Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding
429 comments
·February 21, 2025contravariant
miki123211
"distribution is the act protected by copyright" was the rule all along in many (non-US) jurisdictions, not an American so not sure about how the US does things.
This is why you often see people getting fines for torrenting (Germany is extremely notorious for this for example), but fines for using Usenet, IPTV, streaming or book download services are a lot more rare (which doesn't mean they're nonexistent)!
Operating / selling / promoting those services is a different matter, and most sensationalist articles about "people fined for IPTV piracy" are actually about people involved with that businesss, not the users.
I even remember reading about some (European) torrenting case that was successfully defended on the grounds of something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads, but I can't find the source right now.
dspillett
> something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads
You generally can't set a client to 0B/s (as zero usually means “no limit”) but I'm not sure a good¹ lawyer on the other side would let you get away with claiming glacial distribution is not still distribution. At 1Kbyte/sec (I don't know a client off the top of my head that has control down to the single byte) a 50MByte file (not unusual for a book with illustrations/photos) can be transferred in less than 15 hours, a couple of Mbyte (a plain text book, compressed or just short) in less than one hour.
There are clients that can be set to not seed at all, or you could patch a common client that way. Some that don't even offer the capability at all (some command-line wget-style tools), that would be a legally safest option IMO².
----
[1] good as in good at their job, no moral judgement implied!
[2] caveat: not a lawyer, never played one on TV, nor even in local am-dram.
plorg
It isn't worth my time or risk to test it myself, but if you disable seeding will Warner Media still send a notice to your ISP? If you set your client to 0B/s I assume it's still broadcasting hashes. I suppose if you disable that function entirely in your client there would be nothing to see.
I guess some people may be worried about actual fines, but I would assume the biggest risk to most people is getting blocked by your ISP, which in many cases requires less than the legal standard for proof of copyright infringement.
zeroq
It's an interesting case.
Most commonly used clients won't let you turn off seeding, but you can indeed limit the upstream to a really low value. You can also, at the same time, seed a ton of different things, preferably quite large, to saturate your upload and make it statistically improbable to fully send a copy of any single file.
Now, based on my feeling and cases I've seen in my country I'd say that the judge would make a claim that the sheer fact of making these files available is enough.
Moreover, there were rulings stating that even if you don't have the whole torrent on your disk, but only few fragments you are already in violation.
For me, it make sense, as when a company gets caught red handed they are judged based on the inventory of stolen programs they have, not an actual usage of them.
Lastly, here in an european country, consuming pirated media (books, movies, music, etc.) is not a crime. However there are plenty of caveats:
- you can't share it, so torrenting, as mentioned, might be illegal; getting a copy of a movie on a hard drive from a friend only puts him in jepardy
- it has to be personal use, so watching it alone or with your wife is ok, but playing stolen music in a club is not; commercial use is strictly forbiden ("commercial" as in "commercial licence", so usage in context of a company, so facebook case here is strictly in violation)
- it has to be a media that's already been published somewhere (cinema, television, streaming service); pirating leaks and prereleases is strictly forbiden
- pirating software is whole different animal, since now it's not a copyright, but a breach of licence agreement
You can think about it as owning a tiny portion of "soft drugs" (like marijuana), which is legal in some countries. Selling is not.
krzyk
> You generally can't set a client to 0B/s
It depends on client, it is possible in e.g. transmission
null
foobarian
transmission-cli -u 0 <url>
null
TheSpiceIsLife
> I'm not sure a good¹ lawyer on the other side would let you get away with claiming
Fortunately that’s not how courts work.
I’m not familiar with the case, but it’s possible setting a 1 byte per second limit showed intent to not distribute.
nwh5jg56df
Booooooo don't leech without seeding. Share a little at minimal risk
codetrotter
> This is why you often see people getting fines for torrenting (Germany is extremely notorious for this for example), but fines for using Usenet, IPTV, streaming or book download services are a lot more rare (which doesn't mean they're nonexistent)!
It’s a lot easier to find out who is torrenting than to find out who is using Usenet for example though.
With torrents you can see the IP addresses of peers. And then I suppose they ask a court to tell the ISP to say which customer had that IP addresses at that time.
With Usenet you’d have to get a court to get each Usenet provider to give you a list of all customers that downloaded a file. That seems a little bit different to me.
And who knows, in the case of the torrents maybe they don’t always even need to get a court involved. With all of the data brokers out there, maybe there are lists you can buy of real people tied to different IP addresses and when you have a match you send a threatening letter telling them to pay up or they will take you to court?
RajT88
This process of checking seeding peers to reporting an IP to an ISP to them send a user a nastygram is pretty automated. Torrent a Nintendo game (not even that new of one) and you will get an ISP nastygram within minutes.
I've heard.
trilbyglens
Germany is wild. You will get a knock on your door within hours of firing up a torrent client
consp
Downloading used to be legal here. Now it is explicitly not anymore. Because why not if you can squeeze some extra money from end users who would have never bought your item for the insane prices asked.
j1elo
With "here", you mean Germany? Are you sure? Last time I looked into these things (granted, in 2022 or so), seemed to me that for example using Stremio with a torrent add-on would risk a fine in Germany, but using a Debrid service (that torrents in your name and you just do a direct download like e.g. is done in Youtube) would be free of risks or legal threats. I'm not in Germany though, so I didn't research it much further. Just out of curiosity.
tempfile
When and where? This does not sound true for any jurisdiction I know about.
