They don't follow the law.
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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So this will result in criminal charges against all involved, right?
Right?
We all knew Meta was evil, but damn.
Jokes on them, they could've easily connected to a number of IRC servers/channels through a basic proxy and used scripts to download at least as many books with relative anonymity... albeit slower.
“so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,”
They can't even pirate ethically, fucking landlubbers
Another reason for the wall
Plank
Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,"
Corporation pirates millions of books to train AI: No charge
Bourgeois individual commits billions of dollars in fraud: 40 months in country club prison
Homeless man steals $100 and gives it back: 15 years in general population prison
Any questions?
jfc, please tell me he appealed the sentence
It “read” more books than most ever will and yet it still fails to write a decent story
People love stories. And who has a better story than Frogman from lake?
JasonDJ, of course. A literary giant among men.
I can't write for shit either, where's my trillion dollar stock valuation?
torrenting and seeding of pirated books
downloading them from libgen over http
Wish I had 81tb of disk :sadness:
Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,"
and to top it all off, they're goddamn leechers!
Imagine having all that corporate funding and still cutting costs on...stealing information.
81.7TB is so many fucking books
half of it is the complete works of chuck tingle
SWIM has a folder of 9GB of books and it's a lot. This is almost ten thousand times that many.
chuck is very prolific
"Pounded in the butt by the AI graduated from Facebook's pirate training operation, but not very well compared to the lean efficiency of the pounding provided by DeepSeek with significantly less illegal torrenting, despite the eyepatch and parrot."
one of my personal favorites from chuck's january 2025 ouevre
So, they're being arrested for piracy the same way any of us would be, right?
RIGHT?!
Totally not an oligarchy!
Rarely any person is arrested for piracy in the US. In most cases copyright infringement is a civil case, not a criminal case. That means that you are prosecuted by the copyright holder and not the state. The copyright holder has to take you to civil court to sue you.
If we downloaded multiple terabytes of books, I think it is unlikely that there would be any consequences.
For it to become a criminal case, you basically have to be charging money for pirated content. If Facebook is profiting from the piracy, it is possible that they are doing criminal copyright infringement.
They killed Aaron Swartz for this
Is meta making an AI for fun or profit?
I dunno, it feels like a song and dance to convince investors that there’s future large-scale growth in Meta and that they haven’t hit their functional market cap.
Sure but that’s still profit; that’s still them trying to scheme a bag and they should be punished accordingly
I know what you are saying and you have to also consider fair use. For example, many people on youtube use clips from movies that they pirated in videos that they made for money. I'm not a lawyer.
My point is that it's really hard to get arrested for copyright infringement unless you're like selling bootleg DVDs on the side of the road.
If you did the same thing as Facebook, where you downloaded a bunch of books and fed it into an AI and somehow made money that way, without distributing exact copies of the book. I still doubt you would be arrested.
My professors aren't allowed to upload more than 20% of a selected publication or else they get fired, even if the reading is like 20 years old.
Copyright law only exists to punish the working class and rob artists of their work.
Regular people are getting fined like $20K per infringement for downloading copyrighted material. 81.7 TB of data is a heck of a lot of numbers of infringements, especially where it's clear it's being used for profit
That's just not true. You made that up. If people were getting fined $20k per infringement, piracy would be much less common and you'd see it on the news all the time. Piracy laws in the US are very loose. Most people have pirated books or music or movies or games. Most people have not been fined for it.
Here's how piracy is "prosecuted" in the US in most cases. Copyright holders hire a "troll agency" to monitor public peer-to-peer filesharing of their content. The troll agency records IP addresses of the file sharers. The troll agency then sends threatening emails to the ISPs of the file sharers. In many circumstances, the ISP just deletes the threatening email without even telling you. Sometimes the ISP forwards the email to you. You are not obligated to respond to the email. In order to be "fined" for infringement, the copyright holder has to actually take you to court and prove that you infringed the copyright, which is very difficult to prove.
And if you use a VPN, they would never even find your ISP.
Here's an article from last month describing how RIAA and MPAA uses troll agencies to threaten ISPs.
Under the law, people can actually be charged up to $150,000 per infringement. In reality, it is in the $10k to $20k per infringement range, but I don't think this happens much anymore. There were a bunch of lawsuits 10-15 years ago.
For example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/11/minnesota-woman-songs-illegally-downloaded
The article that you posted does not even align with what you are saying. The article that you posted aligns with what I am saying. The article also says in the headline that the RIAA has realize that suing individual downloaders is an ineffective legal strategy.
That article does not say that people are being fined by the government because copyright infringement in most cases is not a criminal case, it's a civil case. The article itself says that the state isn't pursuing it. That article says that copyright trolls harassed 18000 people, 7000 people didn't even respond and 11000 settled out of court or "were not prosecuted". Weird that it doesn't even say how many people even settled of court.
Why are you posting like you work at the RIAA? "Under the law, people can actually be charged up to $150,000 per infringement" Under what law? Why don't you know the difference between a civil case and a criminal case? I already told you that criminal copyright infringement is different from civil copyright infringement. The woman in the article you posted was not being fined by the government. She was being sued in a civil case for uploading music on Kazaa, not even for downloading.
On top of that, the woman who was being sued in the article that you posted never even payed the damages. She declared bankruptcy to avoid paying the damages. "In March 2013, Thomas-Rasset announced she would declare bankruptcy to avoid paying the RIAA the $222,000."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records%2C_Inc._v._Thomas-Rasset#Aftermath
Repeating what I said in my previous posts. "In most cases copyright infringement is a civil case, not a criminal case. That means that you are prosecuted by the copyright holder and not the state. The copyright holder has to take you to civil court to sue you." "For it to become a criminal case, you basically have to be charging money for pirated content." "the copyright holder has to actually take you to court and prove that you infringed the copyright, which is very difficult to prove."
Criminal copyright infringement requires that the infringer acted "for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain." 17 U.S.C. § 506(a).[9] To establish criminal liability, the prosecutor must first show the basic elements of copyright infringement: ownership of a valid copyright, and the violation of one or more of the copyright holder's exclusive rights. The government must then establish that defendant willfully infringed or, in other words, possessed the necessary mens rea. Misdemeanor infringement has a very low threshold in terms of number of copies and the value of the infringed works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_copyright_law_in_the_United_States#Legal_definition
Sure I agree, i doubt any punishment will be issued in this case.
For it to become a criminal case, you basically have to be charging money for pirated content
nah like $200k fine if anything
They should be getting a cease and desist letter any day now
Oh goody, more kindling!
much less that Plaintiffs’ books were somehow distributed by Meta.
While I guess that Meta may have used settings to be leech only. Unless they show that they did that (which is of course poor practice if torrenting), the nature of torrenting by default means that even one piece of a file was seeded to another user is "distribution."
expropriation now
:no-waying: