629 points | by isaacfrond22 hours ago
It makes sense from the point of view that distribution is the act protected by copyright, not the mere act of copying. If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar, but then people might start wondering how keeping something from public domain for 90 years after the author's death could possibly be about protecting the rights of the author.
This is why you often see people getting fines for torrenting (Germany is extremely notorious for this for example), but fines for using Usenet, IPTV, streaming or book download services are a lot more rare (which doesn't mean they're nonexistent)!
Operating / selling / promoting those services is a different matter, and most sensationalist articles about "people fined for IPTV piracy" are actually about people involved with that businesss, not the users.
I even remember reading about some (European) torrenting case that was successfully defended on the grounds of something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads, but I can't find the source right now.
You generally can't set a client to 0B/s (as zero usually means “no limit”) but I'm not sure a good¹ lawyer on the other side would let you get away with claiming glacial distribution is not still distribution. At 1Kbyte/sec (I don't know a client off the top of my head that has control down to the single byte) a 50MByte file (not unusual for a book with illustrations/photos) can be transferred in less than 15 hours, a couple of Mbyte (a plain text book, compressed or just short) in less than one hour.
There are clients that can be set to not seed at all, or you could patch a common client that way. Some that don't even offer the capability at all (some command-line wget-style tools), that would be a legally safest option IMO².
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[1] good as in good at their job, no moral judgement implied!
[2] caveat: not a lawyer, never played one on TV, nor even in local am-dram.
I guess some people may be worried about actual fines, but I would assume the biggest risk to most people is getting blocked by your ISP, which in many cases requires less than the legal standard for proof of copyright infringement.
You're sent a cease and desist letter with a prewritten cease and desist contract that includes confession of guilt and the obligation to pay a contractual fine, plus additional fines for future breaches.
So in reality the point of the letters is to scare you into signing and paying a fee. Actually collecting evidence is irrelevant, because the lawyer's goal isn't to go to court. That's expensive and he may lose!
The lawyers goal is primarily to stop you from pirating, and then also get lucky enough to win a small lottery payout along the way.
Send a million letters and one thousand pay? You'll be an overnight millionaire.
Most commonly used clients won't let you turn off seeding, but you can indeed limit the upstream to a really low value. You can also, at the same time, seed a ton of different things, preferably quite large, to saturate your upload and make it statistically improbable to fully send a copy of any single file.
Now, based on my feeling and cases I've seen in my country I'd say that the judge would make a claim that the sheer fact of making these files available is enough.
Moreover, there were rulings stating that even if you don't have the whole torrent on your disk, but only few fragments you are already in violation.
For me, it make sense, as when a company gets caught red handed they are judged based on the inventory of stolen programs they have, not an actual usage of them.
Lastly, here in an european country, consuming pirated media (books, movies, music, etc.) is not a crime. However there are plenty of caveats:
- you can't share it, so torrenting, as mentioned, might be illegal; getting a copy of a movie on a hard drive from a friend only puts him in jepardy
- it has to be personal use, so watching it alone or with your wife is ok, but playing stolen music in a club is not; commercial use is strictly forbiden ("commercial" as in "commercial licence", so usage in context of a company, so facebook case here is strictly in violation)
- it has to be a media that's already been published somewhere (cinema, television, streaming service); pirating leaks and prereleases is strictly forbiden
- pirating software is whole different animal, since now it's not a copyright, but a breach of licence agreement
You can think about it as owning a tiny portion of "soft drugs" (like marijuana), which is legal in some countries. Selling is not.
How can that be true? There is no way for me a breach a license agreement without being party to the agreement.
License is an agreement that grants you rights that would otherwise be prevented by copyright or other laws.
You can violate a copyright, or a license agreement, or both, or neither.
It depends on client, it is possible in e.g. transmission
Fortunately that’s not how courts work.
I’m not familiar with the case, but it’s possible setting a 1 byte per second limit showed intent to not distribute.
