In order to help train its AI models, Meta (and others) have been using pirated versions of copyrighted books, without the consent of authors or publishers. The company behind Facebook and Instagram faces an ongoing class-action lawsuit brought by authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, and one in which it has already scored a major (and surprising) victory: The Californian court concluded last year that using pirated books to train its Llama LLM did qualify as fair use.
You’d think this case would be as open-and-shut as it gets, but never underestimate an army of high-priced lawyers. Meta has now come up with the striking defense that uploading pirated books to strangers via BitTorrent qualifies as fair use. It further goes on to claim that this is double good, because it has helped establish the United States’ leading position in the AI field.
Meta further argues that every author involved in the class-action has admitted they are unaware of any Llama LLM output that directly reproduces content from their books. It says if the authors cannot provide evidence of such infringing output or damage to sales, then this lawsuit is not about protecting their books but arguing against the training process itself (which the court has ruled is fair use).
Judge Vince Chhabria now has to decide whether to allow this defense, a decision that will have consequences for not only this but many other AI lawsuits involving things like shadow libraries. The BitTorrent uploading and distribution claims are the last element of this particular lawsuit, which has been rumbling on for three years now, to be settled.
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Shorter and more reasonable copyright lengths would make this a moot point because then there would sufficient literature in the public domain to pull from.
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These kind of charges are what put the Pirate Bay admins in prison and caused Aaron Swartz to kill himself because of a threat of lifetime in prison. The claim that they did this either with the goal of profit or actually successful profit and that this was a serious crime. Neither TPB or Swartz at that point in time had ever moved as much data as Meta has for these claims, nor did they ever have the profit or possibility of profit Meta aims to make from their AI offerings.
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Now Meta is claiming they’ve profited so hard you can’t possibly hold them accountable.
It will be the biggest “fuck you” in history to anyone ever hit with civil charges for piracy in the early 2000s, let alone the TPB admins and Swartz, if they let this go. Which means they probably will because in America, apparently if you crime hard enough and big enough they stop putting you in prison and start patting you on the back and calling it good business sense.
in America, apparently if you crime hard enough and big enough they stop putting you in prison and start patting you on the back and calling it good business sense.
There’s a story about Alexander the great capturing a pirate and scolding him for raiding villages along the coast line. Alexander asked if the pirate feels ashamed and wants to beg for forgiveness. However, the pirate had something else to say. He said that Alexander was doing the same thing, but infinitely worse. The only difference was that Alexander called himself king and plundered entire lands while the pirate only raided small villages. The pirate reminded Alexander of the many lives he had destroyed in his conquest. So the pirate’s only crime was not to be the biggest baddie in the hood, so to speak.
Alexander replied by stating that the title of king forces his hand and that he couldn’t just stop what he was doing. The pirate on the other hand was just an individual who could easily change course. And so Alexander set the pirate free, stating that he himself will start changing his own ways right there and then if the pirate makes a fresh start first.
I don’t know if there is any truth to this but it’s a fable often used to explain how legitimacy changes the perception people have of wrong doing and heroism on a fundamental level. Alexander’s reply sounds like an excuse and I think that’s on purpose. The pirate outwitted him in the end by stating a basic truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQBWGo7pef8
This is where I first remember hearing this tale, in this old Schoolhouse Rock parody that was in protest of the War in Iraq.
in America, apparently if you crime hard enough and big enough they stop putting you in prison and start patting you on the back and calling it good business sense.
If you owe the bank $100 you have a problem. If you owe the bank $100,000,000, the bank has a problem.
If heaven and hell are real I hope God and Satan give Swartz a sabbatical so he can go torture Zuck for a while, periodically.
I like the implication that both have to sign off on it
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These kind of charges are what put the Pirate Bay admins in prison and caused Aaron Swartz to kill himself because of a threat of lifetime in prison.
Um, he did not kill himself
If the ruling goes the wrong way, like with many cases like this (drug use is a good example), it won’t help those in the past. However, it will open a door for everyone in the future.
My guess is every DCMA entity on the planet has already sent this judge a letter saying that allowing this defense is a terrible idea. I am honestly torn on this one since there are so many unknowns, and if Meta loses it will mostly be publishers that benefit vs authors.
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So I can use pirated media to train my AI (Actual Intelligence), right?
As long as you’re rich enough to hire your own army of lawyers, probably.
That said, it seems like when you’re rich enough to hire your own army of lawyers you can pretty much do whatever you want.
Well, that doesn’t sound civil or lawful at all and more like kindoms of the dark ages degree of “rules” where it doesn’t apply to a choosen few.
