Posted by spankibalt 4 days ago
The previous infringement case with Anthropic said that while training an AI was transformative and not itself an infringement, pirating works for that purpose still was definitely infringement all by itself. The settlement was $1.5bn, so close to $3k for each of the 500k they pirated, so if Zuckerberg pirated "millions" (plural) it is quite plausible his settlement could be $6bn.
[1] See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace#Legal_pro...
Cory Doctorow wrote a nice summary of the Zuckerstreisand book by Sarah Wynn-Williams.
"First, Facebook becomes too big to fail.
Then, Facebook becomes too big to jail.
Finally, Facebook becomes too big to care."
That Mark never fails to deliver.
> Afterwards, Kaplan gives her a negative performance review because she was "unresponsive" to his emails and texts while she was dying in an ICU.
Holy shit.
24 songs and was at one point $80k per song, almost 20 years ago. Let's let Zuck off with an even 100k per infringement.
It just seems obvious to me that a profit seeking venture should be held to a higher standard when it comes to infringing on the property rights of other companies and individuals, especially if they seek to enforce their own.
Those kids weren’t hypocritically enforcing their own property rights and making employees sign ndas while downloading shit from tpb.
The hypocrisy is what has at least me upset
It’s currently just as bad but in a different way, imho.
The ability for labels (or whoever owns the rights) to wantonly invoke automated DMCA copyright strikes and demonetization on social media channels like YouTube is borderline criminal to me.
Their lobby did a great job getting them more than they deserved (specifically with regards to the facilitation of capricious invoking of DMCA), but the abuse of the rules limits the growth of the creator economy in very unhealthy ways.
The difference in scope here should be obvious.
We can similarly punish drug dealers while not punishing drug users. In fact it's already policy in large parts of the USA.
"Thats such a non sequitur. This isnt a weed legalisation argument, its "Do we make IP worse for everyone, because you dont like some people benefiting from fair use"."
Of course some kids are going to be charged for this kind of shit, it's still a rules for thee but not for me world, the 'not for me' folks are just a hell of a lot more brazen about it.
Those students are not Zuckenberg. They will not be treated as Zuckenberg. The legal theories that apply to them dont apply to Zuckenberg and vice versa. They do not have money to mount defense and if they do, they will be in debt till the end of their lives.
His constant violation of people's privacy is also horrendous and worthy of condemnation, but that's not directly related to the copyright infringement matter. It's a separate issue.
Anything less than this means it's rules for thee and not for me. Laws cease to have meaning when people realize and internalize the idea that they are just tools of the elite to keep the poors in line instead of proper instruments of justice that apply to everyone equally. That's an extremely dangerous thing for the public to realize and internalize, for obvious reasons.
"We were just following the rules" got people justifiably hanged not so many years ago. There must be principle behind what it is you would enforce, or you're not one of the good guys. If you give a shit about "currently illegal", I won't spend any more time listening to or worrying about what you think should be legal.
But we all know it’ll be a slap on the wrist for Meta and nothing will change.
And when you're targeting someone / something with unlimited lawyers, you'd better have ironclad evidence that exactly that happened in exactly the way the claim is written.
But untreated (at the time, no penicillin) syphilis turned him into a mental pre-teen after his release, so I guess the universe serves some justice where the laws of the land do not.
It's pretty clear that Meta wasn't about profit, given that no amount of "sunk cost" could explain what happened. That had more to do with self-aggrandizement and his belief that he was some sort of digital messiah that would get to usher humanity into another world.
A bad bet doesn’t mean the motive wasn’t to win the bet.
He bought the best protection around for breaking the law.
IIRC, Facebook's cash is more like $81-82 billion.
This common argument to not take market cap valuations seriously doesn't hold.
True, Meta as an entire entity is not liquid. A forced sale in entirety would produce a massive reduction in compensation. But that is a highly unlikely and contingent reduction.
It is also true that if you have Meta's equivalent in cash, the value of the cash is likely to drop, while the value of Meta likely to grow, over any appreciable time. In that sense, $X cash is worth much "less" than the $X market cap.
These seeming contradictions are the result of different practical tradeoffs in structures of wealth. Not because market caps reflect misleading or overstated accounting.
Or do you mean a greater vs. lesser market cap? As compared to what?
If market cap was intrinsic value underlying itself, the business would be irrelevant. That is a circular “origin” of value that even novice investors would want to sell out of. That doesn’t work.
Success that matters for investors isn’t evidenced by a high market cap. But by a market cap not keeping up with business growth. I.e. shares becoming undervalued. By actual/predicted growth increasing faster than cap, or cap falling faster than actual/predicted downturns.
(I think, someone please correct me of I'm wrong?)
Yes, there are specialized products catered to billionaires. But those aren't getting them better rates than someone with a $200k portfolio (Zuck is not conventionally a less risky borrower than the Options Clearing Corporation!). They exist to work around the fact that some borrowers can't just casually liquidate their stock on the open market, let alone at face value. By all accounts these products are more expensive than retail.
Mostly this is an expensive (but maybe still less expensive than taxes, depending on the rate environment—it's more of a no-brainer in ZIRPland) way to diversify out of a single-stock portfolio without selling by adding leverage. At Zuck's age, it's still very unlikely to make sense to borrow instead of sell to spend. He's been known to pay real taxes in the past, they just look small relative to his imputed wealth growth because rich people don't spend a lot relative to their wealth growth because they, quite by definition, have a lot of wealth.
Any asset a bank is willing to take is collateral has the same issue, it’s just very pronounced in this instance.
If you take your idea at face value, anyone who borrows against their property to renovate/upgrade would be up for tax.
Also, you'd totally gut retail home equity lending as collateral damage, with disastrous social policy consequences.
It's similar to a reverse mortgage. Say Fred and Wilma own a house worth $4MM with no mortgage on it. With a reverse mortgage a bank will lend them $2MM. Fred and Wilma make no payments and continue to live in their house, spending the $2MM while the interest on that loan just increases the amount they owe the bank. After both Fred and Wilma have passed away the house is sold and the proceeds are used to pay back the outstanding loan. If there's still money left over, it goes to their heirs. If the sale comes up short, the bank loses money, which is why these reverse mortgages are typically less than 50% of the value of the house and they typically have higher interest rates than conventional mortgages. From Fred and Wilma's point of view, they can use the value of their house now, while continuing to live in it. They essentially spend their children's inheritance.
There's some interesting exceptions, like how Musk has managed to sell Tesla shares totalling more or less as much as the business itself has made in total lifetime revenue; but even then, Musk's theoretical net worth is very different from how much he could get if he was forced to sell all his shares suddenly.
Owner-CEOs like Musk and Zuckerberg get all the effects of such randomness, but the only examples I can think of such people getting into billion-dollar legal troubles tend to be examples which go on to sink their companies completely, so I'm not sure what impact a fine of "merely" 10% of cash reserves would do to investor confidence as expressed in share price. And this is not the only legal case Meta's facing right now.
MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos' ex wife) show it can be turned into real money. As of December 2025 She had given away $7.1 billion in 2025 charitable donations, and $26.3 billion since 2019.
In reality there is the ability to execute on the shares to turn them into real money.
Jeff Bezos holds less than 10% of Amazon stock himself. Which is a huge amount of money, and a not insignificant amount of which can be turned into "real" money and even with some decline is still a phenomenal amount.
In that same time period the stock valuation has more than doubled.
You have a house? You can sell it next month for a certain price, sell it tomorrow for a bit less.
You own every house in your town? You can still sell a few for “full price” but liquidation of all of them is going to be a shock to the market.
I sincerely doubt that Meta's share price would crash as a result of Zuckerberg getting an expensive judgement.
If he did the right thing, then we should all support his choice to use it under fair use.
Freedom means that the state shouldn't punish a public benefactor.
It makes me furious to see programmers fighting against an open source hero.
If it was closed source for Meta profit, I understand.
But they gave it away free, so it infuriates me that people support damages for a public benefactor.
Churches and schools get free money from the government. We need a rule that open AI (not the company, I mean the actuality), can torrent whatever they want because it's for the public good.
Otherwise the rich companies win and can pay their sources and the small guys are screwed.
If Meta has to pay for their training data, they will need to profit from it and won't be able to offer it free.
Nobody in their right mind would ever support the publishers here.
Mine is a daily bash cronjob that fetches a text-based database and uses grep to build an nftables-apply script with all the IPs for the blocked ASNs. I keep meaning to share it, but it's embarrassingly messy I haven't had time to clean it up...
Anyhoo, now you mention it this is the tack I am going to take in my own network, thanks!
No shit.