Either way this is oedantry. My point doesn't change; it depends on what kind of book you download.
Either way, the argument is moot, most torrent clients set a minimum upload rate of 1-5kb/s.
While I am satisfied it has been proven you are aware that by torrenting said files, distribution also occurred. However, I am also satisfied it has been proven that by setting a 1 byte per minute upload limit, you had taken those steps you could to limit uploads in an effort to prevent the prohibited activity. Other evidence presented to the court demonstrates you are regularly employed, that your finances are generally in order, and you have not received payment for the meagre distribution that occurred as a consequence of your behaviour.
It is my opinion that the case brough by the prosecution does not rise to the level of requiring a sentence, nor even a conviction.
You're free to go.
It’s a lot easier to find out who is torrenting than to find out who is using Usenet for example though.
With torrents you can see the IP addresses of peers. And then I suppose they ask a court to tell the ISP to say which customer had that IP addresses at that time.
With Usenet you’d have to get a court to get each Usenet provider to give you a list of all customers that downloaded a file. That seems a little bit different to me.
And who knows, in the case of the torrents maybe they don’t always even need to get a court involved. With all of the data brokers out there, maybe there are lists you can buy of real people tied to different IP addresses and when you have a match you send a threatening letter telling them to pay up or they will take you to court?
I've heard.
In Germany, if you torrent something without protection of a VPN, you may receive a letter from a blood-sucking legal firm within a week or two, with a fine that can be argued down somewhat.
If you’re torrenting and you happen to get caught, you will receive a letter from some copyright lawyer with a fine of X amount as well as a cease and desist.
The only knock on your door is the mail delivery man
In France despite a hefty budget, the org in charge (HADOPI) was so bad they merged it with another one and I think it os over now.
I am pretty sure this is false. It is just that distribution carries heavier sentences and is easier to discover, not unlike with drug dealing.
It is not legal, anywhere, to (for example) borrow a DVD from someone, copy it, and give the original back. In some jurisdictions you have a right to backups, and a right to resale, but you emphatically do not have a right to privately copy.
If the DVD doesn't have strong DRM (which is pretty rare, CSS counts as strong DRM) you are allowed to make a private copy in Finland. There is a levy on various storage mediums to compensate private copying. I believe there are similar laws in other countries based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
I'm not 100% sure if strictly downloading from illegal source makes downloader liable for damages, as far as I know in all court cases there was seeding involved (in Finland).
Of course the levy is somewhat questionable these days since pretty much everything has strong DRM (as bar is very low) and thus you are not allowed to make copies. The authors who protect their work with strong DRM still get part of the levies though.
>you often see people getting fines for torrenting
>fines for using [...] are a lot more rare
Are you saying something kind of like, "When you torrent, you are also distributing that copyrighted information, which is often prosecuted, but simply procuring that information (without redistribution) is not." Or is it something different?
For example: in America, it is completely legal to buy, sell, and own a radar detector. Radar detectors are used to "detect" when the police use radar to catch speeding motorists. In spite of it being legal to own a radar detector, it is illegal to actively use a radar detector for its intended purpose. There are various reasons I have heard for this, but the most common was that the components of the device itself is not illegal, and picking up those signals are not illegal (because they are targeted at the public) but the reason and intent to use one is to commit a crime, and the use of a device in the assistance of committing an offense (speeding) is illegal. It's this kind of weird grey area, where you can possess the thing, but can't use it for the reason you (likely) bought it for.
Is it kind of like that? Like, you can possess copyrighted material that you have not paid for (for whatever justification), but actively sharing that copyrighted material without authorization, is criminal? If so, does that mean that lots of Germans simply don't seed illegal torrents?
