Meta (facebook) torrented 87.1tb of pirated books to train AI
Meta (facebook) torrented 87.1tb of pirated books to train AI
Meta’s alleged torrenting and seeding of pirated books complicates copyright case.
Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,"
Big tech taking without giving back to the community once again.
I think this is still going to be a net benefit to us, though. Meta may not have contributed much bandwidth, which is leeching in the short term, but in the long term they're now forced to contribute something much more important; lawyer power. Meta is going to have to fight to defend piracy.
Yeah they'll lawyer up, but only for themselves. They have no reason to to do anything that benefits the rest of us.
Maybe the torrenting community could see some legal benefits, but only if incentives align. Which they very well may not because Meta is not one of us and their interests don't really align with anyone else's.
Motherfuckers are actually arguing that seeding a torrent isn't "distributing" unless they can show an instance of someone downloading a book from their IP... If that flies they better overturn every fucking piracy conviction ever.
For real.
Just another day in the system only oppressing the poor.
Aaron Swartz does it for educational journals and gets the hammer brought down on him. Zuck n' Co do it and get government funding.
Boo.
Well Aaron didn't deepthroat a mushroom-shaped presidential cock to ask for pardon
Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.
Douchebags.
Lol why do they have to do things in the most cartoonishly evil way?
After doing terrible crap for so long without much, if any, punishment leads to brazen and absurd tactics...
Soon I expect something akin to them running their own marketplace scams or similar fraud just because it's so profitable vs expense/penalty.
As you say, it's like a bad caricature of the stereotype.
I think it's because in the US downloading and owning is by far not as risky as sharing is.
They get out of liability like that.
won't somebody please think of the shareholders?
Yeah, i do. load gun
If we (people in general) do it, we're being filthy thieves and the reason why everything is bad. But when it's a megacorpo, it's suddenly a-OK?
Screw this shit. Information should be like the air, free for everyone. Not free for the GAFAM chaste and paid for us untouchables.
The sad thing is that corporations have more rights (quantitatively) than humans.
- Can offset tax liability through complex structures
- While they cannot vote, they can effectively hide their identity behind Super PACs
- Any criminal liability results in fines, never jail time for anyone in charge
- in fact, all corporate executives benefit from liability shield, so long as their actions can be tied back to benefit the company in any way
- Can own just about anything a human can own, with the added benefit that they belong to the company. Digital rights (e.g. books, movies, etc.) legally belong to an entity that cannot die.
Any criminal liability results in fines, never jail time for anyone in charge
That just applies to American based companies like Purdue Pharma or GM, if you're working for a foreign companie like VW you're absolutely going to jail and get a way bigger fine
Zuckerberg’s corporate piracy era is peak hypocrisy. Stealth mode torrenting on company hardware while scrubbing traces to avoid accountability? Classic. Meta’s obsession with “data” apparently includes swashbuckling for copyrighted material—just don’t let the plebs do it.
”Smallest amount of seeding possible”? Pathetic. Even leechers have standards. But why bother with ethics when you’re a billionaire playing digital privateer? The courts will shrug, the bourgeois judges will yawn, and Zuck’ll sail into the sunset with his ill-gotten datasets.
Yo bro, maybe invest in a VPN next time. Or just buy a legislature.
I guess that's more than three strikes. Why didn't their ISP disconnect them for abuse?
What gets me the most about these sorts of stories is how they're specifically doing this for profit and are not only getting away with it, they're partnering with other megacorps and are collectively being propped up by institutions and governments that jail individuals that wouldn't even register on the chart for lost profits.
Doing it for personal use, without profit or gain, is supposedly illegal. Doing it for profit certainly appears to be legal.
This is so fucking funny
Previous discussion https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/21649585
Isnt thatvway to much volume for text? I would imagine every book ever written to be judt a few tb. But I also don't know much about the issue
They downloaded the torrents from Annas Archive, which are standing at ~500TB currently. Keep in mind that you're dealing not only with text, but also with books scanned as images, books with lots of illustrations, scientific articles with illustrations and also comic books.
Those books couldn't all be in only plaintext. I'm certain that many of them are also scans.
I see. Thanks
what did they use? µTorrent?
So they're one of us? Welcome to the club, outlaws!
Good news is that since feds go after individuals sometimes for petty crimes of piracy, they are surely going to dig in very deep to this corporate piracy with massive crippling fines that will set examples for other companies thinking of doing the same. Right?
That's very little.
87.1tb of books is very little?? Have I just been downloading the smallest size pdf and djvu files by pure luck?
One sci-hub. Very little if we talk about all literature.
Not really, all of 1984 is just 70kb.