Of course, the excuse doesn't even apply: the offense of the tech bosses is not training these models (they had that declared legal the second it became clear only the big companies would be training big models), the offense of all these tech companies is running a piracy site. Taking copyrighted works, storing them, reproducing them and then publishing the results to third parties, in many cases for payment, and organizing this practice knowingly, willingly as a company. Paying others to help them do it. This is the worst copyright offense one can possibly commit. It is what one public prosecutor referred to in the Nappster case as "organizing a criminal cartel to violate criminal law on a huge scale".
Tech bosses weren't sued for downloading, in other words, they were sued for uploading. For asking payment for publishing copyrighted works, without any money going to the authors.
When Kim Dotcom did that, in the words of the US Attorney general, this is "charges of criminal copyright infringement, racketeering, and money laundering" (you see, getting paid for criminal activity is money laundering, a charge that was also made against teenagers selling warez cds)
ChatGPT tells me, unaware and unwilling to discuss the INCREDIBLE unfairness, that in the US, first-time offenders can face up to 5 years in prison, while repeat offenders can face up to 10 years PER OFFENCE. ChatGPT is unwilling to discuss it.
The courts are also unwilling to discuss this, but no worries! New technicality: only a public prosecutor gets to ask ...
Dario Amodei wilfully committed large scale copyright infringement, as did all the tech bosses from Musk to Bezos ... and "strangely" nobody in any court even mentioned how much 10 years times 500,000 is, despite systematically threatening that punsihment repeatedly in the cases against teenagers.
Note that the law is extremely clear that company management IS NOT shielded if ordering criminal actions (violating criminal law, as opposed to violating a contract). In that case, company management carries full criminal culpability, INCREASED from if they did it themselves. Of course, this is only ever applied for refusing to pay tax or court fees.
If the law were applied alike and fairly to individuals and tech bosses, Amodei would have to be VERY lucky the human race still exists by the time his corpse leaves prison.
What do you think the outcome of tightening fair use is going to be? Do you think its going to be most effectual against these big evil AI companies we are meant to fear? Or is it going to end up putting more individual creators on the end of Disneys pitchforks?
Like if you support creating a gun to kill a monster, that's great. But you need to understand that weapons rarely only target the person you want them to. And its unlikely that any bill that specifically targets a certain size or profit margin is going to make it all the way into law without being generalised to the approval of large IP holders.
Its much much (much) better to look at this as an opportunity to erode IP laws for everyone, than to make them worse and hope that your particular enemies are the only ones that are affected.
>That doesn’t mean I’m behind industrialized narcotic production on such a huge scale that it that it starts to distort the economy, and companies looking for new ways to add methamphetamine to every goddamn product.
Thats such a non sequitur. This isnt a weed legalisation argument, its "Do we make IP worse for everyone, because you dont like some people benefiting from fair use".
Meta used allegedly stolen copyrighted materials to train a model they shared for free with the whole world. Is this a recreational use?
It is the same playbook everytime. We dont have to be naive and pretend meta is doing something for other peoples benefit.
Are you unable to access this page?
https://www.llama.com/llama-downloads/
Or this one?
https://lmstudio.ai/models/meta/llama-3.3-70b
>It is use to build a monopoly
How?
>We dont have to be naive and pretend meta is doing something for other peoples benefit.
Meta benefits from the current war of open model competition, but we also benefit from it. In particular, participating in all this makes it hard for them to pull the ladder up when the market changes. They will have to justify why whatever new hotness is better than these existing models already on our hard drives.
Don't they? They release the llama model weights, they do things like this:
https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Open_Rack/SpecsAndDesigns
They also make significant contributions to Linux and are the originators of popular open source projects like zstd and React.
They make their money from selling ads, not selling licenses.
But I hear you. One of my biggest tells that someone can't be reasoned with is when they resort to whataboutism without any consideration for how 2 situations can actually be different even if there is some commonality. It's a powerful bad faith argument technique. When that style of argument comes up I nod my head and walk away. Some people are just doomed.
'"They then copied those stolen fruits"
How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?
Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
And you would be hard pressed to prove that LLM's haven't advanced the arts and sciences, so at bare minimum transformative, ie fair use.'
If you write a book and I take it and embed its knowledge into my product that is so pervasive that no one needs to buy your book any more (and I don't even credit you so no one knows where that knowledge came from), to you really still have what was stolen? And I didn't even buy a copy of your book to copy it.
The trouble with this analogy is that it proves too much.
Suppose you write a book, and so does someone else, but they have better marketing than you and then people in the market for that genre buy theirs instead of yours. Let's even stipulate that the existence of their book actually lowers your sales, because people who want that kind of book already bought theirs by the time they find out about yours and then some people don't have time to read or can't afford to buy both.
