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Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn’t illegal without proof of seeding

⁨541⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨JustJack23@slrpnk.net⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-defends-its-vast-book-torrenting-were-just-a-leech-no-proof-of-seeding/

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Comments

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  • latenightnoir@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So, piracy is legal if you don’t distribute? What the fuck is Zuck smoking?

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    • ulterno@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Well, that’s how it tends to be in most places.
      You don’t get caught for downloading; you get caught for uploading.

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      • umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        That’s just confirmation bias. The buyer/downloaders don’t get caught is just because there are too many of them and going after the distributor is an easy target.

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      • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Yup. In switzerland its legal to leech, illegal to seed.

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      • latenightnoir@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Eh. Makes sense from the perspective of protecting profits, I guess, because the actual thing which bothers them is the volume of lost potential customers…

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    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Elitism. He is of the belief that he is better than you, and doesn’t live in the same world as you.

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    • regrub@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      And the copyright owners have no problem with them profiting from derived works that were made using pirated content?

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      • rain_worl@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        you can download it, but you can’t use it. so restrictive :(

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  • spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Another example of Republican principles. Corporations are protected by laws but not bound by them, while the average citizen is bound by laws but not protected by them.

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    • EmptySlime@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      In group and out group baybee!

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      • spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I want to know how to switch groups.

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    • kilgore_trout@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      What does this have to do with the Republican party? The other party upholds the same copyright law.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So not just they pirated them, which may or may not be a crime and where I may or may not be impartial, but they are also leeches who would be banned on any decent torrent tracker of the olden days.

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    • Podunk@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Truly despicable. Seeding to at least 1 to 1 is the bare minimum of courtesy and humanity. If you dont, its unethical

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      • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Seeding shouldn’t be done on ratios - being the only one seeding 10 seasons of a tv show and getting it to 0.4:1 is way more helpful than seeding the same movie as everyone else and getting to 20:1

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      • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Hey now some of us just have wildly shit upload speeds and couldn’t hope to reach 1:1 without spending an entire year seeding a single movie.

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Yeah, I always went for 2:1. It doesn’t really cost me anything, so why not?

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  • singletona@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So where’s the MAFIAA? Here you go guys, literal industrial scale piracy.

    Or are you afraid to go after someone that isn’t a teenager in their parent’s back room?

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    • Eezyville@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Fighting Meta will cost easy more money than fighting a teenager.

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      • singletona@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I am aware. I was simply demonstrating they were never about money, simply bullying people who couldn’t fight back.

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    • Omgpwnies@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The real shit deal is if there was a ruling against Meta in this, it would still be worse for everyone because there would be precedent to litigate against people who only consume pirated content (which has been tried in several countries and found to be legal)

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      • singletona@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        …Oh god…

        you described a situation where i want Meta to win…

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  • Mohamed@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This is irrelevant because Meta should not be tried for this the same as a private individual would be.

    The case for torrenting being illegal for private individuals is one or both of:

    1. Downloading in of itself is stealing.
    2. Uploading is giving unauthorized access to someone else who otherwise might have had a harder time finding it. Anything else, such as watching, reading, listening, learning, etc. is not illegal (or does not make sense to make illegal). The exception might be publishing. This is rare for private individuals (e.g. using pirated FL studio to make a commercial song).

    For corporations, a lot change. Firstly, a corporation downloading a torrent is necessarily making unauthorized material available for some people of the company. It’s like a group of 20 friends all downloaded and uploaded to each other. Secondly, they used this copyrighted material commercially (like playing pirated music in a public night club). Both should be illegal.

    However, all of this is still a distraction. The real issue is using copyrighted materials to train commercial AI. Does Meta require permission from copyright holders to make AI based on their work? The law is grey on this, and desperately needs regulations.

    Just my thoughts.

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    • Geodad@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      AI has already stolen everyone’s work. The internet is officially a free for all.

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      • aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        back in the good ol’ days.

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  • molten@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Of course that fuck isn’t a good seeder. Leech.

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  • JustJack23@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Also I love how they they don’t say they didn’t seed, just say there is no proof

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    • FireTower@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      This is a motion to dismiss not an answer. That’s how those work. It is linked to by the journalist in the article.

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  • Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This is honestly a win-win. Either the courts recognize that the LLM uses stolen copyrighted content, or they recognize that torrenting is legal by default.

    Though with the way courts have been bending case law into knots recently, I wouldn’t be surprised if they somehow word the ruling in a way that favors Meta and makes torrenting outright illegal.

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    • WrenFeathers@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Ahh, but you’re forgetting the Rules for Thee clause that protects any and all wealthy, white, corporate gremlins from facing the same or similar consequences that any of the poors might face for the same infraction.

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      • doodledup@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Life is simpler when that clause exists.

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    • sik0fewl@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You think it’s actually going to go to court and have a verdict?

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  • daikiki@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It’s not illegal to download books without yourself offering them for upload. What’s illegal is when you feed those books into your reality devouring content monster and it outputs all that copyrighted content in a slightly different order and you profit off that content vomit.

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  • distortwave@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Well, at least they released llama for free, But honestly, their hypocrisy is so pathetic.

    Hey, who knows? Maybe now they’re gonna like start funding legal defense funds for people torrenting. Part of their whole corporate social responsibility, If they feel so strongly about it… right? /s

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    • daytonah@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Let’s just make legal the evil we do…

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    • balder1991@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      At the very least they’ll create a legal precedent.

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        They’ll just settle if the case isn’t going their way.

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  • TheFogan@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I mean isn’t that at least some extent technically true to a level.

    I mean if we weren’t talking a shitty corporation to begin with. If this were say, a 20 year old mcdonnalds worker pirating game of thrones.

    IMO the bigger concept is still rather than if they got it… defining whether using that data after the fact is legal. I mean hypothetically speaking lets just say they bought 1 copy of each of the millions of books, or bought used copies, or say had a machine that could scan every book in a library. IMO the issue shouldn’t be whether or not anyone managed to download the books in their pure form afterwards. The focus should be the AI trained on their books, is going to be distributing portions of their book to millions of people, and any potential profits of such will be going to meta and uncredited to the original authors. The idea that meta’s involvement in torrenting may have let little timmy get a copy of his text book 15 seconds faster… shouldn’t be the driving force here.

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    • Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I mean isn’t that at least some extent technically true to a level.

      It’s completely true. That’s why a lot of people don’t seed. And why your ISP won’t bother you if you don’t.

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  • brightandshinyobject@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So it’s okay if we download content from well known online repositories?

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  • kingblaaak@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You wouldn’t download car…and then upload its stats to a centralised system

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  • badbytes@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    My class action Spidey sense is tingling

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  • phillycodehound@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Double Standard!

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  • timewarp@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Well good news if they are successful in their arguments it can set precedent to make piracy legal.

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    • Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That’s what I’m saying. Let the Zuck cook.

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  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Facebook got FBI_README.txt at the root of their DC++ share.

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  • plaineatin@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That’s true, it’s not really your problem in most areas if you don’t seed, basically scraping them. If a legal person comes your way it’s not good but for facebook they have lawyers. They will just say not our problem, we never hosted it, just scraped it. not many people would decide to go against facebook lawyers bc they can pay to drain you.

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  • b3an@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Rules for thee and not for me, plus we PROFIT off of it to boot. But none of you guys can do that. Only for Richys.

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  • hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    According to the law (the thing that determines if something is or isn’t illegal) it’s illegal. Zuck is a criminal.

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  • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This is why I try to find legitimate sites offering direct downloads instead of illegally uploading during torrenting. There are many sites offering direct downloads, but I often have trouble finding them.

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