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jcalvinowens 3 hours ago [-]
I had to block meta's ASN on my personal cgit server a few weeks ago because they were ignoring robots.txt and torching it. Like hundreds of megabytes of access logs just from them, spread around different network blocks to clearly try and defeat IP based limiting. I couldn't believe it.
bflesch 2 hours ago [-]
IMO ASN-based blocking should be much more common, but unfortunately it is not supported as a first-class configuration option in many common tools.
jcalvinowens 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I dont know how anybody stays sane without it. I have a list of over a thousand ASNs I blackhole at this point...
Mine is a daily bash cronjob that fetches a text-based database and uses grep to build an nftables-apply script with all the IPs for the blocked ASNs. I keep meaning to share it, but it's embarrassingly messy I haven't had time to clean it up...
walrus01 1 hours ago [-]
It's a real pain in the ass because in the absence of ASN based blocking, you often have to give something a long list of IP ranges in CIDR notation, and be certain you don't "miss" even one ipv4 /23 or /24 or a crawler will get through.
websap 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jesse_dot_id 1 hours ago [-]
The world would be a much better place if these kinds of engineers had a spine.
scottyah 53 minutes ago [-]
Some spines are just crooked, and the extra rigidity would hurt more than help.
debo_ 52 minutes ago [-]
"One moment: reticulating spines..."
ttoinou 54 minutes ago [-]
They could even feed 20 kids
ben_w 6 hours ago [-]
A lot of people would be very pleased if this leads to Zuckerberg getting even the statutory minimum damages ($750?) on each infringement.
The previous infringement case with Anthropic said that while training an AI was transformative and not itself an infringement, pirating works for that purpose still was definitely infringement all by itself. The settlement was $1.5bn, so close to $3k for each of the 500k they pirated, so if Zuckerberg pirated "millions" (plural) it is quite plausible his settlement could be $6bn.
grebc 3 hours ago [-]
Nothing will happen to him/Meta while DJT is president.
He bought the best protection around for breaking the law.
GolfPopper 3 hours ago [-]
When you're a big Trump donor they let you do it.
stackghost 44 minutes ago [-]
Grab them by the Epstein Files
bamboozled 1 hours ago [-]
There will be not a single consequence for any of this.
gloxkiqcza 5 hours ago [-]
For context, his net worth is ~$220 billion.
azinman2 4 hours ago [-]
And meta's worth is much more than that. He's not personally paying.
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
A company being "worth" some amount doesn't mean it has that much money and real property; it means there exist people willing to buy shares, on the margin, at a price which works out like that. One of the common (very rough) approximations is that a business is worth as much as the profit it's expected to make over the next 20 years. But one of the reasons (there are many) that this is only a rough guide, is that if you tried to sell too much of a big company all in one go, it usually depresses the price a lot, and the other way around (trying to buy a whole company) tends to raise the price a lot; both effects are because most people have different ideas about how much any given company is really worth despite that rough guide, and trade their shares at different prices while you're doing it. You may note this is a circular argument, this is indeed part of the problem.
IIRC, Facebook's cash is more like $81-82 billion.
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
At the same time, isn't Zuck's worth based on his shares of evilCorp while evilCorp's shares are what you just said. Ergo, the Zuck isn't worth all that either???
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
Yup. All the headlines following the pattern "${billionaire} {gains|loses} ${x} billion this week" are mostly just fluff, the marginal share price of any given stock wanders all over the place even without forced sales or people trying to buy them out.
There's some interesting exceptions, like how Musk has managed to sell Tesla shares totalling more or less as much as the business itself has made in total lifetime revenue; but even then, Musk's theoretical net worth is very different from how much he could get if he was forced to sell all his shares suddenly.
Owner-CEOs like Musk and Zuckerberg get all the effects of such randomness, but the only examples I can think of such people getting into billion-dollar legal troubles tend to be examples which go on to sink their companies completely, so I'm not sure what impact a fine of "merely" 10% of cash reserves would do to investor confidence as expressed in share price. And this is not the only legal case Meta's facing right now.
ScoobleDoodle 1 hours ago [-]
It doesn't seem to be mostly just fluff to me.
MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos' ex wife) show it can be turned into real money. As of December 2025 She had given away $7.1 billion in 2025 charitable donations, and $26.3 billion since 2019.
In reality there is the ability to execute on the shares to turn them into real money.
Jeff Bezos holds less than 10% of Amazon stock himself. Which is a huge amount of money, and a not insignificant amount of which can be turned into "real" money and even with some decline is still a phenomenal amount.
In that same time period the stock valuation has more than doubled.
thomastjeffery 21 minutes ago [-]
That's why billionaires use shares as collateral to get loans. It's money once removed, and it continues to be spendable so long as the share price stays high.
I sincerely doubt that Meta's share price would crash as a result of Zuckerberg getting an expensive judgement.
financetechbro 2 hours ago [-]
Zuck can just take out loans against his equity. He doesn’t need to sell any of it to benefit from Metas “worth”
litoE 1 hours ago [-]
Plus, the money he borrows is not taxable. If he sold stock he would have to pay taxes before he could spend the income. Sure, he now owes money to someone, but he can refinance those loans again and again, and live tax-free the rest of his life while we, poor working stiffs, pay the taxes that built the airport where he parks the private jet he bought with the money he borrowed.
naniwaduni 41 minutes ago [-]
People seem to get the weird idea that borrowing against their stock holdings is some special thing rich people get to do with products that the rest of us don't have access to. It's not. Margin loans are widely available to the tune of ff+1%ish or lower, and if your brokerage's publicly offered rates are probably a ripoff, they're almost certainly negotiable. The bar for access to "institutional" rates is basically 100k, the regulatory requirement for portfolio margin.
Yes, there are specialized products catered to billionaires. But those aren't getting them better rates than someone with a $200k portfolio (Zuck is not conventionally a less risky borrower than the Options Clearing Corporation!). They exist to work around the fact that some borrowers can't just casually liquidate their stock on the open market, let alone at face value. By all accounts these products are more expensive than retail.
Mostly this is an expensive (but maybe still less expensive than taxes, depending on the rate environment—it's more of a no-brainer in ZIRPland) way to diversify out of a single-stock portfolio without selling by adding leverage. At Zuck's age, it's still very unlikely to make sense to borrow instead of sell to spend. He's been known to pay real taxes in the past, they just look small relative to his imputed wealth growth because rich people don't spend a lot relative to their wealth growth because they, quite by definition, have a lot of wealth.
