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.
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.
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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 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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s weird that your take away is “Meta needs to get it” and not “Clearly, these laws work for no one”. You don’t get better copyright laws by cheering for the copyright companies.
Aaron wouldn’t be part of the side that wants to lock up all data behind a giant gate and give the keys to a handful of companies. Well, we don’t know what he would think, but I’m guessing he didn’t lean copyright.
Literally the first thing I said was in regards to more sensible copyright making this all a moot point but you do you.
The only reason Meta needs to get it is because it’s entirely hypocritical to all the dirt poor people who couldn’t afford these kind of lawyers. It doesn’t make the current legal status right or correct. It’s just a slap in the face to someone like Swartz who died over far less.
I would rather copyright be amended but sadly that’s less likely to happen here.
I read this as setting precedent that others couldn’t. Court cases like this are one way to make it possible for everyone to break an absurd law.
Precedent only applies equally if we are able to prove the same in court as Meta did. Are you going to need petabytes of pirated data to train your AI? Can you afford a team of top quality lawyers to fight your case and prove you were training a small locally-hosted AI at home? Do you think Meta, of all companies, really is fighting for you to be able to do the same as them? You will still get taken to court, you will still have to fight your case, “precedent” isn’t an automatic get out of jail free card. Do you have the money to fight massive copyright holders with endless money? Of course you don’t, none of us do.
And unlike Meta, you will be thrown in prison like Jeremiah Perkins.
Even if found completely guilty, the worst that will happen is Meta has to pay a fine: which means nothing because any fine is rolled into the cost of doing business. Meta knows it is stupid to not break the law.
Precedent means we can cite it, so yes, this helps a bit. The rest you wrote is a fair bit of assumption or unnecessary: evidence to back your points would help. Otherwise, it just looks like inconclusive defeatism.
We don’t get better laws if everyone is cheering for the copyright industry. Everything after your first point goes against that. Goliath, the same one that beat up Aaron, finally has a match in his own weight category, and you are hoping he wins basically.
What kind of “better law” do you think will come out of this? That regular people like us will be able to share freely?
You think that the law being applied on poor people but not on the wealthy is a healthy way to get a better law?
Get the fuck real and nobody is asking for the copyright cabal to win as much as we are saying “look, if this is the how the law is going to be applied, apply it evenly, don’t just fuck over poor people but give the wealthy a pass.”
And poor people who don’t have the weight and money of Meta aren’t going to be able to prove that they need the same amount of data to train an LLM so they probably will still have the law held against them. Get fucking real man.
What country do you think you live in? One where laws are applied evenly or rationally? Or one where fascists have taken over the god damned government? Because guess what it’s the latter and the laws are effectively meaningless for the wealthy but still held against the poor. Sure, if that’s what you want, go for it, but it damn sure won’t suddenly get us better laws or let regular people torrent without worry. Congress has been deadlocked for decades and does nothing but hurt common people and give corporations a ticket to do whatever and you think better laws will come out of this? Seriously, once again, get fucking real.
Encouraging laws you don’t like does nothing but cement them. We are currently, as a society, begging lawmakers for harder copyright laws.
I get the Justice system sucks but making the wrong laws stronger does not make it better.
Think about what you are saying is all, you tend to write long elaborate speeches on why copyright deserves to win. There is being critical of AI, and then there’s being a mouthpiece for copyright companies. I’m not trying to be mean here, sorry.
Dude, I have been promoting copyright law being changed and being shortened for 25 fucking years.
Do you even know who Rufus Pollock is or anything about his research into copyright lengths? Because I was around when that shit was published. I hosted DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album on Grey Tuesday as a fuck you to the Beatles copyright holders since the Grey Album should have been considered fair use as it was released for free with no profit at all. I was part of the Kopimi collective.
Not wanting corporations to get a pass while we all get fucked is not the same thing. You’re not being mean, you’re being obtuse.
None of that matter if, right now, you are cheering on copyright laws. There’s no reason to stop promoting change now.
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Looking forward to Jellyfin getting a LLM to train locally on movie preferences so everyone’s library is fair use. Wait, is this why LLMs are being shoehorned into everything? 🤔
By this logic i should be able to copy paste Moby Dick and change all instances of the name to Mopy Dick and now it’s output no longer matches the imput. I’m about to be the next Stefani King.
The woman in white fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed. The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts.
Moby Dick
You could also try understanding the law
§107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include-
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
with particular attention to factors 1 (especially transformation) & 4.
If that’s not for you, though, then you should definitely try that with a copyright work (Disney?) & report back on how that went.
Meta have paid the copyright fee but uploaded material from Ann’s Archive because it wasn’t financially feasible to scan in each book individually.
Fair use is irrelevant.
Meta have paid the copyright fee
Lol, no. “Copyright fees” are what you pay your government in order to register your copyright or keep your copyright registration active.
Or to put it another way, copyright fees have fuck all to do with fair use.
You’re trying make it sound as though Meta obtained consent and paid authors for their own work when in fact, Meta obtained consent from no one, and paid nothing at all to anyone, in exchange for the use of their works.
Even a light skim of the attached article would have told you that much. What do you think a copyright suit is about?
“Meta have paid the copyright fee,” lol. That’s some r/ConfidentlyIncorrect shit right there. Why did you even bother?
Right. Maybe you should email this to facebook…
Don’t need to: their lawyers understood the law & lawyered successfully so far.
Ah, so troll it is.
Are you referring to yourself by claiming your ignorance somehow matches legal expertise? Cool ad hominem, by the way: fallacies, blame-shifting when you can’t back claims with credible evidence, & self-indulgent vanity are the hallmarks of trolls. Way to out yourself, buddy. 😄
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.
lol it would be hilarious if they could order Facebook disconnected from the Internet like a pleb hit with a copyright complaint
Not deserves, needs.
truck full of letters backs up to Meta’s headquarters
“there, that’s more appropriate.”
did they have a library card? if so, then fuck off.
Yup, 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…
There are no rules. Everything is made up to their convenience.
Just spitballing…
If you were to train a model on just one book, as long as you don’t prompt it to create an exact copy (maybe just some indiscernible differences) then presumably that’s fair use.
Then, since we know AI generated work can’t be copyrighted, does that essentially create a copyright-free version of the text which can be freely distributed?
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.
sure. thanks meta, anna’s archive will help me with my reading list, thanks.
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.
We can train our NI (Natural Intelligence) models.
To demand shrubberies?
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!
As long as they cannot copyright what they generate from using the pirated materials