Notice that we haven't yet said a word about the contents of either book. They could be completely independent and they've never even heard of you or your book -- they "didn't even buy a copy of your book to copy it". All we know is that they're the same genre and the existence of theirs is costing you sales. By that logic all competition would thereby be "stealing", and that can't be right.
Which implies that you don't have a property right to the customers.
People on this thread need to focus on what "derivative" and "fair use" mean and understand both are measured on a somewhat fuzzy spectrum, subject to interpretation.
In a perfectly fair world AIs/MLs could vacuum up all human knowledge, fair and square. (In an ideal world, they would do that adhering to polite opt-in/opt-out agreements with copyright holders. We can dream). Input isn't theft.
On output, two magic genies would stand at the gate, the Derivative Genie and Fair Use Genie and review anything spat out by the AI/ML. If it crossed agreed upon thresholds the Genies would bar the gates and issue a stern warning to prompt again (or maybe the AL/ML would auto-adjust the prompt and try again).
So, if your prompt asked for a 300-word poem about thrash metal mosh pit dancing and it spat out a poem where 85% of it match one of the handful of available mosh pit poems in its database, the Derivative Demon would block the output and raise an alarm.
On the other hand, if you asked for a line by line analysis of a famous mosh pit dancing poem (by name) or maybe asked for a satirical spoof of said poem, the Fair Use Demon would overrule the Derivative Demon and give the output a pass.
That's as fair as this could get, especially if you add one more thing: An Appeals Court (maybe corporate, maybe 3rd party, maybe state run) with a Settlement Pool. If a copyright holder could prove the Genies let pass something they shouldn't, the AL/ML would fix that. If real damage is done, the creator would get a settlement from the pool.
The point is that the Input Genie is out of the bottle. Creators just look foolish trying to squeeze it back in. Better, they should focus on making the output Genies and the Appeals process as effective and fair as possible for everyone.
I'm not sure how this plays out legally, but it certainly seems unethical
Would it be fair for Greece to do retroactive term extensions all the way back to Plato and then sue anyone who copies the idea of having a university or uses the Platonic solids or distributes religious texts that incorporate the dualistic theory of the soul?
Letting companies train LLMs on the "classics" is very different to training on contemporary media where the creator still depends on it.
The attempt to distinguish them is through copying, but that's the part that isn't depriving anyone of anything.
Facts are not copyrightable. Only your particular way of expressing those facts is copyrightable.
> Theft [...] is the act of taking another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing
This isn't a court of law. We don't have to talk like lawyers. If you replaced "theft" with "copyright infringement" in the comment you had such a problem with, what meaningfully changes besides we all have about five additional brain cells?
The obvious difference that copyright is subject to fair use and various other limitations that personal property isn't.
maybe you should look up the definition of property, which is a set of legally recognized rights over a thing, typically including:
* possession (what you're focusing on)
* use
* exclusion
* transfer
The last 3 seem like they have been breached, in legally that's theft.
This can even extend to stealing physical property.
Depending on local laws, stealing a car may not actually be theft if the defendent can prove they intended to return it before the owner got home from work, though it would certainly be considered theft in the colloquial sense of the term, and they would still be guilty of a lesser offense like civil and/or criminal conversion.
I doubt there's even one place where the law works like that.
In a lot of places, that's how it works. A key element of theft is the intent to permanently deprive someone of property.
This is why joyriding isn't classified as auto theft and is instead a lesser offense. It's because joyriding is an intent to temporarily deprive, while GTA is an intent to permanently deprive.
In some jxns (the UK is one), there is a tort called trespass to goods, and an example of this would be "stealing" someone's property to deliver to another location for them to use there. The tort of conversion is similar: interference with someone's property right to treat it as your own (silent as to length of time).
Getting punched in the face also violates rights, yet isn't murder. Murder is specifically about dying.
People seem to think what ai is today is theft. If enough people agree, it will be theft. Big companies dont like this and push the other way. An objectiveness doesnt exist here. It is too wiggly
With theft, the entire damage is the deprivation. It could be an heirloom or some other object that may have been entrusted to you, something that can never be replaced, memorabilia of loved ones. Something that you may have needed in your posession to survive (e.g. a car to go to your job).
With a given copyright violation, the damage is that maybe[1] you made less profit than you could have. The potential for profit is not property. Profit isn't guaranteed.
[1] The loss is not certain, because there's no guarantee that the ones consuming the copyrighted content could have even afforded it.