_DeadFred_ 9 minutes ago [-]
I think people take issue with the taxes loophole. They have GAINED from the VALUE of their stocks, but they don't pay taxes on that. It should be law if you realize value from stocks you pay capital gains on those stocks. So if a loan is collateralized by $1,000,000 worth of stock value taxes should be paid on $1,000,000.
Telaneo 55 minutes ago [-]
Looking forward to the personal liability.
I've wondered what the legalese justification for letting liability evaporate as it does so often with corps. So far the reasons I'm left with are 'shrugs' and 'the relevant provision (seemingly? apparently?) simply don't apply', neither of which are any good.
I was going to make a joke about how we should attach magnets to Aaron Swartz' corpse, since that'd make for a pretty potent energy source, given how fast he must be spinning. But honestly, I think he would have seen this sort of thing coming, given how his case was handled and how things really haven't gotten any better.
woah 41 minutes ago [-]
Alternate reality Aaron Swartz escaped canonization and is now running an AI/crypto startup that pays you to upload training data with his YC alum buddies
Telaneo 38 minutes ago [-]
Every now and then, I feel like we live in the worst possible world. Then I realise it could be much worse.
This does not comfort me.
soundworlds 33 minutes ago [-]
I should hope that if Zuckerberg isn't severely punished for this, it at least sets a legal precedent for every other person to do the same with immunity.
All the Aaron Schwartzes of the future could freely share scientific papers with the world.
_doctor_love 12 minutes ago [-]
"You can be unethical and still be legal that’s the way i live my life"
- Mark Zuckerberg
motbus3 2 hours ago [-]
I know personally a case of a engineer who was told to do something despite all the legal problems because the company had lawyers for a reason
Telaneo 54 minutes ago [-]
I'd love for that to come out during discovery when the lawsuit hits, but it probably never will. Blowing the whistle is also not a great option in this economy, although I wish more people did.
28304283409234 5 hours ago [-]
So... "move fast and steal things"?
lm411 52 minutes ago [-]
When the AI scrapers were just getting started, that is basically what I thought - their plan was to scrape / suck up everything they possibly could before people realized what was happening and blocked them.
The rate at which they were spidering and scraping was so far beyond what any other supposedly legit spider was doing, it seemed like the logical explanation.
mil22 2 hours ago [-]
It started at the top and at the beginning.
vips7L 2 hours ago [-]
The biggest theft from the working class that has ever happened.
MengerSponge 4 hours ago [-]
Always Has Been
ipython 3 hours ago [-]
Just gonna say... Aaron Swartz faced years of prison time and ultimately decided to take his own life... for downloading scientific journal articles... to share freely with the world (aka not even profiting from it).
But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that data set? Meh, sounds like Silicon Valley disruption, give the man a medal!
lesuorac 1 hours ago [-]
And Jstor dropped the lawsuit when Aaron deleted his local copy. DOJ didn't drop theirs.
I doubt Meta has deleted their local copy though ...
alex1138 30 minutes ago [-]
And also I think MIT didn't defend Aaron but maybe I'm wrong about that
spongebobstoes 24 minutes ago [-]
Aaron Swartz was treated unjustly because copyright sucks. we should oppose such laws and treatment, not wield them as retributive tools against our opponents
it is wrong to advocate for everyone to be treated equally unjustly. better to advocate for the removal of the bad laws/structures
defen 36 minutes ago [-]
One man illegally downloading copyrighted material is a crime. Multinational corporations illegally downloading copyrighted material is the only remaining growth area in the US economy and vital to national security.
zajio1am 52 minutes ago [-]
Well, Meta also shared their AI models freely with world
Melatonic 2 hours ago [-]
Truly ahead of his time
alex1138 3 hours ago [-]
Had Aaron copied Snapchat 5 times the DOJ would've been fine with it all. His fault for not having the foresight
alex1138 2 hours ago [-]
(I'm being sarcastic. Zuck gets rewarded for continually copying Snapchat features into his products)
HumblyTossed 52 minutes ago [-]
Waiting for the perp walk.
Tired of the double standard that CEOs get away when bad things happen (because they can’t be everywhere all the time) but all the benefits when the company makes a great profit (because they’re personally driving results!).
spate141 4 hours ago [-]
> a Meta spokesperson said, “AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use. We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
> Authors have sued AI companies for copyright infringement before - and lost.
So, basically nothing will come out of this
fantasizr 3 hours ago [-]
they'll litigate how meta acquired those materials to train. you can do whatever you want with a book after it's in your house. but how did it get there?
gizajob 1 hours ago [-]
They’re already on record as hoovering up Library Genesis and Anna’s Archive. For their “fair use” copyright bonfire to train their LLM.
So not are these publishers rightfully pissed, Meta didn’t even give them the $6.99 for each epub to begin with. They’ve stolen the whole thing as part of this “fair use” campaign to destroy human authorship free of even the most basic remuneration.
anthk 2 hours ago [-]
Until Sony, Nintendo, Disney... sues them and Zuck craps down his pants. And the NSA themselves, too; because for sure they are half-backed from them. If they keep pirating down Japanese and European media, these can just wipe their asses with USA licenses and declare all media from the US un-Copyrighteable Europe and Japan.
nadermx 2 hours ago [-]
"They then copied those stolen fruits"
How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?
Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
And you would be hard pressed to prove that LLM's haven't advanced the arts and sciences, so at bare minimum transformative, ie fair use.
RIMR 2 hours ago [-]
I think you are confusing the idiom "stolen fruits" with an actual accusation of criminal theft. Aside from its use in this phrasing, neither "theft" nor "steal" appears anywhere else in the article.
nadermx 2 hours ago [-]
The article, references the complaint. And even then, why use it at all?
SrslyJosh 4 hours ago [-]
Rules for thee but not for me.
danielmarkbruce 50 minutes ago [-]
Except, as the article says.... it's not copyright infringement. Whether it should be or not is another issue.
hoppyhoppy2 47 minutes ago [-]
>But the latest lawsuit alleges that Meta and Zuckerberg deliberately circumvented copyright-protection mechanisms — and had considered paying to license the works before abandoning that strategy at “Zuckerberg’s personal instruction.” The suit essentially argues that the conduct described falls outside protections afforded by fair-use provisions of the U.S. copyright code.
runjake 2 hours ago [-]
I don't have strong opinions on Zuck needing to be punished for this, because I have friends and family doing the same thing, although perhaps not at the same scale. I myself do not download copyrighted content. I think "rules for thee, not for me" goes both ways.
