Submitted 10 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.techspot.com/news/101507-meta-admits-using-pirated-books-train-ai-but.html
You see, if you pirate a couple textbooks in college because you don't have resources, but you want to earn your right to participate in society and not starve, it's called theft.
But if one of the top 10 companies in the world does the same with thousands of books just to get even richer, it's called fair use.
Simple, really.
This guy gets it. The laws aren’t applied evenly. It’s “he who has the most fuck you money wins.”
Laws are to protect the haves from the have-nots.
I went to grad school in the USA. I bought the international version of a few books that were going to be used in class (knew beforehand that the recommended lectures weren’t written by any faculty member at such a university), but that didn’t stop the professor from going aggressive and saying that my books were banned from the classroom because they aren’t the USA version. When I told the professor what the difference was between me buying a text book for $15 instead of $200 and a Fortune 500 outsourcing entire departments instead of hiring USA employees?
Interestingly, my books weren’t an issue. Yes, I gambled being publicly labeled as a troublemaker in my engineering department (probably I was labeled privately within faculty members).
The internet archive library fiasco springs to mind.
I’ll say this: If Meta and Facebook are prosecuted and domains seized in the same way pirate sites are, for Meta’s use of illegimately obtained copyrighted material for profit, then I’ll believe that anti-piracy laws are fair and just.
That will never happen.
Fair use covers research, but creating a training database for your commercial product is distinctly different from research. They’re not publishing scientific papers, along with their data, which others can verify; they are developing a commercial product for profit. Even compared to traditional R&D this is markedly different, as they aren’t building a prototype - the test version will eventually become the finished product.
The way fair use works is that a judge first decides whether it fits into one of the categories - news, education, research, criticism, or comment. This does not really fit into the category of “research”, because it isn’t research, it’s the final product in an interim stage. However, even if it were considered research, the next step in fair use is the nature, in particular whether it is commercial. AI is highly commercial.
AI should not even be classified in a fair use category, but even if it were, it should not be granted any exemption because of how commercial it is.
They use other peoples’ work to profit. They should pay for it.
Facebook steals the data of individuals. They should pay for that, too. We don’t exchange our data for access to their website (or for access to some 3rd party Facebook pays to put a pixel on), the website is provided free of charge, and they try and shoehorn another transaction into the fine print of the terms and conditions where the user gives up their data free of charge. It is not proportionate, and the user’s data is taken without proper consideration (ie payment, in terms of the core principles of contract law).
Frankly, it is unsurprising that an entity like Facebook, which so egregiously breaks the law and abuses the rights of every human being who uses the interent, would try to abuse content creators in such a fashion. Their abuse needs to be stopped, in all forms, and they should be made to pay for all of it.
They’re not publishing scientific papers, along with their data, which others can verify;
Not that I think this is really relevant here but I’m pretty sure Meta has published scientific papers on Llama and the Llama 1 & 2 models are open and accessible to anyone.
No that is relevant, however I would still argue that a paper without enough data to replicate their work (ie releasing the code of their LLM) isn’t really anything that should qualify as research. The whole point of academia is that someone else verifies your work - or rather, they try to prove you wrong.
Fair use covers research, but creating a training database for your commercial product is distinctly different from research. They’re not publishing scientific papers, along with their data, which others can verify;
Since when is there a legal requirement to publish the results of your research?
My answer to both your comments is that just because a lot of people get away with breaking the law and abusing peoples’ rights doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened and they can’t or shouldn’t be held to account.
That’s not at all how fair use works.
That is exactly how fair use works. Look up the legislation and quote where it says I’m wrong.
Zuck be stealing any thing privacy, userdata, copyrighted materials now we want him on fediverse smh
Can’t wait for any $$ fined to be evenly split between the editors, publishers and their lawyers.
You mean split 10/90 between the editors+publishers and lawyers?
Lawyering is hard work.
Anyone can write a book.
ITT: A hilarious combination of people who have no clue what copyright covers and people who think providing a tool that allows a user to generate potentially copy written material is a violation of the aforementioned.
Google literally does this in every image search, but go off I guess…
ITT: snobbish zuck bootlickers pretending to be knowledgeable of copyright laws
Yikes. We’re at a complicated crossroads where discussion around copyright is as important as ever. You’re against someone choosing a path that will empower a major corporation, so you want to… *checks notes* strengthen copyright law? You should work for Disney.
Copyright was meant to be for 30 years. It’s corporate greed that push that number up. Every version of consciousness requires the intake of ideas and transforming them. A higher quality and wider variety of ideas the better. I’m all for creators having time to profit from their works. But fighting for more restrictive copyright law is a fight against humanity and A.I… You’re going to lose that fight.
Google does not just show a link. It scrapes the content of the page to build a search index, i.e. consomes the content. This happens without explicit permission and in the past, there were no opt-out ways. Then they use this knowledge to provide search go users and incorporate ads to make money without paying the original pages. Google also started to show you these handy answers by showing some text section scraped from the page.
Like, there certainly is a similarity. And there is the difference that Google mostly feeds users to the original webpage while GenAI can replace the content.
What a cuck comment.
You sound like fun.
Even if this were not covered by copyright. Our copyright system is broken and laws can be changed. Especially if they don’t correspond to what the majority sees as moral.
I agree copyright is broken because it is a mechanic if capitalism which has been breaking for a while.