Also social media profile pics. Great way to get faces for deep fake ads. Most people are just 1 phone call away from being voice cloned. Our likeness isn't all that important either if you think about it.
Maybe meta will clone your writing style and sign into your meta account and message your friends telling them about this awesome new product. Meta owns the account and you uploaded data to it.
Don't be naïve. A corporation would tear the flesh from your body if it meant a better quarterly earnings report.
I wouldn't even go that far. Its an entirely new product. Its like the guy who sold you the keyboard demanding royalties for the software you built.
That the person who wrote the book couldn't predict a new use case for the book in training LLMs, is irrelevant. The book isn't in the LLM. Its not being sold with the LLM. Its one of billions of tools used to create the LLM.
People try and sell this as the AI companies extracting value from the poor little IP holders like Disney. Its maddening. That content is your cultural heritage. It already belongs to you, just some idiot has been granted a lifetime of exclusive exploitation. An LLM is trained on data you already own. Disney et al wants to exploit the new technology to extract even more money out of stuff created often decades ago.
At absolute worst its reverse engineering, which was supposed to be fair use protected in the US but apparently that's been somewhat eroded.
An LLM is essentially a lossy compression of the training data. The book absolutely is in there, it’s just mangled to the point of unrecognizability.
When large quantities of source material are replicable by prompting its a bug not a feature.
>The LLM Wouldnt be here without the copyrighted works
Google wouldn't be here if it hadn't scraped every copyrighted website and used them to form a searchable graph of the internet but we only hear complaints about them when they reproduce entire news articles.
What makes you think you are entitled to tell people what they can and cant do with data they purchased (or otherwise acquired) from you. Extremely honest question. I just cant put myself in your shoes.
Like if I had written anything useful I would be overwhelmingly flattered that my content be considered so worthy for inclusion.
Your profile suggests that you are a philosopher. Did you get into philosophy hoping to exploit the publishing industry to the extent that you can squeeze every cent out of your thoughts, and deny their potential uses downstream?
Its actually crazy how bad things are, I am usually keen on capitalism and exclusivity, but the whole thing with LLMs, I see people pushing hard to tighten the grip of intellectual property. I see people making 50 cents a month on Kindle Unlimited suddenly shocked that someones LLM generated output might be ever so slightly influenced by weights ever so slightly influenced by their work, seemingly thinking they might get some big payday out of it.
Give me a tiny little wedge of understanding of your thought process. Your book is right now, doing a greater social good on your behalf than me running around and removing all the trash from my neighborhood, and the benefits of that social good are going to accrue long after you and I are gone. Your work is now going to live on, in a very tiny way, in these systems forever. I am honestly envious.
If anything, I would be trying to get bad writing removed from LLM training data. Things that I dont want to influence others. But as a potentially honest promoter of your work, you want it removed?
Whats the number? If not 1:1 exactly what you charge for the book, what do you think the proper compensation for slightly influencing training weights you should receive?
Hundreds of years of copyright law. I bought a copy of Windows, but I’m not allowed to modify that data with a cracker and sell a bootleg DVD of it.
I should edit to clarify that I’m not a big fan of Lars Ulrich or Disney, but I don’t think we’re going to get a win here for the recreational IP pirates. What’s more likely is that we’ll end up with some Frankenstein law that favors both Mikey Mouse and OpenAI, and you and I will neither get free movies nor the ability to earn a living off of our creative labor.
But in abstract you should absolutely be able to modify and sell windows.
And before you give me an analogy about how someone could listen to Pink Floyd and then produce works inspired by their influence yada yada: Someone is a human being with human rights, and if we're going to start pretending that training an LLM is in any way analogous to human consumption and creativity, and not an industrial process that encodes input data into a digital artifact, then let's start by saying LLMs have human rights and cannot be owned by a company that charges for access to them.
Yep and so far it looks like the issue with the meta case is they didnt pay for the book. Not that they used it in training data.
>in the most charitable interpretation, using them to create derivative works.
Yeah in the same way I use a hammer to create a derivative table.
>Someone is a human being with human rights, and if we're going to start pretending that training an LLM is in any way analogous to human consumption and creativity.
I dont care about that. Its simply a tool being built using existing tools. Like using a jigsaw to make a step ladder.
Let's not sane-wash what they did here, they didn't just 'forgot to pay for the books', they deliberately and illegally downloaded and used material that wasn't theirs to use.
If you or I did that, we would be jailed or sued into destitution. In a fair world we either should change copyright laws (allowing for anyone to freely pirate all media), or Zuckerberg needs to go to jail.