FireBeyond 2 hours ago [-]
How much revenue have your friends and family made from "doing the same thing"?
runjake 2 hours ago [-]
Some. In some cases they've "stolen" tens of thousands in content. Like I said, not at the same scale, but the same "crime" nonetheless.
I'd much rather prosecution focus on Zuck's more serious crimes against privacy and civilization as a whole. But maybe this is a small start?
pessimizer 2 hours ago [-]
> Some. In some cases they've "stolen" tens of thousands in content.
That's not revenue.
dmitrygr 2 hours ago [-]
Who will be the first to implement a one-layer three-weight model and add it to BitTorrent? Let it “train” on all downloaded files. That makes it fair use. Am I doing this right?
pessimizer 2 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't this stuff trigger RICO? Why do torrent site operators get led off in cuffs for running operations that usually lose money, but Zuck doesn't?
RICO specifically cites "criminal infringement of a copyright" as laid out in 18 U.S. Code § 2319. If the CEO tells his employees to download hundreds of thousands of works illegally in order to carry out his money-making scheme, how is that not organized crime even if (dubiously) LLM training on the material is fair use?
> As used in this chapter — (1) “racketeering activity” means (A)[...]; (B) any act which is indictable under any of the following provisions of title 18, United States Code: [...], section 2319 (relating to criminal infringement of a copyright),[...]
> (c) It shall be unlawful for any person employed by or associated with any enterprise engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce, to conduct or participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise’s affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity[...].
“Meta — at Zuckerberg’s direction — copied millions of books, journal articles, and other written works without authorization, including those owned or controlled by Plaintiffs and the Class, and then made additional copies of those works to train Llama,” the suit says. “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement. Meta also stripped [copyright management information] from the copyrighted works it stole. It did this to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.”
alex1138 21 minutes ago [-]
> Meta also stripped [copyright management information] from the copyrighted works it stole. It did this to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.
WTF
stopbulying 39 minutes ago [-]
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stopbulying 28 minutes ago [-]
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lenerdenator 4 hours ago [-]
The behavior will continue until a consequence is imposed.
josefritzishere 5 hours ago [-]
I would rather Zuckerberg do 6 months in jail and probation than fine Meta.
Lammy 3 hours ago [-]
You aren't going to be able to make me anti-piracy just because some corpo benefits from it too.
idle_zealot 2 hours ago [-]
I think this is an easy distinction to make: copyright is bullshit and knowledge should be free. I have no problem with pirates sharing information freely. I do have a problem with a company taking someone else's work and profiting from it. The only thing worse than copyright as it exists is copyright that can be selectively ignored when the powerful will it. Attempt to use copyright to promote Free software with the GPL? Ha, nope, copyright for me and not for thee; I'll train on your code and sell it back to you. You want to preserve access to a game or film that's unavailable or unplayable? Time to send the C&D and destroy you. Only bad things are possible.
Until we progress as a society to the point that we can put this system behind us we should at least fight to make enforcement uniform. In fact, uniform enforcement is probably a good starting point for arguing for abolition, as the pain of that enforcement is felt by proles and elites alike.
ginko 1 hours ago [-]
People who don't believe in copyright shouldn't be punished for "breaking" it.
Corporations believe in copyright so if they "break" it they should get punished for breaking rules they made up themselves.
Generally the law should be more strict for corporations than for real people.
edit: People downvoting can you argue why you disagree? I do think it's fair for the law to be more strict on the powerful rather than on the powerless.
jmclnx 4 hours ago [-]
I agree, time to start handing out real punishments, I think 6 months is way to small.
If this was you or me, we would be in prison for decades and have a fine in the millions. Time for these people to feel consequences.
As someone said, they will probably settle for around 6 billion, that is the same as say a $100 fine for us.
4 hours ago [-]
karanbhangui 4 hours ago [-]
This comment could get its own DSM classification for how insane it is.
I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?
rpdillon 4 hours ago [-]
I'm gonna have to go dig up the link, but isn't there a guy that Nintendo basically has on indentured servitude for the rest of his life?
Ah, found it:
>In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison having served 14 months of a 40-month sentence. Good behaviour reduced time behind bars, but now his options are limited. For a while he was crashing on a friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions, which he needs to ease chronic pain, were costing hundreds of dollars every week, and he didn’t have a job. And soon, he would need to start sending cheques to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m (£11.5m), and he’s probably going to spend the rest of his life paying it back.
I'm not even a tiny bit supportive, but there is precedent.
American executives have been pushing to criminalise copyright infringement for decades, and America has worked hard to pressure countries all round the world to do this as part of trade deals. There is, for example, a Brit serving an eleven year sentence right now *.
Facebook isn't one of the companies that's been pushing for that.
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
How is that relevant?
j-bos 55 minutes ago [-]
"American executives have been pushing to criminalise copyright infringement...Why should Zuckerberg be exempt?" Implicit relevence in the comment to which I'm replying.
esseph 31 minutes ago [-]
I think we're misunderstanding one another.
Zuckerberg saying anything about copyright infringement is irrelevant to the actions Meta has taken in consuming and promoting the practice, and he should face criminal liability.
AlotOfReading 4 hours ago [-]
The non-strawman way to interpret the parent comment is that they want them to be treated the same as normal copyright violators. Jail is a common result of (criminal) copyright prosecution, with 44% of convicted offenders being imprisoned, averaging 25 months [0].
Now, I personally find the idea of imprisoning people for copyright offenses horrific, but I don't think it's remotely insane that someone else might come to that conclusion, given that we broadly accept it as a society.
From [0]: "In fiscal year 2017, there were 80 copyright/trademark infringement offenders who accounted for 0.1% of all offenders sentenced under the guidelines." This is such a low number that I assume most prosecuted cases are settled without ever making it to sentencing, or alternatively copyright infringement is just hardly ever prosecuted criminally at all.
pessimizer 2 hours ago [-]
I don't understand how the fact that 80 people were prosecuted for copyright violation in one year is an argument that one person shouldn't be prosecuted for copyright violation.
jaredcwhite 57 minutes ago [-]
Decades? Maybe not. A few years at minimum? Hell yeah!
ginko 4 hours ago [-]
Is this controversial? Executives should be held liable, certainly moreso than just regular people sharing files.
lenerdenator 2 hours ago [-]
For better or for worse, the idea behind incorporation is that you, as an owner of part or all of the company, are separated from it financially and legally in most circumstances.
