous, violent disregard for a powerful centralized federal government is quite literally the premiere founding principle baked into the US's history.
Congress has zero power whatsoever whenever they lack the consent of the goverened. The functional legitimacy of the entire federal government is near zero - we're living in the orwellian nightmare where the military industrial complex more or less runs the entire show from behind the scenes - something Eisenhower tried to warn us about over half a century ago.
I am not convinced that applies to receiving information.
I would expect it to be argued by defendants that since no man (or indeed woman) at Meta actually read the books that were torrented, the First Amendment does not apply here. The question is: does the First Amendment apply to an algorithm?
So I can setup a cable streaming service with ripped vids as long a no one in my company watches it?
A bit off-topic, but I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship but are perfectly OK with advertising and other forms of propaganda (from social media editorializing, bought newspapers...), that arguably do much more to "control men's minds" than censorship ever would.
It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).
> I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship
Not sure you can make this blanket statement about “Americans” any more. It seems like an increasing number are fine with censorship when they aren’t the ones being censored.
Yes, for many this "free speech absolutism" is just a rhetorical stance they adopt, which do not reflect their actions at all.
It's very simple, Americans believe that the individual is responsible for themselves while most of the rest of the world wants to be "protected" by a restrictive government. One leads to innovation and one stifles it. We would rather be responsible for discovering the truth on our own, than trust a central authority to decide what is and isn't true(or propaganda). I find it funny how Europeans think their governments are protecting them from propaganda instead of drowning them in propaganda.
Those who turn discussions about degrees of something into fights about binary extremes are the true problem. Media and politicians included.
>free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society
How does this work? What danger represents freedom of speech? With lack of it dangers is understandable: it is a giant "welcome" sign for bloody totalitarian dictatorship.
> I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.
And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.
Also, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food, I've got some oceanfront property in North Dakota I'd like to sell you. You do know, don't you, that antibiotics in your beef, for example, is done all the time in factory farming with government approval?
Not sure European governments do much to combat external propaganda anyway.
Hi, American here. Just want to say I'm embarrassed to share a nation with this nutcase. Sorry, friends.
You don't need to fact check the torrent of information you describe. You can just ignore it. None of it is worth the time and effort to fact check anyway. You don't need any of that information to make the decisions you need to make in your daily life.
If you want to argue that you need to fact check all that information to, for example, decide how to vote in elections, none of that information is of any value for that purpose either, because it's basically all propaganda at this point. There are no "independent" sources of information that you can trust, other than your own eyeballs and brain. (Possibly you are lucky enough to have some friends and family whose eyeballs and brain you can also trust.)
First of all, there's a difference between facts and understanding. Thomas Young may have understood the wave theory of light, but he could say nothing with certainty about Queen Victoria's underwear. Secondly, it's getting easier to understand everything, because ideas are becoming more powerful. We are however bombarded with facts, that part is true.
Not even most Americans believe that. I would say paradoxically we have a slice of folks who want liberty from the government and also have plenty of government protections.
Then there is the "liberty at all costs" types, the fringe of which idolizes the David Koresh lifestyle.
There are plenty of folks who also think it is OK to ruin someone's entire life if they post something sexist to Twitter.
Americans are not so easily generalized; they come in many flavors.
Seeing how almost everyone here in France despises our current government, I don't think this propaganda you mention is very effective, if it's as present as you claim.
Meanwhile money basically dictates who gets elected on your side of the pond, whith billionaires being crazy over-represented in your political offices, despite being a tiny minority in your population.
Also, the people advocating for smaller government are often on board with executive power consolidation and increased police and army funding, so I think it's little more than a stance.
You can't "discover the truth" on your own, no one can. Are you able to go everywhere something happens in the wordl to get a first hand account of the event and then build your own conclusions? Of course not, you rely on media (social or legacy) to digest the facts for you, and they might (and do) influence you and how you think about the world. It can't be another way, so fighting obvious lies isn't a bad thing in my book.
American here. We're an incredibly large and incredibly diverse country. This generaliization doesn't really work.
I know, I have friends and family in America. It was just a fun thought I had in my head for a while. I should have added a "Some americans..." in my comment. Sorry for the blanket statement.
> It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).