"Attached to the core rights of free speech and free press are several peripheral rights that make these core rights more secure. The peripheral rights encompass not only freedom of association, including privacy in one's associations, but also, in the words of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), "the freedom of the entire university community", i.e., the right to distribute, the right to receive, and the right to read, as well as freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, and freedom to teach.[144]"
"The United States Constitution protects, according to the Supreme Court in Stanley v. Georgia (1969), the right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, and to be generally free from governmental intrusions into one's privacy and control of one's thoughts.[145]"
"As stated by the Court in Stanley: 'If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.'[146]"
[144] - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/381/479/
[145], [146] - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/557/
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
I'm not saying that either of these situations are directly analogous to the distribution of copyrighted works (since among other things, I don't think there's any way to buy a TV without being able to freely give it to someone else), but that it's not immediately obvious to me that the illegality in distribution has to be symmetric, and that there might be a coherent legal argument that people having the right to _receive_ information isn't inconsistent with the only people with the right to transmit it refusing to allow it. The part of the Constitution (edit: Supreme Court opinion; not actually the Constitution itself) quoted above doesn't seem to say anything about the right to share anything, just to receive it.
a more pertinent example to the main topic at hand
i download a file onto my PC. in doing so i have made a copy of that file onto my PC.
if that file is a copyrighted work, e.g. a musical work, i have reproduced the work by downloading it. i have copied it. streaming music is covered by copyright for the same reason - a copy is transferred onto your device because you clicked on a button. the act of copying, or reproducing, the work is the bit that matters.
the distributor (spotify/apple) just gave me access to their original copy to make my own, new, copy. distribution is covered, but slightly different as it is facilitating others to infringe copyright (if i’m pirating music).
in your TV example, a closer idea would be if i 3D printed a new TV based on a patented design. probably not allowed to do it (i don’t know patent law) but who’s gonna enforce it? no one knows about it.
if i start selling my 3D printed TVs, well, i should probably get a lawyer sharpish.
—
also, isn’t knowingly receiving stolen goods a crime? so receiver of the TV in your example could be charged with a crime if it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt that they knew it was stolen?
In this specific example, probably yes.
> Does the answer change if Robin Hood were instead the owner of the mansion next door
Yes, it does. The main problem here is that Robin Hood is well known to obtain everything he has in the world by stealing it.
In this situation, the noble does not own the painting, so much as they possess it and have only been granted a license to privately view it, not a license to show it to others, and further license only to reproduce it for their own personal archival purposes - Robin Hood did not have license to view the painting, and the genie did not have license to reproduce it
but now that the reproduction exists, does it carry the same license with it, and should the neighbor be held responsible for the original violation of the license, when all they’ve done is receive an illegally produced copy?
Should the owner if the original painting be held responsible for failing to prevent it from being illegally viewed and copied?
What is the point of making such an "analogy"? Might as well say the noble has a copy of Die Hard in their DVD collection.
Yes, forgery is a crime in many jurisdictions, and in some it does not matter whether or not you are transparent about it being such -- specifically for copyright/trademark reasons.
Interestingly, I think that the more direct analog to what we have today would be if the noble themself had the genie copy the painting and gift it to their friend Robin Hood. I do think the same logic I gave above ultimately applies to whether our current legal system would allow the artist to enforce exclusivity, but I find it a lot more compelling as an argument about whether it _should_ be allowed or not compared to the hypothetical you gave. In your version of it, it doesn't feel like allowing what Robin Hood did is particularly beneficial to society, but in the version where the noble is an enthusiastic participant in the copying, it seems a lot more like outlawing it would lead to some harmful dynamics (like you mention about whether the noble bears responsibility for protecting access to the painting based on obtaining it). In other words, having a system where the artist is allowed to enforce his exclusive distribution rights universally actually seems _less_ problematic to me at first glance than one that only applies to those who sign an agreement when purchasing the paintings.
To put this in terms of torrenting, my naive understanding is that right now, it's definitively considered illegal to seed protected content, and the question is whether it's legal to download it without seeding or not. I actually think that it would be worse to allowing downloading without allowing seeding as well, so the system that Meta is arguing for would be worse than if what they did is also illegal. However, I'm honestly not sure if they're actually right or not about what the law says, and that's why I brought up the hypotheticals I did. I also honestly don't feel confident in my feelings on whether I'd prefer to ban both seeding and downloading protected content or to eliminate the legal protections entirely and allow both, but it doesn't seem like that's actually the legal question at the heart of the current matter.