BrandoElFollito
Are there cases in Germany who went through until the end?
In France despite a hefty budget, the org in charge (HADOPI) was so bad they merged it with another one and I think it os over now.
tempfile
> "distribution is the act protected by copyright" was the rule all along in many (non-US) jurisdictions, not an American so not sure about how the US does things.
I am pretty sure this is false. It is just that distribution carries heavier sentences and is easier to discover, not unlike with drug dealing.
It is not legal, anywhere, to (for example) borrow a DVD from someone, copy it, and give the original back. In some jurisdictions you have a right to backups, and a right to resale, but you emphatically do not have a right to privately copy.
buzer
> It is not legal, anywhere, to (for example) borrow a DVD from someone, copy it, and give the original back. In some jurisdictions you have a right to backups, and a right to resale, but you emphatically do not have a right to privately copy.
If the DVD doesn't have strong DRM (which is pretty rare, CSS counts as strong DRM) you are allowed to make a private copy in Finland. There is a levy on various storage mediums to compensate private copying. I believe there are similar laws in other countries based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
I'm not 100% sure if strictly downloading from illegal source makes downloader liable for damages, as far as I know in all court cases there was seeding involved (in Finland).
Of course the levy is somewhat questionable these days since pretty much everything has strong DRM (as bar is very low) and thus you are not allowed to make copies. The authors who protect their work with strong DRM still get part of the levies though.
registeredcorn
Sorry, I may be missing something. Can you please clarify:
>you often see people getting fines for torrenting
>fines for using [...] are a lot more rare
Are you saying something kind of like, "When you torrent, you are also distributing that copyrighted information, which is often prosecuted, but simply procuring that information (without redistribution) is not." Or is it something different?
For example: in America, it is completely legal to buy, sell, and own a radar detector. Radar detectors are used to "detect" when the police use radar to catch speeding motorists. In spite of it being legal to own a radar detector, it is illegal to actively use a radar detector for its intended purpose. There are various reasons I have heard for this, but the most common was that the components of the device itself is not illegal, and picking up those signals are not illegal (because they are targeted at the public) but the reason and intent to use one is to commit a crime, and the use of a device in the assistance of committing an offense (speeding) is illegal. It's this kind of weird grey area, where you can possess the thing, but can't use it for the reason you (likely) bought it for.
Is it kind of like that? Like, you can possess copyrighted material that you have not paid for (for whatever justification), but actively sharing that copyrighted material without authorization, is criminal? If so, does that mean that lots of Germans simply don't seed illegal torrents?
sightbroke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
"Attached to the core rights of free speech and free press are several peripheral rights that make these core rights more secure. The peripheral rights encompass not only freedom of association, including privacy in one's associations, but also, in the words of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), "the freedom of the entire university community", i.e., the right to distribute, the right to receive, and the right to read, as well as freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, and freedom to teach.[144]"
"The United States Constitution protects, according to the Supreme Court in Stanley v. Georgia (1969), the right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, and to be generally free from governmental intrusions into one's privacy and control of one's thoughts.[145]"
"As stated by the Court in Stanley: 'If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.'[146]"
[144] - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/381/479/
[145], [146] - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/557/
papercrane
The US Constitution grants congress the power to give authors and inventors time-limited exclusive rights to their works/discoveries (Art1.S8.C8). This moots the 1st amendment argument.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
saghm
I don't think that authors having exclusive rights to their works necessarily implies that someone else _receiving_ them is legally culpable though. My admittedly naive thinking is that someone distributing something illegally doesn't necessarily imply that the receiver is also committing crime. If Robin Hood steals a fancy 4K TV from the mansion downtown and gives it to his neighbor as a birthday gift, would the neighbor be guilty of a crime as well? Does the answer change if Robin Hood were instead the owner of the mansion next door (who could plausibly be the owner of the TV) and gives it to his less wealthy childhood friend?
I'm not saying that either of these situations are directly analogous to the distribution of copyrighted works (since among other things, I don't think there's any way to buy a TV without being able to freely give it to someone else), but that it's not immediately obvious to me that the illegality in distribution has to be symmetric, and that there might be a coherent legal argument that people having the right to _receive_ information isn't inconsistent with the only people with the right to transmit it refusing to allow it. The part of the Constitution (edit: Supreme Court opinion; not actually the Constitution itself) quoted above doesn't seem to say anything about the right to share anything, just to receive it.
withinboredom
Once you tell someone a secret, you need to be prepared to beat them up if they share it. — dad, 1996
This gives you the right “to beat them up” but not the right to learn a secret. You can take a patent and build that thing in your house. The government can’t stop you, neither the inventor. It’s when you try to sell it that they can come after you.
SAI_Peregrinus
I don't think it'd hold up, but one could argue that the first amendment was an amendment, and thus changed the constitution, and therefore removed that ability of congress.