If Meta and other bigcorps that support the US goverment get the special “avoid-judgment” card and you face punishment then there’s no law, only bigotry.
That would encourage individuals and small groups to keep their activites a secret (go anonymous) and break the law whenever they can,
because the “king and his followers” don’t follow their own “rules”.The US is not only getting dystopian, they’re commiting primitive mistakes.
Should make all journal publications fair use.
Unfortunately you do have to prove you’re intelligent
Yes, in fact there’s no framework or legal precedent right now so everyone already is doing it. You can just scrape the web etc and disregard IP ownership because training AI is transformative work - as it should be.
If only US were going for a win in that AI
I absolutely love the fact that all these companies are laying the legal groundwork to destroy intellectual property rights altogether. If they win enough of these cases, then every pirate on the open seas sails under a flag of amnesty.
No, I expect they’ll be more like “rules for thee but not for me”
I wouldn’t be so confident without a legal argument to support your opinion.
No legal argument is necessary. Just look at history. The rich and well connected have always lived by a different set of rules.
See below:
- Robert Richards (Du Pont heir): A 2014 Forbes article noted that a Du Pont heir, Robert Richards, pleaded guilty to raping his 3-year-old daughter in 2008 and received probation instead of jail time, which caused public outrage.
- August Busch IV: August Busch IV, a former Anheuser-Busch CEO, has been involved in past legal incidents, including a girlfriend’s overdose death at his house in 2010 and a car crash in 1983, but he was not charged with rape in these cases.
Not all IP is self surviving. Even CopyRight isn’t always a bad thing, if you think of small artists, for example. My fear is about CopyLeft mainly as I feel it’s been incredible successful in pushing forwards openness. The megacorps hating it, tells you it is doing its job. Only of the things they love about LLM and code is it can license wash away CopyLeft.
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So meta gets to claim fair use with pure digital duplication, but archive.org doesn’t when they scan physical copies of books and only lend out the same number of copies as they own in warehouses. That’s piracy.
Got it.
Rules for thee but not for me ahhhh corpo shit.
yuppers
Classic “the end justifies the means” (bad) defense. If ISPs can send letter for torrenting, and Facebook torrented a lot, Facebook deserves a fair punishment.
Not deserves, needs.
lol it would be hilarious if they could order Facebook disconnected from the Internet like a pleb hit with a copyright complaint
truck full of letters backs up to Meta’s headquarters
“there, that’s more appropriate.”
So we can pirate books as well as long as we aren’t able to reproduce them verbatim from memory as well?
Judge Vince Chhabria either accepts whatever bribes and offers he’s probably getting offered and sides with Meta, or it will eventually go on to the Supreme Court where they most definitely will. That’s the part of this that will work the most under an administration of no accountability.
Tell the judge you are training a neural network… it just happens to also be you.
So when this works for them it’ll be precedent to allow the fair use pirating of all media and software, right?
Oh never mind, I forgot that I don’t have billions of dollars to spend on lawyers. Never mind.
At this point I don’t understand pirating software.
He’s ex blizzard dev who opened his own indie studio
And he’s out of mana.
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Honestly I agree with Meta here but this should apply to everyone. I think most people here conflate their hate for Meta with the factual reality of intellectual property.
I can hate both.
People can also hate the fact that if you have enough money you can make everything legal.
What do you mean you can hate both? Whats the other of your hates? Disregard for copyright absolutism?
14·4 months agoYup, that’s what I’m doing with all those audiobooks I torrented. Helping the US maintain the lead in AI 😂
Unironically may become a legitimate defense. Although in that case, indiscriminately bombing gas stations in your town and extorting their owners should also be allowed but…
So we subsidize these baby killing bastards and they pull the broke boy card. The united state is a brutal imperialist capitalist shithole …pffft fuck capitalism
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anna’s archive
I wish. As someone astutely put it in another conversation, now that the tech companies have pilfered Anna’s Archive, the big publishers are going to try to get it shut down.
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We can train our NI (Natural Intelligence) models.
To demand shrubberies?
Is it fair use if I do it?
How rich are you?
I’m quite poor. I’m thankful every day that my mom and dad still let me live with them.
I wouldn’t recommend it then 😞
just claim that you are training an AI for a new startup you are working on, and will soon be looking for VC to fund the project further. be sure to use terms like “revolutionary” and “democratize” liberally.
We’re going to end up in a situation where whatever is necessary to train AI is permitted, and the main question is whether that will be through (re)interpretation of existing law or the passage of a new law.
Good thing I have a local model running that’s constantly learning, for precisely this reason
I’m still collecting media before I can start the training process.
If anything, this is proof you should be next in line for a large venture capital infusion!
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