This seems to describe ‘Murican Freedom pretty well to this particular American, for what it’s worth.
AFAIK, in the US it’s literally about copying. In fact, case law mostly supports the position that just the act of copying a program from disk into memory to run it is protected by copyright (with some statutory exceptions). (Google “RAM copy doctrine”.)
That’s my understanding as well. Duplicating the bytes of a file when you don’t have the rights to the content is technically infringement and grounds for an infringement claim, and then you have to explain in court why it’s “fair use.”
I’m waiting for this precedent to be set in favor of META and then enjoying all the movie torrents I can get my hands on. Without seeding of course.
With Musk in the White House (who has similar interests) that might actually happen.
I don't know Musk but why would he make this happen? He's for corporate interests is he not?
I don't think Musk's interests are aligned with those of legacy media corporations.
A right adversarial move would be to support this and watch the GDP without the entertainment business as part of it. Check what happens next.
Author rights wouldn’t be an accurate term. Copy rights do not necessarily belong to the author, even when they are alive. Distribution rights or “distrights” would make more sense for your argument.
Works fine in Dutch law really, you just have to allow for the option that a company can be an author. A work could also have multiple authors.
I prefer it to a name that's more accurate because it signals what the purpose of the law is, which I consider more important than its implementation.
Now that I think of it that also works quite well when naming things in software. Don't name things after their implementation, when you can help it.
They are called "authorship rights" in Polish. While the right to distribute or make copies doesn't aleways belong to the author they always originate from author. And some are even non transferable or revocable, like the right to say "I, <my chosen name>, made this thing"
In some jurisdictions (e.g. Germany) "copyright" belongs exclusively to the author/creator and is non-transferrable, the German word for "copyright" (Urheberrecht) also literally translates to "author's right"). So instead of transferring copyright to an entity (e.g. the employer) you only grant an "exclusive, transferrable and unrestricted" license to that entity, essentially prohibiting you from using it without their permission while technically still retaining that right. This is also why CC0 exists as a substitute for a public domain declaration because in these jurisdictions it is literally impossible to transfer your copyright to the public domain.
In Germany copyright law there is actually one provision for the real transfer of copyright: death. So as far as copyright is concerned, the transfer of copyright requires literally death of the author - which might get a chuckle out of people into media studies.
In case you didn't chuckle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
I think the equivalent is called author's right in civil law countries
> ...then people might start wondering how keeping something from public domain for 90 years after the author's death could possibly be about protecting the rights of the author.
That's the best part, it's forever copyright! Because the creators are corporations that never die, or a huge number of humans, whomever dies last.
that's not true. the term for works for hire is 95 years from creation https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html
Went the opposite direction here. Copying things for personal use was always legal in Sweden, with some exceptions (notably software, since 1986). That law was amended in 2005 (because of The Pirate Bay, presumably) to say that you are no longer allowed to make a copy from an illegally distributed copy. So if someone is illegally sharing something on the internet you are not allowed to download it.
Sweden is always an edge case - education especially. It’s got a population of 10 million people. My metroplex area in DFW has half that with 75% more diversity. Sweden is cool but a terrible reference point for anything other than homogeneous social studies.
>If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar
Man, that's such an ignorant type of thing to say. Copy does not only mean the act of making a duplicate. Copy also means the words/text directly. Terms like copy editor refer to those that make edits to the copy=>words/text, not those that make edits to the duplicates. Maybe you are unfamiliar with the use of the word in that manner, but that's not the rest of the world's problem. That's a limited knowledge problem on your end.
Even in the "rules" of copyright, you're allowed to make copies. Back in the days of the olds being young and in school, we had to go to places called libraries to look things up. We could pay the librarians to make copies of things for us to take home to use in whatever task we were assigned. The fee wasn't for any kind of rights usage, but simply to cover the library's expense in providing that copy to you.
It's amazing how quickly information is lost from the lack of use
I remember back in the day when hefty penalties for torrenting music were in the news, they would erroneously describe it as penalties for “downloading” music. I suppose this was intentional in order to spook usenet users, etc.
> There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar
that's exactly how it's called in french - droit d'auteur
Would definitely torrent any leaked internal facebook data.
But never seed your honor, that would be illegal!