Gormo
How can a provision in the base text of the constitution take precedence over an amendment?
sightbroke
I am not convinced that applies to receiving information.
nonfamous
I would expect it to be argued by defendants that since no man (or indeed woman) at Meta actually read the books that were torrented, the First Amendment does not apply here. The question is: does the First Amendment apply to an algorithm?
Gormo
> The question is: does the First Amendment apply to an algorithm?
No. The first amendment explicitly applies to Congress; by extension it applies to the policy-making authority of the federal government generally, and via the 14th amendment, it applies to the states.
It prohibits the abridgment of freedom of speech by government institutions, without distinction as to the identity of the speaker or the content of the speech.
_DeadFred_
So I can setup a cable streaming service with ripped vids as long a no one in my company watches it?
thrance
A bit off-topic, but I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship but are perfectly OK with advertising and other forms of propaganda (from social media editorializing, bought newspapers...), that arguably do much more to "control men's minds" than censorship ever would.
It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).
rapind
> I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship
Not sure you can make this blanket statement about “Americans” any more. It seems like an increasing number are fine with censorship when they aren’t the ones being censored.
LuciOfStars
American here. We're an incredibly large and incredibly diverse country. This generaliization doesn't really work.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
> It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).
This seems to describe ‘Murican Freedom pretty well to this particular American, for what it’s worth.
lordloki
It's very simple, Americans believe that the individual is responsible for themselves while most of the rest of the world wants to be "protected" by a restrictive government. One leads to innovation and one stifles it. We would rather be responsible for discovering the truth on our own, than trust a central authority to decide what is and isn't true(or propaganda). I find it funny how Europeans think their governments are protecting them from propaganda instead of drowning them in propaganda.
latexr
Author rights wouldn’t be an accurate term. Copy rights do not necessarily belong to the author, even when they are alive. Distribution rights or “distrights” would make more sense for your argument.
contravariant
Works fine in Dutch law really, you just have to allow for the option that a company can be an author. A work could also have multiple authors.
I prefer it to a name that's more accurate because it signals what the purpose of the law is, which I consider more important than its implementation.
Now that I think of it that also works quite well when naming things in software. Don't name things after their implementation, when you can help it.
null
scotty79
They are called "authorship rights" in Polish. While the right to distribute or make copies doesn't aleways belong to the author they always originate from author. And some are even non transferable or revocable, like the right to say "I, <my chosen name>, made this thing"
hnbad
In some jurisdictions (e.g. Germany) "copyright" belongs exclusively to the author/creator and is non-transferrable, the German word for "copyright" (Urheberrecht) also literally translates to "author's right"). So instead of transferring copyright to an entity (e.g. the employer) you only grant an "exclusive, transferrable and unrestricted" license to that entity, essentially prohibiting you from using it without their permission while technically still retaining that right. This is also why CC0 exists as a substitute for a public domain declaration because in these jurisdictions it is literally impossible to transfer your copyright to the public domain.
In Germany copyright law there is actually one provision for the real transfer of copyright: death. So as far as copyright is concerned, the transfer of copyright requires literally death of the author - which might get a chuckle out of people into media studies.
FabHK
In case you didn't chuckle:
grotorea
I think the equivalent is called author's right in civil law countries
ru552
Copy in copyright is not copy like copy in copying some data.
Copy in copyright is a term for the actual writing that gets published on ads, or magazines, or in a news paper. "I need to get the copy from marketing for this campaign." "The editor hasn't approved the copy for the article yet."
Typically, people not in/around the industry aren't familiar with the term, which leads to the confusion.
wrs
The word “copy” in the early 1700s when copyright was codified in law meant both a written text and a reproduction of a written text. The meaning you’re using, of text at an intermediate stage of a publishing process, is much later, 19th century. [0] So, the original meaning was a noun (the right to make “a copy” of a book) but meant the book itself, not the abstract text of the book. It would be interesting to research whether there were any rulings in that period about hand-copying a book, which was the only alternative to printing it.
Nowadays of course copyright covers much more than text, and includes such “copies” as the public performance of a theatrical work or reproduction of a sculpture, so the modern copyright clearly doesn’t have the meaning you’re using.
singlow
Any proof that the word copyright was intentionally referring to the noun instead of the verb? The British Statute of Anne in 1710, the first copyright statute, definitely referred to the act of copying a book, not some abstract concept of writing samples.
pfannkuchen
I always thought that ad copy also came from copy as in copy some data. Like it's the words that get copied when the media is replicated for distribution, as opposed to words that are for some internal communication purpose.
singlow
The use of the noun copy probably came from the act of copying, but both uses predated the word copyright, so that doesn't really help answer the question.
tempfile
This sounds completely false to me. Do you have a reference for it?
In particular, the original Statute of Anne (the first law establishing a copyright) is officially titled:
> An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Copies, during the Times therein mentioned
No doubt people used the word "copy" in the sense you mean, but "copy" in "copyright" is absolutely about copying as in copying some data.
1vuio0pswjnm7
"Well, I guess it would be nice if we could have some precedent for the claim that downloading copyright protected information is not in itself a breach of copyright."
