Precedent only applies equally if we are able to prove the same in court. 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.
That’s also precedent, and a template for using on institutions to break copyright. Still seems like good news to me.
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.
Artisian@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Precedent is, in effect, new law and it absolutely does change who gets taken to court and the costs of defending your case. So, depending on which arguments the court accepts, I won’t need fancy lawyer. And it won’t require nearly the risk, creativity, or time that it requires of Meta’s legal reps today. Look at civil rights or environmental protections case law; big profile early cases were horrifically costly, and now compliance by company’s is largely by default.
Horrible people and companies can set good precedent, often without intending to. For example, plenty of criminals set and clarified due process law. So we absolutely could all benefit from Meta’s bad intentions.
We benefit from institutions that will be training their own AI, hosting data publicly, and have the resources to mirror a precedent. Care to cite sources that the arguments being accepted are going to carve out Mark Zuckerberg by name as the one person who can ignore copyright? I haven’t read the fillings, but this should be easy.