Authors seek Meta's torrent client logs and seeding data in AI piracy probe

Buying a book to read and incorporating their text in a product are two different things. Even if they bought the book, imo it would be illegal.

I think they'd ask why they'd want those millions of books. The publishers don't have to, and would be unlikely to, sell if they though something like copyright violation was the goal.

It’s a fun hypothetical and not an obvious answer, to me at least.

But it’s not at all a similar dilemma to “should we allow the IP empire-building of the 1900’s to claim ownership over the concept of learning from copyrighted material”.

> would it be worth just ignoring everyone's wish regarding privacy one time to suck up this data and have AGI moving forward?

Sure, if we all get a stake of ownership in it.

If some private company is going to be the main beneficiary, no, and hell no.

Wouldn't it be a bad thing, even if it didn't require any privacy invasion?

If it matched human intellectual productivity capacity, that ensures that human intelligence will no longer get you more money than it takes to run some GPUs, so it would presumably become optional.

Could this agi cure cancer, and would it be in the hands of the public? Then sure, otherwise nah.

If you don't, your geopolitical adversary might be the first to build AGI.

So in this scenario I could see it become necessary from a military perspective.

no

Ah geeze, I come to this site to see the horrors of the sociopaths at the root of the terrible technologies that are destroying the planet I live on.

The fact that this is an active question is depressing.

The suspicion that, if it were possible, some tech bro would absolutely do it (and smugly justify it to themselves using Rokkos Basalisk or something) makes me actually angry.

I get that you're just asking a hypothetical. If I asked "Hypothetical: what if we just killed all the technologists" you'd rightly see me as a horrible person.

Damn. This site and its people. What an experience.

Fuck no

Alteratively if they trained the model on synthetic data, filtered to avoid duplication, then no copyrighted material would be seen by the model. For example turn an article into QA pairs, or summarize across multiple sources of text.

Since this is Wikipedia, it could even satisfy the attribution requirements (though most CC-licensed corpora require attributing the individual authors).

Google also operates a book store, like Amazon. Both could process a one-off to pay their authors, and then draw from their own backend.

Wouldn't that still be piracy? They own the rights of distribution, but do they (or Amazon) have the rights to use said books for LLM training? And what rights would those even be?

Leveraging their position in one market to get a leg up on another market? No idea if it would stick, but that would be one fun antitrust lawsuit right there.

The number 150,000,000 is laughably small.

Anyway the problem is not money it's technical feasibility and timelines.

You clearly don't think LLMs have any value though, so W/E

copyright piracy isn't theft, try proving damages for a better arguement

Meta can show this with testimony. (Employee: “I opened the settings and disabled sharing.”)

This is a difficult theory for the plaintiffs to prevail on, since they would have no evidence of their own to contradict Meta’s testimony to keep the issue in play. Which is why they’re asking for client logs - and good luck with that.

I am not commenting on any legal mechanics. Just technical details.

Right, that's what I'm talking about. I.e. https://github.com/pmoor/bitthief and similar.

I was (partly) responsible for obtaining recordings for a Very Large Online Streaming Service(tm). Sometimes the studios would send us trucks filled with CDs. Sometimes they didn't have any easily accessible copies of the albums and would tell us to just "get it however..." which often involved SoulSeek, Limewire, etc.

We were not smart about it. We just found the stuff and hit download. To the point where there were days the corp Internet was saturated from too many P2P clients running.

The issue with bittorrent isn't so much that you are acquiring material but that you are also distributing it. There are cases where downloading copyrighted material is legal. But distributing it without consent never is, and is generally punished much worse.

The use might (might!) be transformative, but the work is copyrighted. How Meta copied it is an issue. Is the way they acquired it illegal?

After all, Google Books did not acquire their books through torrents. They got physical books.

Thats the argument they are using before they were likely seeding.

If anything, and the seeding can be proven, there will be a lot of entities seeking restitution.

Its a technicality but its better than breaking fair use to appease authors.

You know, I actually don't think so. Gabe Newell famously said piracy is a distribution problem, so a court would likely have to acknowledge inadequate distribution methods hampering AI development. This gives great precedence for consumer piracy, especially for old media that isn't sold anymore. It may not be a criminal offence if best efforts aren't being made by the original copyright holders to distribute.

wtf

This is why the "AI learns from materials just like a human does so it's not copyright infringement" argument always bothered me. A person won't recite full pages of word-for-word copies [1] from their head when you ask them something.

When I first tried Copilot, I asked it to write a simple algorithm like FizzBuzz and it ripped off a random repo verbatim, complete with Korean comments and typos. Image models will also happily generate near-identical [2] copies (usually with some added noise) of copyrighted images with the right prompt.

[1] https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2020/12/20/lmmem/

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/06/uh_oh_attackers_can_e...

Copyright infringement and plagerism aren't the same thing.

A human reproducing a patagraph word for word in an educational context would probably not be considered copyright infringement (although lack of attribution might be problematic). In the US anyways. The US is sonewhat unique as having very broad fair use when it comes to material used in an educational context, much broader than most other countries.

If that's contractually-enforceable in their terms-of-service... then I have my own terms-of-service proposal that I've been kicking around here for several weeks, a kind of GPL-inspired poison-pill:

> If the Visitor uses copyrighted material from this site (Hereafter: Site-Content) to train a Generative AI System, in consideration the Visitor grants the Site Owner an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use and re-license any output or derivative works created from that trained Generative AI System. (Hereafter: Generated Content.)

> If the Visitor re-trains their Generative AI System to remove use of the Site-Content, the Visitor is responsible for notifying the Site Owner of which Generated Content is no longer subject to the above consideration. The Visitor shall indemnify the Site-Owner for any usage or re-licensing of Generated Content that occurs prior to the Site-Owner receiving adequate notice.

_________

IANAL, but in short: "If you exploit my work to generate stuff, then I get to use or give-away what you made too. If you later stop exploiting my work and forget to tell me, then that's your problem."

Yes, we haven't managed to eradicate a two-tiered justice system where the wealthy and powerful get to break the rules... But still, it would be cool to develop some IP-lawyer-vetted approach like this for anyone to use, some boilerplate ToS and agree-button implementation guidelines.

It's incredibly hypocritical too. They have become rich by training on valuable data produced by others. Yet others are not allowed to train on valuable data produced by them.