Zuckerberg may be CEO, majority shareholder, and on the board of Meta, but he didn't break copyright law, Meta did. So if there were to be a consequence, Meta would pay out the fine. Not sure how you jail a company.
Now, in a company with a real corporate governance structure, the board would look at the loss incurred by said fine, look at Zuckerberg, and immediately fire him for causing the loss. However, like I said before, Zuck's in charge of Meta, so that's not going to happen, and the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares, which are the main repository of his wealth. So if he thinks he can make himself richer violating copyright law in the future, he will likely direct Meta to do so.
TL;DR, in the famous words of Bender from Futurama, "Hooray, the system fails again!"
Telaneo 39 minutes ago [-]
> Zuckerberg may be CEO, majority shareholder, and on the board of Meta, but he didn't break copyright law, Meta did.
I'm still stuck on how Z telling Meta (or the relevant people at Meta, whatever) to go out there and do illegal shit doesn't make a court say that he's functionally done said illegal shit, or at least encouraged the company to do, and that he should thus be liable for that. It's not like there's much plausible deniability here. It'd be one thing if the lower ranks thought it'd be fine and did it of their own accord. It's quite another for Z to tell people to go nuts doing illegal shit.
The DMCA makes facilitation of copyright infringement illegal. Telling people to do copyright infringement is surely facilitation of copyright infringement. Surely then, Z having broken the DMCA is a fairly open and shut case, modulo calculating the damages. But apparently not?
triceratops 2 hours ago [-]
> Not sure how you jail a company.
> the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares
You lack imagination :-) but you've identified both the problem and the solution.
gizajob 1 hours ago [-]
I’ve sometimes pondered this about the legal personhood of a company - it has most of the rights as a human being but can’t suffer any of the major consequences, such as jail.
It could be possible to construct a legalistic jail for a company whereby if it has committed the type of crime that a human could be jailed for, then it could be frozen for the duration, say ten years, and all its assets, shareholder funds, contracts, everything were frozen and impounded.
Of course this seems completely ludicrous because it’s so “out there” but it’s worth having the thought experiment. Things like “corporate manslaughter” really have few consequences for the corporation itself - if it was actually jailed for twenty years and shareholders and officers left frozen out and on pause, then it might be the kind of punishment that really counted for something.
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
> Not sure how you jail a company.
You jail the CEO and the others will stand up and take note.
"But they'll complain" who gives a fuck.
lenerdenator 1 minutes ago [-]
In this case, they'll be right. That, again, is the purpose of incorporation. It's also the same concept that keeps someone from emptying out all of your personal bank accounts if your small business gets sued.
What you'd need is something that either removes that protection past a certain amount of value, or, to tell entities like Meta - which are basically sole proprietorships with window dressing - that they're not entitled to the protection of incorporation if they don't enact a real corporate governance model.
ginko 2 hours ago [-]
Well I guess the idea of incorporation is wrong then. Execs and major shareholder should absolutely be held personally held liable.
surgical_fire 4 hours ago [-]
I would prefer a harsher punishment, but I would begrudgingly accept throwing him in jail for decades.
I always heard that criminals should be thrown in jail, it's time we started doing it to the real criminals.
jacques_chester 4 hours ago [-]
There aren't enough things an executive can go to jail for.
Fines don't do anything to deter bad behavior. Either:
* The company pays
* They pay and the company mysteriously increases next year's comp / grants a "loan" / etc
* D&O insurer pays
In all three cases the money comes out of the shareholders' hides. It provides zero personal deterrence. The payoff matrix, as seen by a sociopath, makes it rational to always defect against the common good.
The only punishment that can really focus attention is physical imprisonment in a facility they can't choose.
SOX did this for financial reporting and gee shucks it turned out executives can follow the law after all!
esseph 4 hours ago [-]
> I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?
They stole the life's work of millions of people.
In less civilized times, they likely would have been drawn and quartered by strong horses, and had their limbs drug to the 4 corners of the continent as a warning to anyone else that would consider doing it again.
CalmBirch127 2 hours ago [-]
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wotsdat 3 hours ago [-]
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qarl 4 hours ago [-]
I know people really hate AI training on their work - but is it really any different than a human reading it?
I know there's a complaint that AI can verbatim repeat that work. But so can human savants. No one is suing human savants for reading their books.
Producing copyrighted material, of course. Training on copyrighted material... I just don't see it.
EDIT: Making a perfectly valid point, but it's unpopular, so down I go.
jryan49 3 hours ago [-]
I had to buy the copyrighted material before reading it... Meta apparently operates in a different legal system than me. That's my issue with it.
qarl 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, I have no objection to that part. It's the arguments that training itself is the problem.
Sarah Silverman as the most prominent example.
redsocksfan45 6 minutes ago [-]
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thomasahle 3 hours ago [-]
The human savant will remember where they read it and give you credit. It might lead more people to read your work, and ultimately you make money.
The AI won't even know where the page of text it's seeing came from, and people will avoid your book as they can just ask the AI. So you make less money. (Talking about specialized technical books here.)
qarl 3 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily.
Quarondeau 3 hours ago [-]
There's a huge difference in scale. The human mind can only process a limited portion of all works available over a lifetime. Human learning is therefore naturally limited to small-scale reuse, which serves to keep it proportional.
A machine training on all copyrighted materials in the world for commercial purposes at an industrial scale makes it disproportionate.
qarl 3 hours ago [-]
I see that as a distinction - but does it make a difference?
If a company hired hundreds of savants, then it would be illegal for them to read books?
I don't follow.
Quarondeau 3 hours ago [-]
It would hardly make a dent. And if you hired hundreds of savants, the knowledge would still be spread over hundreds of separate minds.
And even if we grant that those savants are also very skilled at creating "market substitutes" based on their training that are capable of competing with the original works, their maximum creative output would only be a relatively small number of new works, because they can only work at human speed.
qarl 3 hours ago [-]
Ok - but if a company were able to hire one million savants, you feel it should be illegal, because why?
Can you cite something in the copyright laws themselves that suggest this scale distinction?
Quarondeau 2 hours ago [-]
This goes back to the original purpose of copyright, which is to serve as an economic incentive for individual creators and artists to make more art, by securing exclusive rights to use their own works commercially for a specified time. The goal is both the creation of more works, but also to protect the economic viability of artists.
