- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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From the article…
The company is preparing a fair use-based defense after using copyrighted material
Oh, NOW corporations are accepting of fair use.
“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.
The only solution is vigilante justice. Bezos and all the directors and snr execs. Bring them all to justice. Exile to Mars.
One of the founders of The Pirate Bay.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?
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 penalty for a crime is a fine, that law only exists for the lower classes.”)
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. While individuals just trying to share are treated like fucking villains.
Look at how they treat Meta versus how they treat Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub exists only to promote and improve science by giving people access to scientific data. The entire copyright world is trying to fucking destroy them, and take them offline. But Facebook pirating to make money? Totes fucking okay! If it’s selfish, it’s fine, if it’s selfless, sue the fuck out of them!
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.
You can be actually be sued for piracy? Is this mostly in the United States?
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.
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.
If you could survive discovery and defend any other uses evident on your home devices…
But why does that strike me as really unlikely?
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
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.
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.
Hey guys, I’m sure Meta’s intentions with the fediverse are pure though! Really!
I mean, pure? No. But also not at all linked to this topic. They can get fediverse data whether or not they are federated.
Who’s saying that?
There are a lot of people who are not against federating with Threads.
No, who’s saying they believe Meta’s intentions are pure?
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.
I was going to say I knew all that and was poking to make it clear to others that literally no one is saying that but then you hit me with “Eternal September 2.0 scenario” haha.
I’ll have to do a little searching on that one.
Edit: Ah, I had forgotten.
Edit: Ah, I had forgotten.
Wow, that sets the Wayback Machine to high.
Heh, no, not that one. This one.
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.
This guy gets it. The laws aren’t applied evenly. It’s “he who has the most fuck you money wins.”
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.
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.”
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.
Even if they do I won’t believe copyright beyond attribution is just, but it’s unlikely to.
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.
Ok now spend years of your life and your money making a thing that everyone just gets for free instead of paying you for. See if you feel the same way then.
I have released thousands of photos I took under free licenses.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
They have released it on github. The code is only about 500 lines. But releasing the model is arguably more important because that sort of compute is not affordable to any mortals.
Yeah I mean what they’ve released is essentially the design of the battery and starter system, without the design of the actual motor. You can’t replicate their product and prove their work with what they’ve published.
Good to see all the lawyers moved over from Reddit.
Good to see all the lawyers moved over from Reddit.
Maybe they’re just doing some pro bono work.
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.
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…
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what’s a troglodyte
i dont know but it sounds scathing
By the artist Skrumpgoblin
thanks
Literally means ‘cave dweller’
why do they do this
Yikes. We’re at a complicated crossroads where discussion around copyright is as important as ever. You’re against someone choosing a path that will empower a major corporation, so you want to… *checks notes* strengthen copyright law? You should work for Disney.
Copyright was meant to be for 30 years. It’s corporate greed that push that number up. Every version of consciousness requires the intake of ideas and transforming them. A higher quality and wider variety of ideas the better. I’m all for creators having time to profit from their works. But fighting for more restrictive copyright law is a fight against humanity and A.I… You’re going to lose that fight.
Thank you for your comment, I think there’s a meaningful discussion to be had here. US “law” is meant to legitimize the ruling class and serve to protect their interests. In this case, copyright law, meant to legitimize the control of US media corporations on intellectual property, is actually hindering their reach and access to materials that can train their AI models. In any case, this is going against the spirit of what the law is made for, which is to protect corporations.
Law isn’t made from a vacuum. Law is written by the ruling class passed and minted by the ruling class. I did not remember voting for any copyright law (the US is not a direct democracy), and therefore the law is imposed to us.
So, you are correct, we are at a crossroads. More specifically, corporations are. Will they lobby to be an exception to copyright laws so they can continue training on copyrighted data, or will they weaken copyright laws enough so that their actions will be deemed legal?
My take is that since their models are trained from copyrighted data made by the people, the access to their models and its predictions / inferences must also be made accessible to the people. Of course they will not do that, so they will fight the hardest to be able to train on the most amount of public data while giving the fruits of that data only to the paying customers. The classic “socialize the losses, privatize the gains” trick that capitalists use.
anyway fuck capitalism fuck AI fuck this rant I’m high af
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Google does not just show a link. It scrapes the content of the page to build a search index, i.e. consomes the content. This happens without explicit permission and in the past, there were no opt-out ways. Then they use this knowledge to provide search go users and incorporate ads to make money without paying the original pages. Google also started to show you these handy answers by showing some text section scraped from the page.
Like, there certainly is a similarity. And there is the difference that Google mostly feeds users to the original webpage while GenAI can replace the content.
What a cuck comment.
You sound like fun.
Even if this were not covered by copyright. Our copyright system is broken and laws can be changed. Especially if they don’t correspond to what the majority sees as moral.
I agree copyright is broken because it is a mechanic of capitalism which has been breaking for a while.
Once we learn to live without the notion that people need to “earn a living” and instead move to a system of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” without the money insensitive the true biggest reward anyone can receive for having an idea is seeing your brilliant idea being used by everyone for the improvement of everyone.
I don’t see that happening anytime soon, because it will be very hard to convince literally everyone to be ok with what they need and pass on what they want.
Definitely a valid point. My hope is agnostic aswell, future is everything but predictable.
I do think though that on the current trajectory of the 1% owning 99% of wealth before 2030 will force some kind of change in this matter seoon, for better or worse.
