So not just they pirated them, which may or may not be a crime and where I may or may not be impartial, but they are also leeches who would be banned on any decent torrent tracker of the olden days.
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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Truly despicable. Seeding to at least 1 to 1 is the bare minimum of courtesy and humanity. If you dont, its unethical
This is irrelevant because Meta should not be tried for this the same as a private individual would be.
The case for torrenting being illegal for private individuals is one or both of:
- Downloading in of itself is stealing.
- Uploading is giving unauthorized access to someone else who otherwise might have had a harder time finding it. Anything else, such as watching, reading, listening, learning, etc. is not illegal (or does not make sense to make illegal). The exception might be publishing. This is rare for private individuals (e.g. using pirated FL studio to make a commercial song).
For corporations, a lot change. Firstly, a corporation downloading a torrent is necessarily making unauthorized material available for some people of the company. It's like a group of 20 friends all downloaded and uploaded to each other. Secondly, they used this copyrighted material commercially (like playing pirated music in a public night club). Both should be illegal.
However, all of this is still a distraction. The real issue is using copyrighted materials to train commercial AI. Does Meta require permission from copyright holders to make AI based on their work? The law is grey on this, and desperately needs regulations.
Just my thoughts.
AI has already stolen everyone’s work. The internet is officially a free for all.
just like back in the good ol' days.
Except in the good ol' days just about everything on the 'net benefited most of us in some way ... and it was free. Now it sure as hell ain't free and it's been co-opted to benefit billionaires only.
I started torrenting 23 years ago and it was easy. Just a client, no VPN required. Now I need not only a VPN, but a good router that I can flash with a (still mostly free) program, hours of working out how best to set up the router with wireguard etc, then scroll through dozens of links to try and find a stable stream to watch hockey.
It's fucking exhausting.
Of course that fuck isn't a good seeder. Leech.
It's not illegal to download books without yourself offering them for upload. What's illegal is when you feed those books into your reality devouring content monster and it outputs all that copyrighted content in a slightly different order and you profit off that content vomit.
Another example of Republican principles. Corporations are protected by laws but not bound by them, while the average citizen is bound by laws but not protected by them.
In group and out group baybee!
I want to know how to switch groups.
pull yourself up by your bootstraps and become rich. pretty simple, no?
Too late, you should've been born with lots of money. Actually, you could marry someone who's rich I guess..
So, piracy is legal if you don't distribute? What the fuck is Zuck smoking?
Well, that's how it tends to be in most places.
You don't get caught for downloading; you get caught for uploading.
Using a similar logic to distribution via DVDs. Only the seller gets into trouble. The buyer does not.
The buyers/downloaders don't get caught is just because there are too many of them and going after the distributor is an easy target.
Not the case, necessarily.
In Portugal, for example, it's legal to download pirated content. It's not a matter of not pursuing it because it's hard or being difficult to catch or distributors are an easier target, it's just that, legally, you're not doing anything wrong.
sooooo.... vpn should point to Portugal...
Oh for real? Learn something new today.
In Canada it’s legal to download and watch content for personal use, so it’s when it’s shared that it becomes an issue.
Just like you could record anything with a vcr, you just couldn’t share it with your friends.
Is it not also because it was easier to feign ignorance for the time the laws were passed?
And that nobody thought of Tor, while at the same time, leechers who don't seed are actually being worse for the Torrent?
Eh. Makes sense from the perspective of protecting profits, I guess, because the actual thing which bothers them is the volume of lost potential customers....
Elitism. He is of the belief that he is better than you, and doesn't live in the same world as you.
And the copyright owners have no problem with them profiting from derived works that were made using pirated content?
you can download it, but you can't use it. so restrictive :(
That's true, it's not really your problem in most areas if you don't seed, basically scraping them. If a legal person comes your way it's not good but for facebook they have lawyers. They will just say not our problem, we never hosted it, just scraped it. not many people would decide to go against facebook lawyers bc they can pay to drain you.
Also I love how they they don't say they didn't seed, just say there is no proof
This is a motion to dismiss not an answer. That's how those work. It is linked to by the journalist in the article.
So where's the MAFIAA? Here you go guys, literal industrial scale piracy.
Or are you afraid to go after someone that isn't a teenager in their parent's back room?
The real shit deal is if there was a ruling against Meta in this, it would still be worse for everyone because there would be precedent to litigate against people who only consume pirated content (which has been tried in several countries and found to be legal)
....Oh god...
you described a situation where i want Meta to win.....
Fighting Meta will cost easy more money than fighting a teenager.
I am aware. I was simply demonstrating they were never about money, simply bullying people who couldn't fight back.
Especially since in the height of my pirating years during teenagerdom, no amount of cajoling or coercion could get me to pay for whatever it was because I didn't have any money. Which not at all coincidentally was why I was pirating it in the first place.
These dweebs always operate from the frankly invalid preconception that if the pirate had not pirated the media they would have paid for it and therefore they're "owed" a sale, but that's not how it works. I imagine that if the vast majority of people were unable to pirate their thing, they simply would not watch/listen/read/play/consume the thing at all.
So it's okay if we download content from well known online repositories?
Double Standard!
Rules for thee and not for me, plus we PROFIT off of it to boot. But none of you guys can do that. Only for Richys.
I mean isn't that at least some extent technically true to a level.
I mean if we weren't talking a shitty corporation to begin with. If this were say, a 20 year old mcdonnalds worker pirating game of thrones.
IMO the bigger concept is still rather than if they got it... defining whether using that data after the fact is legal. I mean hypothetically speaking lets just say they bought 1 copy of each of the millions of books, or bought used copies, or say had a machine that could scan every book in a library. IMO the issue shouldn't be whether or not anyone managed to download the books in their pure form afterwards. The focus should be the AI trained on their books, is going to be distributing portions of their book to millions of people, and any potential profits of such will be going to meta and uncredited to the original authors. The idea that meta's involvement in torrenting may have let little timmy get a copy of his text book 15 seconds faster... shouldn't be the driving force here.
I mean isn't that at least some extent technically true to a level.
It's completely true. That's why a lot of people don't seed. And why your ISP won't bother you if you don't.
You wouldn't download car....and then upload its stats to a centralised system
Well good news if they are successful in their arguments it can set precedent to make piracy legal.
That’s what I’m saying. Let the Zuck cook.
Facebook got FBI_README.txt at the root of their DC++ share.
According to the law (the thing that determines if something is or isn’t illegal) it’s illegal. Zuck is a criminal.