Meta also argued that the BitTorrent sharing was a necessity to get the valuable (but pirated) data.
Actually that's not true, they could have done hit-and-run, not that it helps anything though.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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The company also stresses that the data helped establish U.S. global leadership in AI.
Just like the data helps establish much needed universal access to education and entertainment.
But of course, the argument is only relevant when it goes in favor of the rich people.
So pirating anything has become "fair use"? Or does that work only for billionaire public-market companies?
When they can argue its for "transformative use" or whatever the magic words are? Thats technically fair use in US law.
Critique, parody, and even collage-as-art are all explicit carveouts for fair use. Remixing and remuxing artists, being broke, cannot afford the lawyers to effectively apply this, so they pay off the "owners" of that existing IP.
The AI bros might have a serious point within the law, and that should scare actual artists. It should also scare studios like Disney that hold a fuck ton of "intellectual property".
Using it to train an AI? Takes meeting that "transformational" requirement for fair use to newly undisputed heights, so long as safeguards are in place to remove the possibility to use it as a vector for direct replication.
When they can argue its for “transformative use” or whatever the magic words are? Thats technically fair use in US law.
Well, considering they transformed its use to about 250GB of weights, that would qualify. That's at least thousands of times less than the size of the books they downloaded, so you can't really claim "they downloaded the books and put it into the model unaltered".
It's not like you can ask one of the models for page 156 of the second Harry Potter book, unless it's cheating and attached to a search engine to try to find the result. There is no compression technique that can take something to a thousandth of its size without an substantial loss. You can, however, ask it to summarize what happened in the second Harry Potter book, including what the actual title is, without it trying to look it up on its own.
The AI bros might have a serious point within the law, and that should scare actual artists. It should also scare studios like Disney that hold a fuck ton of “intellectual property”.
Actual artists have been fucked over by copyright since its invention. Copyright, patents, and intellectual rights were created under the false pretense that it "protects the little person", but these are lies told by the rich and powerful to keep themselves rich and powerful. Time and time again, we have seen how broken the patent system is, how it is impossible to not step on musical copyright, how Mark Twain, Sonny Bono, and Disney has extended copyrights to forever, and how the megacorporations have way more money than everybody else to defend those copyrights and patents. These people are not your friend, and their legal protections are not for you.
If the rich end up dismantling their own IP shield that has existed to enrich themselves for centuries in the name of AI progress, I'm going to call that a win.
mixed feelings...
so either piracy wins or meta loses?
lol
most likely only 'rich' piracy wins
at least this would create quite nice case if someone has to defend oneself in court. Either one can defend oneself with it or its dismissed and it proves that law does not apply to the rich.
Huge corps have been getting away with a lot in the name of "AI". It would be so fucking funny if this is how copyright law finally dies.
I am disappointed nobody has argued that it’s what the Jesus would have wanted.
Not enough bread? Copy paste it. Baker won’t mind because we bought the first copy.
Alright, I'm going to torrent all my books too then, if it's fair use
Aaaah, precedent is a wonderful thing.
Oh I guess those guys from the Pirate Bay are in the clear and we can undo their prison sentences then!
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Copyright should be a much shorter, more reasonable length, and then this whole issue would be a moot point because there would more than enough in the public domain for the corporations to train their AI while also not restricting access to individuals and open source projects to do the same.
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The real issue at hand is that corporations like Facebook have literally billions at their disposal to fight this in court. The Pirate Bay admins did not, despite being charged with profiting wildly off their media sharing site. Facebook has arguably made so much more off of their AI offerings than the admins of the tiny Pirate Bay team could have dreamed of. For fucks sake Peter Sunde's username was "brokep" which I always assumed stood for "Broke Peter" as in "Peter has no money."
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We have yet to see if the courts in the USA will make this a hypocritical outcome where small players like the Pirate Bay who legitimately did not make that much money went to prison, Aaron Schwartz was threatened with life in prison and committed suicide, but somehow it will be okay for giant corporations to do because they made so much money doing it. It's definitely possible, America feels like a country where as long as you do the crime big enough, it stops being treated as a crime and instead people pat you on the back and reward for criming so hard you broke the justice system and instead it just gets labeled "good business sense."
imo copyright should be like patents. 20 years after the copyright was filed, it becomes public domain.
that’s the compromise at least, ideally copyright should not exist at all
That's what it used to be, until Disney lobbied to extend it so that they wouldn't lose Mickey and their other cash cows.
Mark Twain started this nonsense.
I don't unterstand why copyright would last longer than the lifetime of the authors who were part of the creative process. It doesn't make sense that it can be transferred like it is
Because Disney lobbied for the time to be raised again and again
I know why it is the case but it doesn't make sense from a logical perspective that isn't capitalistically oriented
Well ... yeah? Of course a capitalist decision only makes sense under capitalism.
Hell, let's compromise and say 20 years after the author's death. In case they have a small child at the time of death and said child's other parent isn't capable of the kid's upkeep, a little extra would help.
But what is it right now? 70 years? Literally no excuse for that.
At some point it just becomes a tool for making money off of other people's works
Why do they last more than a year?
Why do they exist at all?
I understand them lasting for a certain time so the authors can get a compensation for what they have worked for. Of course people are allowed to quote things and use the content in a transformative way like in the German urheberrechts laws.
Without royalties or copyright it's difficult to earn enough money for living as an artist. If there was proper support and compensation for artists there would be no reason for copyright law.
It would be great if that argument prevailed, but it almost certainly won't.
Anything is possible with a large enough Trumpcoin purchase...