"See your honour, I'm just training my AI with all these books, comics, movies, music, general software and games. Totally permissible. Go fine Lars retroactively for keeping interfering with our training".
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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So when this works for them it'll be precedent to allow the fair use pirating of all media and software, right?
Oh never mind, I forgot that I don't have billions of dollars to spend on lawyers. Never mind.
So Anna's Archive is legal now?
So meta gets to claim fair use with pure digital duplication, but archive.org doesn't when they scan physical copies of books and only lend out the same number of copies as they own in warehouses. That's piracy.
Got it.
Rules for thee but not for me ahhhh corpo shit.
Honestly I agree with Meta here but this should apply to everyone. I think most people here conflate their hate for Meta with the factual reality of intellectual property.
I can hate both.
People can also hate the fact that if you have enough money you can make everything legal.
What do you mean you can hate both? Whats the other of your hates? Disregard for copyright absolutism?
I saw this coming from 69 miles away
I absolutely love the fact that all these companies are laying the legal groundwork to destroy intellectual property rights altogether. If they win enough of these cases, then every pirate on the open seas sails under a flag of amnesty.
Not all IP is self surviving. Even CopyRight isn't always a bad thing, if you think of small artists, for example. My fear is about CopyLeft mainly as I feel it's been incredible successful in pushing forwards openness. The megacorps hating it, tells you it is doing its job. Only of the things they love about LLM and code is it can license wash away CopyLeft.
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So I can use pirated media to train my AI (Actual Intelligence), right?
If only US were going for a win in that AI
Yes, in fact there's no framework or legal precedent right now so everyone already is doing it. You can just scrape the web etc and disregard IP ownership because training AI is transformative work - as it should be.
As long as you’re rich enough to hire your own army of lawyers, probably.
That said, it seems like when you’re rich enough to hire your own army of lawyers you can pretty much do whatever you want.
Well, that doesn't sound civil or lawful at all and more like kindoms of the dark ages degree of "rules" where it doesn't apply to a choosen few.
If Meta and other bigcorps that support the US goverment get the special "avoid-judgment" card and you face punishment then there's no law, only bigotry.
That would encourage individuals and small groups to keep their activites a secret (go anonymous) and break the law whenever they can,
because the "king and his followers" don't follow their own "rules".
The US is not only getting dystopian, they're commiting primitive mistakes.
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So we can pirate books as well as long as we aren't able to reproduce them verbatim from memory as well?
Judge Vince Chhabria either accepts whatever bribes and offers he's probably getting offered and sides with Meta, or it will eventually go on to the Supreme Court where they most definitely will. That's the part of this that will work the most under an administration of no accountability.
Tell the judge you are training a neural network... it just happens to also be you.
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Shorter and more reasonable copyright lengths would make this a moot point because then there would sufficient literature in the public domain to pull from.
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These kind of charges are what put the Pirate Bay admins in prison and caused Aaron Swartz to kill himself because of a threat of lifetime in prison. The claim that they did this either with the goal of profit or actually successful profit and that this was a serious crime. Neither TPB or Swartz at that point in time had ever moved as much data as Meta has for these claims, nor did they ever have the profit or possibility of profit Meta aims to make from their AI offerings.
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Now Meta is claiming they've profited so hard you can't possibly hold them accountable.
It will be the biggest "fuck you" in history to anyone ever hit with civil charges for piracy in the early 2000s, let alone the TPB admins and Swartz, if they let this go. Which means they probably will because in America, apparently if you crime hard enough and big enough they stop putting you in prison and start patting you on the back and calling it good business sense.
in America, apparently if you crime hard enough and big enough they stop putting you in prison and start patting you on the back and calling it good business sense.
If you owe the bank $100 you have a problem. If you owe the bank $100,000,000, the bank has a problem.
If heaven and hell are real I hope God and Satan give Swartz a sabbatical so he can go torture Zuck for a while, periodically.
in America, apparently if you crime hard enough and big enough they stop putting you in prison and start patting you on the back and calling it good business sense.
There's a story about Alexander the great capturing a pirate and scolding him for raiding villages along the coast line. Alexander asked if the pirate feels ashamed and wants to beg for forgiveness. However, the pirate had something else to say. He said that Alexander was doing the same thing, but infinitely worse. The only difference was that Alexander called himself king and plundered entire lands while the pirate only raided small villages. The pirate reminded Alexander of the many lives he had destroyed in his conquest. So the pirate's only crime was not to be the biggest baddie in the hood, so to speak.
Alexander replied by stating that the title of king forces his hand and that he couldn't just stop what he was doing. The pirate on the other hand was just an individual who could easily change course. And so Alexander set the pirate free, stating that he himself will start changing his own ways right there and then if the pirate makes a fresh start first.
I don't know if there is any truth to this but it's a fable often used to explain how legitimacy changes the perception people have of wrong doing and heroism on a fundamental level. Alexander's reply sounds like an excuse and I think that's on purpose. The pirate outwitted him in the end by stating a basic truth.
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Looking forward to Jellyfin getting a LLM to train locally on movie preferences so everyone’s library is fair use. Wait, is this why LLMs are being shoehorned into everything? 🤔
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