This principle is quite universal and can be found in many places, including the US constitution and US (supreme) court decisions, many international jurisdictions, treaties and conventions.
qarl 2 hours ago [-]
But my question is about your point of scale.
I don't understand why it should be allowed for one savant to study and answer questions about one book, but wrong for a company to hire one million savants to answer questions about one million books.
And I'm asking where in the law or case law this is supported.
grebc 4 hours ago [-]
It’s different.
qarl 3 hours ago [-]
Hm. I'm not sure I follow your logic.
nancyminusone 4 hours ago [-]
No one is asking human savants about what they read 1 million times per day.
Suppose they did, and some guy was filling stadiums regularly to hear him recite an entire audio book. That would probably get the attention of someone's lawyers.
qarl 4 hours ago [-]
I don't see your point. The problem is producing the copyrighted work, not processing it beforehand.
If it's illegal for AIs it should be illegal for humans, too. Is that really what you're arguing? It should be illegal for savants to read books?
SahAssar 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think anyone is arguing that the consumption is illegal. It's the reproduction that is illegal.
Read a book, that's fine. Write a book, that's fine. Read a book and then write a book that is 99.9% the same as the book that you read and sell it for profit without a license from the original author, that's infringement.
qarl 4 hours ago [-]
No, if you read the article, the point is in the training, not the reproduction.
That's what all these lawsuits are about - it's the training not the reproduction. I already agreed in my first comment that the reproduction is off limits.
In this case, it appears that Meta torrented illegal copies of the work to do the training. Obviously that's bad. But conflating that with training itself doesn't follow.
SahAssar 2 hours ago [-]
The point of these lawsuits is the piracy. My parent comment was about the general situation, not this specific article.
Pirating content is illegal, regardless of if it is to train an LLM.
Usage of LLMs trained on unlicensed content (basically all of them) might or might not be illegal.
Using any method to reproduce a copyrighted work by using that original as input in a way that supplants the market value of the original is probably illegal.
At least that is my rudimentary understanding.
qarl 2 hours ago [-]
Well - maybe so. But the common belief is that training itself is a violation of copyright, no matter how it's done. That's the argument I'm countering here.
SahAssar 2 hours ago [-]
The issue is that the trainers have not sought licenses for the data and instead outright pirated it.
I don't think anyone thinks that all training is a copyright violation if all the training data is licensed. For example a LLM trained on CC0 content would be fine with basically everyone.
The problem is that training happens on data that is not licensed for that use. Some of that data also is pirated which makes it even clearer that it is illegal.
qarl 1 hours ago [-]
But why should separate licensing be required at all? A search engine reads and indexes every word of every page it crawls. No one argues that requires licensing, only that the outputs must respect copyright. Why should training be different?
SahAssar 49 minutes ago [-]
When google starting outputting summaries people asked the same questions.
If you supplant the value of the original with the original as input then you probably have some legal questions to answer.
lobf 1 hours ago [-]
Sharing copyrighted material is illegal. Presumably, if Meta blocked all seeding on the torrents they downloaded, they wouldn't have broken copyright, right?
doublescoop 4 hours ago [-]
If copyright law doesn't extend to the works being used for training, why should it extend to the model that is produced as a result? AI model creators have set up an ethical scenario where the right thing to do is ignore copyright laws when it comes to AI, which includes model use. It might never be legal, but it has become ethical to pirate models, distill them against ToS, etc.
qarl 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I follow. Can you say it a different way?
SahAssar 2 hours ago [-]
I think the parent is basically saying that if you can legally pirate a book to train a LLM why can't you legally pirate a LLM model?
It's a "rules for thee and not for me" argument.
qarl 1 hours ago [-]
AH. Thank you.
triceratops 2 hours ago [-]
Training requires making copies. Even if Meta had purchased each work they'd have had to make copies of it to distribute around the training cluster.
qarl 2 hours ago [-]
Does it though? If they bought a copy for each machine?
triceratops 2 hours ago [-]
Then no copying happened so they'd be on firmer legal ground.
qarl 1 hours ago [-]
Good, we're agreed. My only point here is that training is not inherently a copyright violation.
Barrin92 2 hours ago [-]
>The problem is producing the copyrighted work, not processing it beforehand.
the distinction isn't particularly clear cut with an open source model. If it is able to reproduce copyright protected work with high fidelity such that the works produced would be derivative, that's like trying to get around laws against distribution of protected works by handing them to you in a zip file.
It's a kind of copyright washing to hand you the data as a binary blob and an algorithm to extract them out of it. That wouldn't really fly with any other technology.
And that's really where a lot of the value is mind you, these models are best thought of as lossily compressed versions of their input data. Otherwise Facebook ought to be perfectly fine to train them on public domain data.
qarl 2 hours ago [-]
I tend to agree - but you assume that it would not be possible to create a model that can train on copyrighted work and only output text which would be considered fair use.
That seems very possible to me, and undermines the "training is copyright violation" argument. It's not the training, it's the output.
fantasizr 3 hours ago [-]
reading it after stealing it: gray area. producing & monetizing competing works devaluing the original is a problem
qarl 3 hours ago [-]
So is it a problem when humans produce and monetize competing works? My understanding is that there quite an industry in humans reading books and synthesizing their points. Cliff's Notes, for example.
fantasizr 3 hours ago [-]
I did some quick googling and most of cliffs notes guides are on public domain works so no problem there, they've also paid to license content, and also have been protected by fair use as parody
qarl 3 hours ago [-]
To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Beloved, The Kite Runner, The Handmaid's Tale are all copyrighted works with a Cliff's Notes guide.
triceratops 2 hours ago [-]
> I know people really hate AI training on their work - but is it really any different than a human reading it?
Yes it's very different. Humans need to eat, sleep, and pay taxes. You also have to pay them competitive wages.
qarl 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure your argument is supported by the actual law as written.
There's nothing in the law to support your argument either. The law however does say, very unambiguously, that copying without permission isn't allowed . There aren't exceptions for "training" just because it's superficially similar to a human activity (reading a book). A human isn't allowed to hand-copy Harry Potter. Even if they bought all the Harry Potter books.
How about then to grant AI all other rights, for example, to allow voting?(sarcasm)
qarl 3 hours ago [-]
We're not talking about rights, we're talking about illegal acts. If it's illegal for a machine to do it, how can it be ok for a human?