According to Meta's motion the claim about "seeding" (cf. the claim about removing CMI) relates to Cal Penal Code 502(c), the "Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act".
Whether the data accessed is "copyright protected information" is irrelevant to section 502(c). 502(c)(2) applies to "any data".
https://www.calpers.ca.gov/sites/default/files/spf/docs/ca-p...
mrcode007
I’m waiting for this precedent to be set in favor of META and then enjoying all the movie torrents I can get my hands on. Without seeding of course.
wkat4242
With Musk in the White House (who has similar interests) that might actually happen.
mrcode007
A right adversarial move would be to support this and watch the GDP without the entertainment business as part of it. Check what happens next.
rasz
Especially considering it would disproportionally harm California, last bastion of Democrats?
knowitnone
I don't know Musk but why would he make this happen? He's for corporate interests is he not?
paulryanrogers
> ...then people might start wondering how keeping something from public domain for 90 years after the author's death could possibly be about protecting the rights of the author.
That's the best part, it's forever copyright! Because the creators are corporations that never die, or a huge number of humans, whomever dies last.
adgjlsfhk1
that's not true. the term for works for hire is 95 years from creation https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html
2mlWQbCK
Went the opposite direction here. Copying things for personal use was always legal in Sweden, with some exceptions (notably software, since 1986). That law was amended in 2005 (because of The Pirate Bay, presumably) to say that you are no longer allowed to make a copy from an illegally distributed copy. So if someone is illegally sharing something on the internet you are not allowed to download it.
6stringmerc
Sweden is always an edge case - education especially. It’s got a population of 10 million people. My metroplex area in DFW has half that with 75% more diversity. Sweden is cool but a terrible reference point for anything other than homogeneous social studies.
otterley
Both the headline and the theme of the story are incorrect and misleading. Meta isn’t claiming that everything they’re doing is lawful. They’re claiming that their activities don’t run afoul of a particular California state law, CDAFA, and section 1202(b)(1) of the DMCA.
It’s very common in litigation for the plaintiff to accuse the defendant of every violation they might be guilty of or liable for (“throwing the book at them”), and for defendants then to systematically try to strip them away.
As far as I know, Meta is not yet claiming their activities were completely lawful.
Here is the actual filing: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Kadre...
JKCalhoun
Feels like their defense for some state incursion is an admission of a larger crime. I still don't get it.
I'm not going to murder someone, steal their car, then put out a statement that I was unaware the car had expired tags and I shouldn't be prosecuted for it.
grayhatter
Is this your first experience/exposure to the us legal system?
Defending yourself from an accusation using a hypothetical admission doesn't actually admit to it. e.g. I didn't murder anyone, and I didn't steal that car, but if even if I did murder them, and steal their car, the car's expired tags wouldn't apply to me because [reason].
If you care about justice, you want to enable every truth to come out, and be decided on. If you prohibit someone from making an argument, because it might imply something that is separate, you limit the the possible outcomes to something strictly less fair. If someone did murder a person them and took their car, they should be prosecuted for that, but just because you did commit crime a, and crime b, doesn't mean you should be convicted of crime c. Even if crime c is the least significant. That's still not just.
BeetleB
Of course you will if you've been caught and charges are being filed and there's evidence you were in the car.
gosub100
A YouTube video I saw talked about the charges faced by the accused killer of the United Healthcare CEO.
Aside from murder , he faced:
- criminal possession of a weapon
- illegal possession of a silencer
- illegal possession of an automatic weapon (it wasn't full auto, but somehow due to the large capacity magazine, NY state considers it an automatic weapon)
So had he used a hammer or a knife, he might be able to get out again because murderers in NYS can be out in as little as 20 years. But all the firearms charges can effectively double his sentence.
tiahura
Won't named plaintiffs have the burden of proving meta actually seeded blocks containing their works? How could they ever do that?
otterley
The plaintiffs do have the burden of proof, but there are many ways to Rome. Any evidence they can find, whether it be packet captures, client and server logs, incriminating emails, or even admissions, will be proffered to the court and/or jury.
tiahura
many ways to Rome
Fair enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if none of those methods pan out.
1) Given the timeline, it seems unlikely that anyone was doing a packet capture.
2) Why would anyone at META have been paying attention to, or logging, which blocks were being seeded and which weren't? Who would have personal knowledge such that they could admit that transmission didn't seed the declaration of independence 6 million times?
papercrane
The plaintiffs will, eventually, need to prove that their claim is likely true ("preponderance of the evidence" standard.) Right now they're fighting about expanding discovery to try and uncover more evidence.
braiamp
> Meta responded to this complaint with a motion to dismiss. In a supporting reply filed on Tuesday, the company notes that the ‘torrenting’ allegations, relating to the removal of copyright information and the CDAFA violations, don’t hold up.
They are addressing both the second and third counts. The "Direct Copyright Infringement" isn't being addressed by these claims. This is even quoted on the filing you provided:
otterley
How does your response conflict with what I said?
isaacfrond
It's certainly nice to see someone accused of bittorrenting with the bankroll to come up with a decent legal defense team.
mrweasel
Isn't Meta going to be battling the full legal team of the entertainment industry with this argument? I think Meta did something stupid with this argument, because there is no way that Hollywood or the music industry is going be pleased with a precedence for legally downloading copyrighted material. They will now do everything in their power to get Meta found guilty.
d1sxeyes
Or, more likely, drop the case to avoid establishing a precedent.
