So you broke the law AND made sure to be a dick
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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The real crime should be not seeding after downloading, have some common courtesy
What a relief. I was really concerned that they may have given somebody else a copy of the books they found useful enough to download themselves. /s
Fucking bottom-feeders.
Seeding is something to help your fellow pirates. You donate your bandwidth to help them get their files. It's totally in character for meta to just leech everything, take stuff, not give back anything and then to run to the bank laughing
Meta, even if you aren't seeding it still counts, because if you had the books already you wouldn't need to grab them from elsewhere, and you refusing to seed makes you a fucking leech.
'We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.'
So where's the RIAA/MPAA/etc now that it's a Big Company doing this? They were the ones screaming murder about torrenting in years past. So go on. Go after these guys who are doing piracy on a literally industrial scale.
Damn leechers. And doubly so. First they steal the books, and then they don't even give back to the pirates. And it's not like Anna's Archive or Libgen weren't struggling already. So Meta is just harming everyone involved.
The class action against META gonna be huge.
For the record, the reason this matters is because distributing a copyrighted work confers a much higher penalty than simply copying it for yourself. If Meta seeded those books they could be on the hook for a staggeringly large amount of damages. It's on the order of hundreds or even thousands per download. And that's across all the thousands of different books Meta grabbed.
The statutory penalty in the US is on the order of $100,000 per infringement. "Statutory" means that the number is written into the law, and the aggrieved party doesn't have to establish or prove actual losses.
Would distribution in the form of an AI not constitute a different form of seeding? I think it should.
No, you can't find any copyrighted text inside the model's weights.
It's much more complicated than this. Given that models have been shown to spit out verbatim copies of some training material, it can be argued that the weights do in fact encode the material, just in some obfuscated way. Additionally, it can be argued that the output of the model is a derivative copy of the original work regardless of whether the original work can be "found inside" the model weights, just by the nature of the process. As of now, there is no precedent that I know of on whether this constitutes redistribution of copyrighted material.
But doesn't that apply only to individuals? Or am I mistaken?
"Corporations are people, my friend."
No, it applies to "anyone," its just that corporations can drag lawsuits on for years, so they get to make sweet heart deals for their crimes that the test of us dont.
Why print an obvious lie?
Can you actually download a torrent without seeding it?
Yes. Although it is considered "poor form" by the pirating community.
Heck, at some point I was seeing torrent clients advertising features that let you block connections to people who weren't uploading and only downloading.
I thought most throttle you if you don't seed too much?
I'll seed zucc's mom and sister.
Gross.
That might be worse than using Windows XP as your daily driver and webpc in 2025.
Probably the same person or at least fabricated by the same electrical engineer.
I was hoping for lizzards
That's sexy