Just from a rational argumentation point of view. Clearly if a law is written saying as much, then sure. But there is no such copyright law like that yet.
pkaeding 2 hours ago [-]
But machines don't do things. People do things, and they use tools/machines to do those things more easily or efficiently.
qarl 2 hours ago [-]
My apologies - I'm speaking loosely of course. Translate all my claims about machines breaking the law into claims about humans using machine breaking the law.
pkaeding 47 minutes ago [-]
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be pedantic. I was trying to make the point (which I think is in line with your point) that the fact that AI is involved here doesn't make a difference. It is a tool, but the people using the tool are (as always) responsible for the outcome.
NoOn3 3 hours ago [-]
The issue is certainly not so simple. But it seems to me, purely theoretically, that the rules don't necessarily have to be the same for living people and non-living machines.
qarl 3 hours ago [-]
Well - actually - it is pretty simple. For something to be illegal, there must be a law saying it's illegal. There are no laws distinguishing humans from machines in copyright law.
triceratops 2 hours ago [-]
> There are no laws distinguishing humans from machines in copyright law
Correct. Because until very recently there was no need.
qarl 1 hours ago [-]
AH. So you agree that it's not illegal.
0x3f 3 hours ago [-]
HN really loves the copyright lobby when it's against someone they hate, huh
teddyh 3 hours ago [-]
The problem is people at large companies creating these AI models, wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it, but these large companies also want to keep copyright protection intact, for their regular business activities. They want to eat the cake and have it too. And they are arguing for essentially eliminating copyright for their specific purpose and convenience, when copyright has virtually never been loosened for the public’s convenience, even when the exceptions the public asks for are often minor and laudable. If these companies were to argue that copyright should be eliminated because of this new technology, I might not object. But now that they come and ask… no, they pretend to already have, a copyright exception for their specific use, I will happily turn around and use their own copyright maximalist arguments against them.
>wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it
Learning from copyrighted content is legal - for both humans and AI. If Meta is in hot water for anything, it's piracy and/or storage of copyrighted material.
amanaplanacanal 2 hours ago [-]
I think it's more that the little guy gets the book thrown at them while the rich bitch gets a slap on the wrist. This is widespread, and is BAD regardless of your personal opinion on copyright.
swader999 3 hours ago [-]
I take issue with the use of tense used in this framing. Its not 'infringed' its 'infringing' and to say that it happened is wrong, its happening and happening continuously in these models that are in use. To say a one time payment settles it is missing the whole scope of this theft.
Royalties are owed and continuously owed as these models are deployed and doing inference. How is it any different to paying a small pittance to someone every time a song is played?
ronsor 3 hours ago [-]
Royalties for inference are unrealistic in a way that even royalties for training aren't.
The LLaMA models were released openly. Copies exist everywhere in the world. You aren't going to be able to charge someone for running `llama.cpp`; a court order ceases to have practical relevance at that point.
eaglelamp 2 hours ago [-]
Inference might be unreasonable for a royalty agreement, but, in assessing damages, it is certainly relevant.
"I made enough copies for everyone" isn't a valid defense for copyright infringement.
swader999 3 hours ago [-]
These models can provide citations so I don't see why they can't tick a royalty owed. I'm sure many here could help build this pipeline.
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
First, LLMs do not reliably cite works. They are not looking things up in a database and repeating them. I think this false idea occurs a lot in people who don't understand what LLMs are or how they work.
Second, royalties are not required to cite a source.
Can you imagine how disastrous it would be to everything from news reporting to scientific publishing if that was the case?
swader999 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah well then I want my robot running this crap locally in its brain so I can get it to farm my two acres and haul water for me and I'll unplug from the rest of this nonsense going forward lol.
ronsor 3 hours ago [-]
... LLMs cannot reliably provide citations. If you ask for citations, and the model did not use a web search tool, then whatever "citations" you receive are unreliable. Please do not trust these models to be honest. Just because they can discuss a topic doesn't mean they "know" where the knowledge came from in the same way that you don't need to have studied physics to catch a ball.
kodt 3 hours ago [-]
If you steal a book and read it, should you have to pay every time you use the knowledge gained or recall parts of it from memory?
teddyh 3 hours ago [-]
No. People are not LLMs. And even if some argue that they are mechanically similar, they are legally distinct.
kodt 31 minutes ago [-]
And yet most of the replies are giving examples of human action as if they are legally analogous.
drfloyd51 3 hours ago [-]
If I charged people for the privilege of listening to me recite relevant parts of the book to them for profit? Yes. Depending on the copyright.
kodt 43 minutes ago [-]
So like a teacher?
swader999 3 hours ago [-]
If I perform a song in public then yes, I should pay the creator every time I play it. I fail to see the difference here.
kodt 55 minutes ago [-]
What if you are performing your own song which was heavily influenced by other artists?
Also I believe performing covers is legal
mitthrowaway2 3 hours ago [-]
What if you steal a CD and then play it on your radio station each morning?
Lio 3 hours ago [-]
Even better, what if you transform that stolen CD into an MP3, so the data isn’t the same as a lossy process was used, then share the MP3 with the world as your own work?
I don’t get why the training process doesn’t count as any other form of transformation but then I’m not a lawyer.
Mine is a daily bash cronjob that fetches a text-based database and uses grep to build an nftables-apply script with all the IPs for the blocked ASNs. I keep meaning to share it, but it's embarrassingly messy I haven't had time to clean it up...
The previous infringement case with Anthropic said that while training an AI was transformative and not itself an infringement, pirating works for that purpose still was definitely infringement all by itself. The settlement was $1.5bn, so close to $3k for each of the 500k they pirated, so if Zuckerberg pirated "millions" (plural) it is quite plausible his settlement could be $6bn.
He bought the best protection around for breaking the law.
IIRC, Facebook's cash is more like $81-82 billion.
There's some interesting exceptions, like how Musk has managed to sell Tesla shares totalling more or less as much as the business itself has made in total lifetime revenue; but even then, Musk's theoretical net worth is very different from how much he could get if he was forced to sell all his shares suddenly.
Owner-CEOs like Musk and Zuckerberg get all the effects of such randomness, but the only examples I can think of such people getting into billion-dollar legal troubles tend to be examples which go on to sink their companies completely, so I'm not sure what impact a fine of "merely" 10% of cash reserves would do to investor confidence as expressed in share price. And this is not the only legal case Meta's facing right now.
MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos' ex wife) show it can be turned into real money. As of December 2025 She had given away $7.1 billion in 2025 charitable donations, and $26.3 billion since 2019.
In reality there is the ability to execute on the shares to turn them into real money.