Yes. Forgot is your word.
But lets face it, there wouldn't be a case to answer for if they had paid retail for each book, torn them up and scanned them and trained on that data.
>Zuckerberg needs to go to jail.
I am comfortable with that but would prefer updating copyright.
It’s called a copyright notice. Same as a license. If you’re running a commercial business you can’t legally just take that piece of work and reuse it. Pick any book off your shelf and pretty well every one of them will have words to the effect of:
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed "Attention: Permissions Coordinator," at the address below.
Same as every piece of commercial software has a license which has to be abided by. Same as use of Meta’s service has terms and conditions which HAVE to be agreed to.
So yeah they’re free to break that license but they’re also free to be sued by IP holders for breaking it at scale.
The items they call out around training the models (and attempting to claim that each subsequent model generation should count as an additional instance of infringement) seem far less grounded in the current court interpretations of AI training.
I am not a fan of US copyright law, but if I torrented millions of books, I would be facing a felony charge in criminal court and a (with statutory damages as high as $150,000 per title in cases of willful infringement) multi-billion dollar lawsuit in civil court.
In my opinion, this has nothing to do with whether or not AI training is transformative and this fair use, and everything to do with whether or not the laws apply to everyone equally. If Facebook isn't forced to pay billions and elect a sacrificial executive to serve prison time, then I will remain angry.
That is not what this case is about. It is more about the illegal violation and piracy of copyrighted content done by Meta for commercial use and Zuck knew they were doing it.
Why did Anthropic settle [0] with a multi-billion dollar payout to authors after commercializing their LLMs that was trained off of copyrighted content that was illegally obtained and kept without the authors permission?
There's a reason why they (Anthropic) did not want it to go to trial. (Anthropic knew they would lose and it would completely bankrupt them in the hundreds of billions.)
AI boosters will do anything to justify the mass piracy and illegal obtainment of copyrighted material for commercial use (not research) which that is not fair use in the US. There is no debate on this. [0]
[0] https://images.assettype.com/theleaflet/2025-09-27/mnuaifvw/...
The original work is not replicated identically, why would we replicate a work when it can be more easily seen in original or replaced with an alternative options online. We use AI to produce new outputs to new situations. We already have had drives and networking for plain copying.
Or anything to defend on Meta. If they go out of business, humanity profits.
Elsevier at least works within the (admittedly broken) system, Meta does not.
Not even going to all GPL stuff, that in a better world should have screwed all the slop companies
I've wondered what the legalese justification for letting liability evaporate as it does so often with corps. So far the reasons I'm left with are 'shrugs' and 'the relevant provision (seemingly? apparently?) simply don't apply', neither of which are any good.
I was going to make a joke about how we should attach magnets to Aaron Swartz' corpse, since that'd make for a pretty potent energy source, given how fast he must be spinning. But honestly, I think he would have seen this sort of thing coming, given how his case was handled and how things really haven't gotten any better.
In the years since the basis of the case has been forgotten and replaced with an assumption about piracy, but it was a case about unlawful access.
The law doesn't see it that way, but it is not the ground truth.
This does not comfort me.
All the Aaron Schwartzes of the future could freely share scientific papers with the world.
RICO specifically cites "criminal infringement of a copyright" as laid out in 18 U.S. Code § 2319. If the CEO tells his employees to download hundreds of thousands of works illegally in order to carry out his money-making scheme, how is that not organized crime even if (dubiously) LLM training on the material is fair use?
-----
RICO: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-96
Definitions: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961
> As used in this chapter — (1) “racketeering activity” means (A)[...]; (B) any act which is indictable under any of the following provisions of title 18, United States Code: [...], section 2319 (relating to criminal infringement of a copyright),[...]
18 U.S. Code § 2319 - Criminal infringement of a copyright: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2319
-----
edit:
> 18 U.S. Code § 1962 - Prohibited activities
> (c) It shall be unlawful for any person employed by or associated with any enterprise engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce, to conduct or participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise’s affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity[...].
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1962
From the lawsuit:
“Meta — at Zuckerberg’s direction — copied millions of books, journal articles, and other written works without authorization, including those owned or controlled by Plaintiffs and the Class, and then made additional copies of those works to train Llama,” the suit says. “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement. Meta also stripped [copyright management information] from the copyrighted works it stole. It did this to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.”
WTF
The rate at which they were spidering and scraping was so far beyond what any other supposedly legit spider was doing, it seemed like the logical explanation.