Sounds like Meta are banking on the entertainment industry looking at it and deciding that the risk of losing this case is too high given Meta’s almost infinitely deep pockets to mount a legal defence.
JKCalhoun
Awesome. And just to be clear, Meta will walk away scot-free, but Billy Torrent is definitely still going to be fined $500,000 if he pulls down "Sleeping Beauty" from 1959.
escapecharacter
As much as I dislike the idea of individual copyright owners, like visual artists or writers, having their works scraped for AI without compensation…
If this does break the stranglehold that copyright has over creative acts, especially in the US, this feels like a net good.
IshKebab
Maybe. But it's hard to see how they could possibly win this case no matter how good their defence team is.
stogot
what is worse to them:
Precedent that LLMs get to keep & use copyrighted data
LLMs get to keep & use copyrighted data without legal precedent
I bet the industry will file amicus briefs to try to support the plaintiffs
tombert
The combined market cap of Disney and Comcast (who owns NBC and the like) is about 350 billion dollars [1][2]. Facebook alone is worth about 1.7 trillion [3]. I had trouble finding exact numbers on this, but it seems like the movie industry itself in the US is worth less than $100 billion.
Facebook could simply buy most of the companies involved if they give them too much shit. We've consolidated way too much power into a few large tech companies. I don't see it very likely that Hollywood could win this.
[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/walt-disney/marketcap/ [2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/comcast/marketcap/ [3] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/meta/market-cap/
achrono
Market cap is not money in the bank.
dfxm12
The current admin and the judges they installed are favorable towards Zuck and antagonistic towards most of the entertainment industry. If this case is seen through (which is not likely) & Meta wins (even if via appeal to higher courts), the legal decision will likely involve a very specific carve out that says what Meta did, and only what Meta did, was fine. It will have no affect on you or me.
rsync
“… the full legal team of the entertainment industry with this argument …”
Is that a problem for them ?
Doesn’t meta make more money than the entire industry of Hollywood including all home entertainment revenue ?
I am certain they do.
EDIT: 2024 full year revenue for meta is ~160B as compared to (roughly) 140B for the entirety of the film industry .
Munksgaard
Meta is a couple of times larger than the entire entertainment industry combined...
hobs
I think its reversed, and that's just the USA -
The U.S. Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry is the largest in the world at $649 billion (of the $2.8 trillion global market) and is projected to grow to $808 billion by 2028 at an average yearly rate of 4.3% (PwC 2024).
https://www.trade.gov/media-entertainment
Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook Inc., continues to dominate the digital landscape with impressive financial growth. In 2024, the company's annual revenue reached a staggering 164.5 billion U.S. dollars, marking a significant increase from 134.9 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year. This upward trajectory reflects Meta's ability to monetize its vast user base across multiple platforms, solidifying its position as a tech giant.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of...
bloomingkales
There's more money to make for entertainment artists in licensing their image and voice for content creation at scale (for the average joe). They need the LLM to exist, so there's no point in crying about how it was made.
doctorpangloss
Meta already runs three of the top eight copyright-violation distribution networks.
Google paid about $1b to Viacom in the YouTube piracy dispute. That's a lot of money, but do you recall anything seriously changing when that happened?
To me, the funniest product is Beat Saber. The best VR game by far. 99% of the value is tied up in violating musician's rights. Meta saved that game. Did people stop making music? No.
This book torrenting thing is complex. The main thing plaintiffs want is discovery of the training data. It's not complicated. There's no justification for the court to block that, it's a fishing expedition yes, but one that will turn up a lot of fish. Then all AI companies will have to acquiesce to it. That is the "win" for the industry.
idiotsecant
The unfortunate side effect is that a megacorp gets to vacuum up the sum of human knowledge for free, boil it down, and sell it back to us for a nice profit.
visarga
Ah you mean like Google Search?
moring
Google doesn't "vaccuum up" anything. Every site indexed by Google is still available without using Google at all. They are _copying_ information, not moving or removing it.
arnaudsm
Google Search brings you traffic and revenue. LLMs do not.
idiotsecant
I still own my content. Google links to it and sends me traffic. We both win. This sort of relationship is not present when my content is anonymously fed into a training model intended to be used to extract users before they are sent to me. And, yes, I am aware Google has pulled some cute shit with this definition, and when they do it then it's also bad.
LevGoldstein
How long before a handful of entities, having already ingested the available content into their proprietary systems, bankroll assaults on Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.
retropragma
Likely never, as those platforms are continuously updating at no cost to the siphons training their LLMs on them
mft_
Really?
a) Meta are (so far) releasing their models for free.
b) There's nothing stopping non-mega-corps from doing the same, especially if this precedent was established. (Training is of course expensive but this is a challenge, not an absolute block.)