Jeff Bezos holds less than 10% of Amazon stock himself. Which is a huge amount of money, and a not insignificant amount of which can be turned into "real" money and even with some decline is still a phenomenal amount.
In that same time period the stock valuation has more than doubled.
I sincerely doubt that Meta's share price would crash as a result of Zuckerberg getting an expensive judgement.
Yes, there are specialized products catered to billionaires. But those aren't getting them better rates than someone with a $200k portfolio (Zuck is not conventionally a less risky borrower than the Options Clearing Corporation!). They exist to work around the fact that some borrowers can't just casually liquidate their stock on the open market, let alone at face value. By all accounts these products are more expensive than retail.
Mostly this is an expensive (but maybe still less expensive than taxes, depending on the rate environment—it's more of a no-brainer in ZIRPland) way to diversify out of a single-stock portfolio without selling by adding leverage. At Zuck's age, it's still very unlikely to make sense to borrow instead of sell to spend. He's been known to pay real taxes in the past, they just look small relative to his imputed wealth growth because rich people don't spend a lot relative to their wealth growth because they, quite by definition, have a lot of wealth.
I've wondered what the legalese justification for letting liability evaporate as it does so often with corps. So far the reasons I'm left with are 'shrugs' and 'the relevant provision (seemingly? apparently?) simply don't apply', neither of which are any good.
I was going to make a joke about how we should attach magnets to Aaron Swartz' corpse, since that'd make for a pretty potent energy source, given how fast he must be spinning. But honestly, I think he would have seen this sort of thing coming, given how his case was handled and how things really haven't gotten any better.
This does not comfort me.
All the Aaron Schwartzes of the future could freely share scientific papers with the world.
- Mark Zuckerberg
The rate at which they were spidering and scraping was so far beyond what any other supposedly legit spider was doing, it seemed like the logical explanation.
But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that data set? Meh, sounds like Silicon Valley disruption, give the man a medal!
I doubt Meta has deleted their local copy though ...
it is wrong to advocate for everyone to be treated equally unjustly. better to advocate for the removal of the bad laws/structures
Tired of the double standard that CEOs get away when bad things happen (because they can’t be everywhere all the time) but all the benefits when the company makes a great profit (because they’re personally driving results!).
> Authors have sued AI companies for copyright infringement before - and lost.
So, basically nothing will come out of this
So not are these publishers rightfully pissed, Meta didn’t even give them the $6.99 for each epub to begin with. They’ve stolen the whole thing as part of this “fair use” campaign to destroy human authorship free of even the most basic remuneration.
How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?
Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
And you would be hard pressed to prove that LLM's haven't advanced the arts and sciences, so at bare minimum transformative, ie fair use.
I'd much rather prosecution focus on Zuck's more serious crimes against privacy and civilization as a whole. But maybe this is a small start?
That's not revenue.
RICO specifically cites "criminal infringement of a copyright" as laid out in 18 U.S. Code § 2319. If the CEO tells his employees to download hundreds of thousands of works illegally in order to carry out his money-making scheme, how is that not organized crime even if (dubiously) LLM training on the material is fair use?
-----
RICO: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-96
Definitions: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961
> As used in this chapter — (1) “racketeering activity” means (A)[...]; (B) any act which is indictable under any of the following provisions of title 18, United States Code: [...], section 2319 (relating to criminal infringement of a copyright),[...]
18 U.S. Code § 2319 - Criminal infringement of a copyright: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2319
-----
edit:
> 18 U.S. Code § 1962 - Prohibited activities
> (c) It shall be unlawful for any person employed by or associated with any enterprise engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce, to conduct or participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise’s affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity[...].
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1962
From the lawsuit:
“Meta — at Zuckerberg’s direction — copied millions of books, journal articles, and other written works without authorization, including those owned or controlled by Plaintiffs and the Class, and then made additional copies of those works to train Llama,” the suit says. “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement. Meta also stripped [copyright management information] from the copyrighted works it stole. It did this to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.”
WTF
Until we progress as a society to the point that we can put this system behind us we should at least fight to make enforcement uniform. In fact, uniform enforcement is probably a good starting point for arguing for abolition, as the pain of that enforcement is felt by proles and elites alike.
Corporations believe in copyright so if they "break" it they should get punished for breaking rules they made up themselves.
Generally the law should be more strict for corporations than for real people.
edit: People downvoting can you argue why you disagree? I do think it's fair for the law to be more strict on the powerful rather than on the powerless.
If this was you or me, we would be in prison for decades and have a fine in the millions. Time for these people to feel consequences.
As someone said, they will probably settle for around 6 billion, that is the same as say a $100 fine for us.
I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?
Ah, found it:
>In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison having served 14 months of a 40-month sentence. Good behaviour reduced time behind bars, but now his options are limited. For a while he was crashing on a friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions, which he needs to ease chronic pain, were costing hundreds of dollars every week, and he didn’t have a job. And soon, he would need to start sending cheques to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m (£11.5m), and he’s probably going to spend the rest of his life paying it back.
I'm not even a tiny bit supportive, but there is precedent.
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/feb/01/the-man-who-ow...
Why should Zuckerberg be exempt?
* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65697595
Zuckerberg saying anything about copyright infringement is irrelevant to the actions Meta has taken in consuming and promoting the practice, and he should face criminal liability.
Now, I personally find the idea of imprisoning people for copyright offenses horrific, but I don't think it's remotely insane that someone else might come to that conclusion, given that we broadly accept it as a society.
[0] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
Zuckerberg may be CEO, majority shareholder, and on the board of Meta, but he didn't break copyright law, Meta did. So if there were to be a consequence, Meta would pay out the fine. Not sure how you jail a company.
Now, in a company with a real corporate governance structure, the board would look at the loss incurred by said fine, look at Zuckerberg, and immediately fire him for causing the loss. However, like I said before, Zuck's in charge of Meta, so that's not going to happen, and the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares, which are the main repository of his wealth. So if he thinks he can make himself richer violating copyright law in the future, he will likely direct Meta to do so.
TL;DR, in the famous words of Bender from Futurama, "Hooray, the system fails again!"
I'm still stuck on how Z telling Meta (or the relevant people at Meta, whatever) to go out there and do illegal shit doesn't make a court say that he's functionally done said illegal shit, or at least encouraged the company to do, and that he should thus be liable for that. It's not like there's much plausible deniability here. It'd be one thing if the lower ranks thought it'd be fine and did it of their own accord. It's quite another for Z to tell people to go nuts doing illegal shit.