Once we learn to live without the notion that people need to “earn a living” and instead move to a system of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” without the money insensitive the true biggest reward anyone can receive for having an idea is seeing your brilliant idea being used by everyone for the improvement of everyone.
Given how LLM’s work and how nearly everything of value is under a copyright until at least the old age of the creators grandchildren LLMs would probably be pretty useless if they can’t disregard copyright for their purposes.
Not that I have any sympathy for the likes of Meta and OpenAI in any of this.
Its about time tech barons started needing food testers.
his hawaii compound could be droned instead
That’s so Meta 😂
You all do a good job at becoming like those wanking arm chair experts in reddit. Keep it up suckers.
Okay, that escalated quickly…
There’s a little Jolly Roger in all of us, isn’t there?
I love how everybody here goes from “yay piracy” and “screw copyright” to “I can’t believe they violated copyright laws” the second it’s somebody they dislike.
🎵 When I want something, man, I don’t wanna pay for it, now I walk right through the door. 🎵
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
When you compare the attitudes on this and compare them to how people treated The Pirate Bay, it becomes pretty fucking clear that we live in a society with an entirely different set of rules for established corporations.
The main reason they were able to prosecute TPB admins was the claim they were making money. Arguably, they made very little, but the copyright cabal tried to prove that they were making just oodles of money off of piracy.
Meta knew that these files were pirated. Everyone did. The page where you could download Books3 literally referenced Bibliotik, the private torrent tracker where they were all downloaded. Bibliotik also provides tools to strip DRM from ebooks, something that is a DMCA violation.
They knew full well the provenance of this data, and they didn’t give a flying fuck. They are making money off of what they’ve done with the data. How are we so willing to let Meta get away with this while we were literally willing to let US lawyers turn Swedish law upside-down to prosecute a bunch of fucking nerds with hardly any money? Probably because money.
Fuck this sick broken fucking system.
kibiz0r@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think in the Darknet Diaries episode about TPB, the guy said they never even made enough off of ads to pay for the server costs.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
He also said as much in their documentary TPB AFK.
drmoose@lemmy.world 10 months ago
They’re the same issue tho. Piracy and using books for corporate AI training both should be fine. They same people going after data freedom are pushing this AI drama too. There’s too much money in copyright holding and it’s not being held by your favorite deviantart artists.
kibiz0r@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s not the same issue at all.
Piracy distributes power. It allows disenfranchised or marginalized people to access information and participate in culture, no matter where they live or how much money they have. It subverts a top-down read-only culture by enabling read-write access for anyone.
Large-scale computing services like these so-called AIs consolidate power. They displace access to the original information and the headwaters of culture. They are for-profit services, tuned to the interests of specific American companies. They suppress read-write channels between author and audience.
One gives power to the people. One gives power to 5 massive corporations.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
So why are Meta, and say, Sci-Hub are treated so differently? I don’t necessarily disagree, but it’s interesting that we legally attack people who are sharing data altruistically (Sci-Hub gives research away for free so more research can be done, scientific research should be free to the world, because it benefits all of mankind), but when it comes to companies who break the same laws to just make more money, that’s fine somehow.
It’s like trying to improve the world is punished, and being a selfish greedy fucking pig is celebrated and rewarded.
TheHobbyist@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but it sounds like you’re suggesting we side with Meta to put a precedence in which pirating content is legal and allows websites like TPB to keep existing but legitimally? Or are you rather taking the opposite stand, which would further entrench the illegality of TPB activities and in the same swoop prevent meta from performing these actions?
I don’t know if we can simultaneously oppose meta while protecting TPB, is there?
Tedrow@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think what they are saying is that Meta is powerful enough to get away with it. You are attempting to equate two different things.
Meta isn’t using the books for entertainment purposes. They are using another IP to develop their own product. There has to be a distinction here.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
I’m advocating that if we’re going to have copyright laws (or laws in general) that they’re applied consistently and not just siding with who has the most money.
When it’s small artists needing their copyright to be defended? They’re crushed, ignored, and lose their copyright.
Even when Sony was suing individuals for music piracy in the early 2000’s, artists had to sue Sony to see any money from those lawsuits. Those lawsuits were ostensibly brought by Sony for the artists, because the artists were being stolen from. Interesting that none of that money made it to artists without the artists having to sue Sony.
Sony was also behind the rootkit disaster and has been sued many times for using unlicensed music in their films.
It is well documented that copyright owners constantly break copyright to make money, and because they have so much fucking money, it’s easy for them to just weather the lawsuits. (“If the punishment for the crime is a fine, the punishment is only aimed at the poor.”)
We literally brought US courtroom tactics to a foreign country and bought one of their judges to get The Pirate Bay case out the fucking door. It was corruption through and through.
We prosecute people who can’t afford to defend themselves, and we just let those who have tons of money do whatever the fuck they want.
The entire legal system is a joke of “who has the most money wins” and this is just one of many symptoms of it.
It certainly feels like the laws don’t matter. We’re willing to put down people just trying to share information, but people trying to profit off of it insanely, nah that’s fine.
I’m just asking for things to be applied evenly and realistically. Because right now corporations just make up their own fucking rules as they go along, stealing from the commons and claiming it was always theirs.
ElBarto@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Image One of the founders of The Pirate Bay.
yesdogishere@kbin.social 10 months ago
The only solution is vigilante justice. Bezos and all the directors and snr execs. Bring them all to justice. Exile to Mars.