Mindwipe
This isn't a decent defence, it's a losing desperate one.
yyyk
Meta's real (nigh invincible) defence is 'we have way more money than you and can keep this going forever'.
stogot
Money doesn’t keep it going forever, only about 2-4 years, even with appeals
That’s enough to bankrupt individuals but industries fighting industries can see it to the end, if they don’t settle
StevenWaterman
The noun phrase was "legal defence team" not "legal defence". A decent team can put forward a poor defence
guappa
They can just bribe the president.
userbinator
Not sure if he has the power to, and if everyone else will let him, but some EOs opening up the copyright system would be very welcome. There are already some things he's done around this:
https://www.omm.com/insights/alerts-publications/trump-admin...
PontifexMinimus
Maybe Trump will legalise internet-based copying.
After all, the main people hurt would be Hollywood, which is run by people supporting the Democrats. And it would be popular with many voters (not an issue for Trump but it is for Republicans).
jillesvangurp
Probably no need. Elon Musk already did that. And one of his companies just published a shiny new version of grok. I wonder where they get their training material. I'm sure it's all just tweets and no stashes of ebooks or other material got downloaded in some way or otherwise fell of the proverbial wagon.
Historically, copyright cases fell in favor of big media corporations based on the notion that they were very rich and powerful and could fight things endlessly, bribe/lobby politicians, and cause laws to be changed (e.g. the DMCA).
However, AI companies are wealthier still. Some have revenues exceeding the GDPs of most countries. Surely, rich enough to outright buy out some of these media companies. At which point it would stop being copyright infringement because they'd own the copyrights. I'm sure some other arrangement will be found that is less mutually disruptive than a lot of court cases. Both sides are making too much money for anything else to happen. Forget about small book publishers making much of a difference here.
JKCalhoun
At some point I expect we'll see the "shareholders made me do it" defense. You know, the fiduciary-duty-to-keep-making-billions-regardless defense.
scotty79
As the richest man on Earth, with multiple investigations into him by various government agencies shown us, nothing is desperate with billions of dollars "in the bank".
JKCalhoun
Yeah, kinda surprised they haven't just flat out denied it, hoped it would blow over.
r1chardnl
"If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research." - Wilson Mizner
janlaureys
"Plagiarize, let no one else's work evade your eyes. Remember why the good lord made your eyes, so don't shade your eyes but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize !" ~ Me
jfk13
Glad to see you didn't acknowledge your source! :-)
(It's Tom Lehrer, for any who don't recognize it.)
stevage
No, it's Jan Laureys
edm0nd
I sung this in the style of System Of A Down for some reason
okwhateverdude
And now I am infinitely disappointed that there don't seem to be any covers of Tom Lehrer tunes in the style of System of a Down.
graemep
Plagiarism is claiming credit for work that is not yours: it is entirely different from a breach of copyright. You can breach copyright without plagiarism, and you can plagiarise without breaching copyright.
tsumnia
"Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal" - Picasso
guappa
I think they should be fined more for torrenting and not seeding :D
lubujackson
Meta's rep continues to degrade - first they steal from copyright holders, but then they admit to leeching? Not even a 1:1 ratio?!
/kickban
easterncalculus
Seriously though, where is that magnet link? That's the only question on my mind when these articles come up.
bcraven
>This torrent list is the “ultimate unified list” of releases by Anna’s Archive, Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, and others. By seeding these torrents, you help preserve humanity’s knowledge and culture. These torrents represent the vast majority of human knowledge that can be mirrored in bulk.
>These torrents are not meant for downloading individual books. They are meant for long-term preservation. With these torrents you can set up a full mirror of Anna’s Archive, using our source code and metadata (which can be generated or downloaded as ElasticSearch and MariaDB databases). We also have full lists of torrents, as JSON.
janetmissed
annas archive has a whole section on torrenting
bilekas
This is actually genius from the lawyers of meta. In this way they are pushing the onus onto the question of "what is illegal in regards to torrenting copyright content".
They have the money and legal team to push it to any conclusion, but that conclusion would risk so many huge industries in the Us that too many parties would be effected. That would incentivize companies to drop this case against meta and the status quo can continue.
I'm under absolutely zero illusion this will set some precedent for one way or the other. It's too valuable to too many people involved.
otterley
It’s not genius; it’s SOP in legal procedure. See my other comment in this discussion.
erremerre
Can someone, self representing, and with the very intention to lose, keep going this battle? I don't know, there are 70tb of books, could someone who had published under their name carry on independently?
thrwaway1985882
Anybody can sue anybody, and this someone in your example would likely have standing, so why not?
A single person self representing against a company that is essentially one of the largest law firms on the planet, and can outspend them tens of thousands times over - what's to be gained?
dkjaudyeqooe
In the Netherlands, for individuals at least, it's legal to download copyrighted works, but not to upload or seed. I don't know if that applies to corporations.
thrance
Yes, it will just turn into another proof that if you're rich enough you can get away with anything in this country. The rule of law is three times gone and never coming back.
lucasyvas
This sets a hilarious precedent where downloading torrents becomes completely fine. You can just cite this case if they win - even though we are talking about books the MPAA is probably going to have an opinion here.
999900000999
You're typical 19 year old doesn't have a team of elite lawyers to argue for her when she torrents Game of Thrones.
