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Meta admits using pirated books to train AI, but won't pay for it (www.techspot.com)

submitted 10 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 183 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (32 children)

“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.

[–] kibiz0r@lemmy.world 48 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The main reason they were able to prosecute TPB admins was the claim they were making money.

I think in the Darknet Diaries episode about TPB, the guy said they never even made enough off of ads to pay for the server costs.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 32 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

He also said as much in their documentary TPB AFK.

Maybe the issue was they didn't make enough money? If they had truly been greedy bastards they could have used that money to win the court case? What a joke.

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