This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is honestly a win-win. Either the courts recognize that the LLM uses stolen copyrighted content, or they recognize that torrenting is legal by default.
Though with the way courts have been bending case law into knots recently, I wouldn’t be surprised if they somehow word the ruling in a way that favors Meta and makes torrenting outright illegal.
Ahh, but you’re forgetting the Rules for Thee clause that protects any and all wealthy, white, corporate gremlins from facing the same or similar consequences that any of the poors might face for the same infraction.
Life is simpler when that clause exists.
You think it's actually going to go to court and have a verdict?
Well, at least they released llama for free, But honestly, their hypocrisy is so pathetic.
Hey, who knows? Maybe now they're gonna like start funding legal defense funds for people torrenting. Part of their whole corporate social responsibility, If they feel so strongly about it... right? /s
Let's just make legal the evil we do...
At the very least they’ll create a legal precedent.
They'll just settle if the case isn't going their way.
My class action Spidey sense is tingling
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.
Truly despicable. Seeding to at least 1 to 1 is the bare minimum of courtesy and humanity. If you dont, its unethical
Yeah, I always went for 2:1. It doesn't really cost me anything, so why not?
Hey now some of us just have wildly shit upload speeds and couldn't hope to reach 1:1 without spending an entire year seeding a single movie.
That's a big part of why I stick with my ISP. My download speeds aren't super competitive for the price, but my upload is half my download, which is nice.
Seeding shouldn't be done on ratios - being the only one seeding 10 seasons of a tv show and getting it to 0.4:1 is way more helpful than seeding the same movie as everyone else and getting to 20:1, you're noy contributing anything there other than decreasing your bandwidth for things that aren't already at 100,000% availability
I'd you are the only one seeding it and get to 0.4, you just left others hanging with incomplete downloads.
However I do agree in general
That's what I'm saying
It's better to not even half-way seed a torrent with low availability than it is to seed one that everyone else is seeding, regardless of how high your ratio goes - it's a point on how pointless it really is to waste your resources seeding something like that
The lazy approach is the best approach IMO. Seed everything, and if the ratio gets high, drop it. That way you get rid of useless popular torrents and keep the less popular ones. If everyone does that, things will work better.
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:
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 firmware, 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.
This is why I try to find legitimate sites offering direct downloads instead of illegally uploading during torrenting. There are many sites offering direct downloads, but I often have trouble finding them.
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.
Another point, opening a web page means downloading it, so if someone wanted to frame someone for downloading something, it would be very easy to make such a trap. This, accompanied with CSAM and network monitoring could be used to easily get any person using the internet, in jail, just for opening the wrong link. So, the laws require much more information regarding intent and such.
Yup. In switzerland its legal to leech, illegal to seed.
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...
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.
Elitism. He is of the belief that he is better than you, and doesn't live in the same world as you.
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.
What does this have to do with the Republican party? The other party upholds the same copyright law.
Of course that fuck isn't a good seeder. Leech.
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?
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.
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.....
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.
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 it's okay if we download content from well known online repositories?
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
Double Standard!
