this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] shittydwarf@lemmy.dbzer0.com 138 points 1 year ago
[–] turkalino@lemmy.yachts 127 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Remember when Aaron Swartz tried to do something similar and received multiple life sentences

[–] guaraguaito@lemmy.blahaj.zone 78 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And was intimidated so bad by the legal system he killed himself.

[–] SeaJ@lemm.ee 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What Swartz did was not even close. What he did was absolutely fair use. He downloaded shit from JSTOR while at MIT which is fine because MIT allows students and employees to access JSTOR. There was no evidence that he shared anything.

[–] albert180@discuss.tchncs.de 73 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If they don't respect copyright I don't respect it either

[–] Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We just need to wait until copyright regulations get killed... Right?

[–] Bezier@suppo.fi 13 points 1 year ago

Right?

Right...?

Surely they would...

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Copyright lobby begs to differ. 😂

[–] heavydust@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My Mullvad account begs to differ. And it makes my banker happy!

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 70 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Meta did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment and has maintained throughout the litigation that AI training on LibGen was "fair use."

When I upload a single half century old photo to Wikipedia, I have to fill out a relatively complicated form proving that it meets "fair use" standards. Internet Archive got legally fucked for allowing people to read their book scans without restriction for a while. And now these absolute cunts have the gall to defer to "fair use"! I really wonder if the same authors and publishing houses who sued IA will do anything about this.

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

See, Meta is rich and US laws don't seem to apply to American oligarchs.

[–] xor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

well the problem here is these laws have no teeth other than fines….
if you’re very rich, a fine is just a cover charge… and cheaper than doing it legally anyways.

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 8 points 1 year ago

Final Fantasy Tactics (1997) quote "If the penalty for a crime is a fine then that law only exists for the lower class"

That aside, there exist other charges such as jail time however long or short and penalties as a percentage of assets (such as in some Nordic countries)

[–] AnEilifintChorcra@sopuli.xyz 64 points 1 year ago (2 children)

“Plaintiffs do not plead a single instance in which any part of any book was, in fact, downloaded by a third party from Meta via torrent, much less that Plaintiffs’ books were somehow distributed by Meta,” the company writes.

Another reason to hate Meta, now they're scummy leechers even though they could afford the bandwidth to seed back

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Capitalists aren't in the business of sharing.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 6 points 1 year ago

Downloading and seeding are very legally different.

[–] nesc@lemmy.cafe 61 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Of course they didn't seed. Fucking leeches.

[–] DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 year ago

They were leeches without the torrenting.

[–] a1studmuffin@aussie.zone 60 points 1 year ago

This doesn’t mean that Meta denies using shadow libraries, its argument is that using such data to train its LLM models constitutes fair use under U.S. copyright law.

Oh wow, I'm very much looking forward to this argument... "We believe pirating the copyrighted commercial works of others en masse to develop our own commercial product constitutes fair use... China bad!"

[–] SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 39 points 1 year ago

And they probably never reseeded it afterwards either, the inconsiderate prats

[–] azron@lemmy.ml 36 points 1 year ago

And they should pay for every book they stole :)

[–] mr_right@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] hannesh93@feddit.org 7 points 1 year ago

What do you think?

Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,"

[–] zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago
[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago

I don't usually like Meta, but here they used that data to produce open weights models available to the public. That sort of thing is what piracy is for so I support it.

That's a lot of Far Side books.