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

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[–] [email protected] 131 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 121 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 78 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

His real crime is threatening profits of a corporation...

MIT is forever disgraced for their conduct and should be stripped of their tax exempt status.

[–] [email protected] 70 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

Right?

Right...?

Surely they would...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Copyright lobby begs to differ. 😂

[–] heavydust 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 67 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months 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)

[–] [email protected] 60 points 2 months 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

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Capitalists aren't in the business of sharing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Parasite's entire MO is to never give back.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Downloading and seeding are very legally different.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Of course they didn't seed. Fucking leeches.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

They were leeches without the torrenting.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 2 months 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!"

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago

And they should pay for every book they stole :)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

What do you think?

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

That's a lot of Far Side books.