The DMCA makes facilitation of copyright infringement illegal. Telling people to do copyright infringement is surely facilitation of copyright infringement. Surely then, Z having broken the DMCA is a fairly open and shut case, modulo calculating the damages. But apparently not?
> the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares
You lack imagination :-) but you've identified both the problem and the solution.
It could be possible to construct a legalistic jail for a company whereby if it has committed the type of crime that a human could be jailed for, then it could be frozen for the duration, say ten years, and all its assets, shareholder funds, contracts, everything were frozen and impounded.
Of course this seems completely ludicrous because it’s so “out there” but it’s worth having the thought experiment. Things like “corporate manslaughter” really have few consequences for the corporation itself - if it was actually jailed for twenty years and shareholders and officers left frozen out and on pause, then it might be the kind of punishment that really counted for something.
You jail the CEO and the others will stand up and take note.
"But they'll complain" who gives a fuck.
What you'd need is something that either removes that protection past a certain amount of value, or, to tell entities like Meta - which are basically sole proprietorships with window dressing - that they're not entitled to the protection of incorporation if they don't enact a real corporate governance model.
I always heard that criminals should be thrown in jail, it's time we started doing it to the real criminals.
Fines don't do anything to deter bad behavior. Either:
* The company pays
* They pay and the company mysteriously increases next year's comp / grants a "loan" / etc
* D&O insurer pays
In all three cases the money comes out of the shareholders' hides. It provides zero personal deterrence. The payoff matrix, as seen by a sociopath, makes it rational to always defect against the common good.
The only punishment that can really focus attention is physical imprisonment in a facility they can't choose.
SOX did this for financial reporting and gee shucks it turned out executives can follow the law after all!
They stole the life's work of millions of people.
In less civilized times, they likely would have been drawn and quartered by strong horses, and had their limbs drug to the 4 corners of the continent as a warning to anyone else that would consider doing it again.
I know there's a complaint that AI can verbatim repeat that work. But so can human savants. No one is suing human savants for reading their books.
Producing copyrighted material, of course. Training on copyrighted material... I just don't see it.
EDIT: Making a perfectly valid point, but it's unpopular, so down I go.
Sarah Silverman as the most prominent example.
The AI won't even know where the page of text it's seeing came from, and people will avoid your book as they can just ask the AI. So you make less money. (Talking about specialized technical books here.)
A machine training on all copyrighted materials in the world for commercial purposes at an industrial scale makes it disproportionate.
If a company hired hundreds of savants, then it would be illegal for them to read books?
I don't follow.
And even if we grant that those savants are also very skilled at creating "market substitutes" based on their training that are capable of competing with the original works, their maximum creative output would only be a relatively small number of new works, because they can only work at human speed.
Can you cite something in the copyright laws themselves that suggest this scale distinction?
This principle is quite universal and can be found in many places, including the US constitution and US (supreme) court decisions, many international jurisdictions, treaties and conventions.
I don't understand why it should be allowed for one savant to study and answer questions about one book, but wrong for a company to hire one million savants to answer questions about one million books.
And I'm asking where in the law or case law this is supported.
Suppose they did, and some guy was filling stadiums regularly to hear him recite an entire audio book. That would probably get the attention of someone's lawyers.
If it's illegal for AIs it should be illegal for humans, too. Is that really what you're arguing? It should be illegal for savants to read books?
Read a book, that's fine. Write a book, that's fine. Read a book and then write a book that is 99.9% the same as the book that you read and sell it for profit without a license from the original author, that's infringement.
That's what all these lawsuits are about - it's the training not the reproduction. I already agreed in my first comment that the reproduction is off limits.
In this case, it appears that Meta torrented illegal copies of the work to do the training. Obviously that's bad. But conflating that with training itself doesn't follow.
Pirating content is illegal, regardless of if it is to train an LLM.
Usage of LLMs trained on unlicensed content (basically all of them) might or might not be illegal.
Using any method to reproduce a copyrighted work by using that original as input in a way that supplants the market value of the original is probably illegal.
At least that is my rudimentary understanding.
I don't think anyone thinks that all training is a copyright violation if all the training data is licensed. For example a LLM trained on CC0 content would be fine with basically everyone.
The problem is that training happens on data that is not licensed for that use. Some of that data also is pirated which makes it even clearer that it is illegal.
If you supplant the value of the original with the original as input then you probably have some legal questions to answer.
It's a "rules for thee and not for me" argument.
the distinction isn't particularly clear cut with an open source model. If it is able to reproduce copyright protected work with high fidelity such that the works produced would be derivative, that's like trying to get around laws against distribution of protected works by handing them to you in a zip file.
It's a kind of copyright washing to hand you the data as a binary blob and an algorithm to extract them out of it. That wouldn't really fly with any other technology.
And that's really where a lot of the value is mind you, these models are best thought of as lossily compressed versions of their input data. Otherwise Facebook ought to be perfectly fine to train them on public domain data.
That seems very possible to me, and undermines the "training is copyright violation" argument. It's not the training, it's the output.
Yes it's very different. Humans need to eat, sleep, and pay taxes. You also have to pay them competitive wages.
There's nothing in the law to support your argument either. The law however does say, very unambiguously, that copying without permission isn't allowed . There aren't exceptions for "training" just because it's superficially similar to a human activity (reading a book). A human isn't allowed to hand-copy Harry Potter. Even if they bought all the Harry Potter books.
How about then to grant AI all other rights, for example, to allow voting?(sarcasm)
Just from a rational argumentation point of view. Clearly if a law is written saying as much, then sure. But there is no such copyright law like that yet.
Correct. Because until very recently there was no need.
(Copied from a comment of mine written more than three years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047>)
Learning from copyrighted content is legal - for both humans and AI. If Meta is in hot water for anything, it's piracy and/or storage of copyrighted material.
Royalties are owed and continuously owed as these models are deployed and doing inference. How is it any different to paying a small pittance to someone every time a song is played?
The LLaMA models were released openly. Copies exist everywhere in the world. You aren't going to be able to charge someone for running `llama.cpp`; a court order ceases to have practical relevance at that point.
"I made enough copies for everyone" isn't a valid defense for copyright infringement.
Second, royalties are not required to cite a source.
Can you imagine how disastrous it would be to everything from news reporting to scientific publishing if that was the case?
Also I believe performing covers is legal
I don’t get why the training process doesn’t count as any other form of transformation but then I’m not a lawyer.