Expect Meta to "win" as in the plaintiffs just give up and calculate it's not worth pursuing. It would stun me if they even settle.
Not to mention the LLMs themselves are creating unauthorized copies of copywriten content. But again, Meta has unlimited money. Different rules for them.
ThrowawayTestr
Not sure if it's still the case but this is it is in Canada. Downloading is legal but uploading is illegal.
lucasyvas
I think you’re right but I don’t think this is the case in the US? I’ve certainly read many stories over the years of the hammer coming down on downloading on its own.
gampleman
I'm a little confused about how is it supposed to work otherwise? Do I have an obligation as an internet user to ascertain if a website owner whose website I visit has the all the rights to all the media that the website contains (presumably also working out whatever jurisdictional issues come up)?
Like how do you know that (say) Netflix actually has the right to stream you every show that they do? And how do you know that some random ad supported website doesn't?
a2128
It's a difference of intent. Paying Netflix as an individual with the intention and expectation of watching content legally is very different to torrenting terabytes of pirated books on company laptops for training a commercial AI to replace those writers, and employees even expressing concern over its ethics on recorded communication
Ajedi32
So your position is that it is illegal for me to watch a movie on Netflix that they don't have the rights to? Just that I wouldn't be prosecuted because I didn't intend to break the law? Unless perhaps I knew they didn't have the rights to it but watched it anyway?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
That the judge will say you did not break the law because you reasonably believed you were following the law.
bilekas
It's an argument made in bad faith to basically send a message to the claim bringers that "hey, we have enough money and time to push this argument all the way, want to try us?".
Try this as a citizen.
arboles
If you download one book you're a criminal. If they download millions of books, that's just business.
greyw
Depends on your jurisdiction. In Switzerland, downloading games, books, music, movies etc. for personal use is always legal even if the copy is "pirated". Work just needs to be published in any form. Dont know any other country where it works like this.
mnau
Czechia. In theory, there is a fee for every media (e.g.HDD) that is paid to OSA (authors organization) and OSA pays to authors through some distribution scheme. Since user already paid fee, downloading is OK.
This is mostly leftover before computers were a thing (think cassettes and paper copiers).
In practice, it's a racket and OSA is a mafia that doesn't pay to anyone. Also, the fees are rather small considering the the purpose (I think it's capped at ~$5 per device), but since authors don't actually get money from it(OSA practices) , it doesn't really matter.
Anyway, downloading audiovisual media is fine, seeding is not.
2mlWQbCK
Sweden has something similar (except, as I mentioned elsewhere, the law was amended in 2005 to explicitly add an exception for downloads).
The Berne Convention has a special provision for this. Something about if the biggest rights organizations agree then a country can have laws that allow some free copying. So a tax on empty media (in Sweden also covering the computer hard drives and the flash memory built into phones) is used to pay off the big music and movie companies.
The weird thing is that only the biggest industries are paid off. No matter what you use your storage for, it is the big movie and music companies that receive the money. No other industries are paid off as far as I know, so most others just have to accept that their stuff is legally copied for free, without compensation (a few things like software are always illegal to copy, so those industries are not affected).
actionfromafar
Sweden apparently kept the fee and made it illegal. That's extra mafia.
delroth
This is a common misconception: there are some exceptions for certain types of media, but for example downloading copyrighted software (including games) without authorization is not legal in Switzerland. And some of those exceptions are more constrained than others.
aurea
Can you point to any official document which states it is illegal? Or any document which mentions any exceptions?
beAbU
In South Africa (as far as I understand) it's also perfectly legal to copy stuff for personal use.
It's been a while since I've been in one, but our public libraries had coin operated photocopiers, you can just walk in, grab literally any book from the shelf, and copy away.
apexalpha
>Dont know any other country where it works like this.
The Netherlands works the exact same.
st_goliath
> If they download millions of books ...
... as a private individual, you are toast.
I think the more appropriate quote to paraphrase would be one from Dennis Hopper's character in the film Speed (1994): "Oh, no. Poor people are pirates, Jack. We are tech innovators!"
voidUpdate
When did he say that? I watched it recently, and don't recall that line at all...
st_goliath
The scene where Jack climbs down the hole under the garbage can into the subway, having figured out the ransom money has moved. He tries to hold up Payne, who reveals he's holding Annie hostage.
jcmp
you are not. Thats their point
latexr
That is definitely not their point. Their point is, quite simply, “don’t punish us, bro”. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the law in general or what it means for other people, they just want to make sure they specifically can do what they please without repercussion.
jcmp
I think they try to argue around the diffrence of sharing activly (=illegal) and downloading (=valid) with this argument it does not matter if you download one book or 1 million books
selamtux
Aaron Swartz didn't seed or distribute articles too
weberer
Swartz killed himself before the trial actually took place. Its entirely possible that the court would have ruled in his favor.
ramblerman
Maybe, but getting arrested with the FBI involved is a pretty traumatic event for a citizen. Having your company's lawyers mail back and forth with the DoJ less so.
visarga
Probably not because there was a DA who needed to make her career on his back.
mandmandam
I don't think that what Aaron did was* wrong.
Meta's wholescale theft, however, is pretty hard to defend, and Meta knew it. That's why they went to some lengths to hide it.
Similarly, that OpenAI whistleblower, the one whose family was calling for a murder investigation, might be alive today if it wasn't pretty well known that stealing the work of thousands/millions of people to make a for-profit imitation machine isn't exactly cool or legal.
Edit: egregious typo.
InsideOutSanta
What Aaron did was not wrong.
He intended to make journal articles publicly available. They should be, as many are publicly funded, and academic publishers like Elsevier do not pay for these articles. Scientists provide them to journals. Universities, libraries, and we then have to buy back access.
w4rh4wk5
+1 public money, public research
mandmandam
Yeah agreed, I was typing pre-caffeination :/
drawkward
Trump solved the problem by just removing the funding! Checkmate, Libs! /s
stalluri
Models absorbed the pirated content. Now Meta is distributing those models. Is that considered distribution?
noboostforyou
For that argument I believe the question becomes "is the output of a model considered a derivative work of the training data?"
ninalanyon
What else could it be?
Ajedi32
An original composition based on a statistical analysis of the training data. Statistical data about a copyrighted work obviously isn't necessarily a derivative of that work. Otherwise Tolkien could sue me for telling you how many times The Lord of the Rings uses the word "the".
monocasa
The industry is banking on Author's Guild v. Google to be precedent in such a way that it's functionally transformative enough to be a completely new work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
I think they have about a coin flip of a chance that it passes muster in the courts.
aezart
I don't know what the legal answer will be, but I believe it should be considered distribution. A model is basically a highly lossy and extremely compressed copy of its training data, available as a content-addressable database. To anthropomorphize, the model is trying to perfectly replicate its training set, its brain just isn't big enough to do so.
null
WXLCKNO
It really should be.
bodiekane
Of course not.
I listened to other people's music and learned some of their songs before writing my own music, that doesn't mean my songs are distribution of theirs.
I read other people's books and short stores and news articles before writing my own, that doesn't mean my writing is distribution of theirs.
null
asadotzler
How about if I play your song at just the right speed with just the right EQ and I can get an exact reproduction of some of the songs you claim to have written? Because we can get large excerpts of exact copies of short and long form content as demonstrated clearly by the New York Times research on chatbots and their own content.
userbinator
If this was 15-20 years ago, arguably at the peak of P2P filesharing, I suspect most people would side with Meta.
grotorea
I think people would dunk on Meta for not seeding
bodiekane
It's today and everyone on HN still should side with them.
It's a travesty that we let the RIAA and MPAA sue defenseless kids and elderly for impossibly large sums, forced them to settle out of court to avoid expensive legal fees, and then use those acts of terrorism to establish the insane idea that filesharing was tantamount to "theft" or should be restricted.
I hope Meta wins. I hope we see a reversal of the attacks on fair use and the end of abusive fraudulent DMCA takedowns, and I'm happy to finally have a powerful ally in the resistance against oppression from the copyright cartel.
kstrauser
I still do on this one specific argument. Just because I loathe them doesn’t mean I disagree with everything they say.
apexalpha
In the Netherlands this is still the law.
Downloading is fine, uploading is not.
We used to have a sort of national library of every single media on Usenet back in the day.
aithrowawaycomm
11 years ago the EU made the Netherlands change their position: https://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-fi... AFAIK this is still the case - the Netherlands is more poorly-enforced than other EU countries, but it's still illegal to download pirated material.
jillyboel
And of course the "thuiskopieheffing", a tax on any storage device that ostensibly is used to fund those whose media gets copied, is still in effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#Netherlan...
As long as I'm paying a tax for it, it is my right to copy
apexalpha
Weird, TIL.
This has never been enforced though.
ninalanyon
These days for books at least Anna's Archive is the place to go.
actionfromafar
Maybe Meta has a "trading desk" in the Netherlands. :-)
micromacrofoot
Why do we have to play this purity game where we take a situation, remove context, and wag our finger at each other?
There's an ENORMOUS difference between college students pirating some movies or albums and the company worth $2 trillion doing it programmatically across millions of works and then reselling the laundered data.
This is a completely unserious discussion without considering context.
Ajedi32
The difference being... what? Just scale?
To be clear, Meta didn't "[resell] the laundered data": or at least they're claiming there's no proof of seeding.
asadotzler
Yes, scale matters, a lot. I can feed my neighbor some rycin and I'm a murderer. If I poison the state's water supply with rycin and millions die, I'm not just a murderer any more. I'm now a terrorist and an entirely new set of laws apply to me. Same with blowing up my neighbors barn vs blowing up a large building. Scale matters and these "what's the difference except the scale" comments seem unconsidered or naive to me.
throw_m239339
The difference is scale AND that META does it for profit, violating plenty of licensing terms in the process as well.
Well, I guess it would be nice if we could have some precedent for the claim that downloading copyright protected information is not in itself a breach of copyright.
It makes sense from the point of view that distribution is the act protected by copyright, not the mere act of copying. If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar, but then people might start wondering how keeping something from public domain for 90 years after the author's death could possibly be about protecting the rights of the author.