This gives you the right “to beat them up” but not the right to learn a secret. You can take a patent and build that thing in your house. The government can’t stop you, neither the inventor. It’s when you try to sell it that they can come after you.
I don't think that is correct. The patent act states:
>...Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.
https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-35-patents/35-usc-sect-27...
Note where it says "makes, uses". In practice, it is highly unlikely that someone would know about the infringement if it was just done for personal use, but that doesn't mean it isn't infringement.
It is. It's often called the "research exemption." You literally can only get into any kind of trouble when your intentions are commercial.
Thus, the 1A locks in speech rights as they existed in 1791. Because there was no right to slander, or threaten, or commit treason, or "share" in 1791, Congress retained the power to regulate.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and intentions of the constitution. Slander and fighting words are exceptions to the first amendment that were determined through the legislative process.
Essentially the entire US constitution is negative rights - the right to X when X means government NOT doing something. Right to freedom of movement, right to freedom of religion, right to freedom of speech, right to privacy - these are restrictions on government to protect the liberties of the people. And then you come to the tenth amendment -
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
It seems abundantly clear from even a cursory analysis that the founders explicitly designed the constitution to limit and restrict the power of a centralized federal government, as treasonous, violent disregard for a powerful centralized federal government is quite literally the premiere founding principle baked into the US's history.
Congress has zero power whatsoever whenever they lack the consent of the goverened. The functional legitimacy of the entire federal government is near zero - we're living in the orwellian nightmare where the military industrial complex more or less runs the entire show from behind the scenes - something Eisenhower tried to warn us about over half a century ago.
The legislative process can't make exceptions to constitutional provisions. These were recognized as not covered by first amendment protections by jurisprudence, not legislation.
Interpreted as an ordinary voter would have interpreted it.
Which is why we immediately replaced a loose federation of Strong States with a new government built around an explicitly empowered and strengthened federal government?
The idea that the constitution was built around a very weak federal government is wrong. The founders built a weak federal government, immediately ran into problems with it, and immediately those same founders built a new government with a strong federal government with EXPLICIT and CLEAR authority and supremacy over the states on certain things.
For example, modern conservatives often decry how the federal supremacy on interstate commerce is used to regulate interstate commerce, but the commerce clause was built to tear down all possible protectionism and trade barriers states had erected amount themselves. The strong federal government was also built explicitly to be a single strong bloc for trade negotiations.
There were plenty of anti-federalists around during this time. They got to air their complaints and opinions. Nobody listened to them because the articles of confederation, and the loose, weak federal government it built was just that useless and broken. The founders literally tore up the government to make a new one without the authorization to do so because there was no stability, no long term hope for the existing one.
Nobody listened to them? I think most historians would agree that they were instrumental in getting the bill of rights added to the constitution. For example:
>...Anti-Federalists in Massachusetts, Virginia and New York, three crucial states, made ratification of the Constitution contingent on a Bill of Rights. In Massachusetts, arguments between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists erupted in a physical brawl between Elbridge Gerry and Francis Dana. Sensing that Anti-Federalist sentiment would sink ratification efforts, James Madison reluctantly agreed to draft a list of rights that the new federal government could not encroach.
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-anti-federalists-and...
No. The first amendment explicitly applies to Congress; by extension it applies to the policy-making authority of the federal government generally, and via the 14th amendment, it applies to the states.
It prohibits the abridgment of freedom of speech by government institutions, without distinction as to the identity of the speaker or the content of the speech.
It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).
Not sure you can make this blanket statement about “Americans” any more. It seems like an increasing number are fine with censorship when they aren’t the ones being censored.
This seems to describe ‘Murican Freedom pretty well to this particular American, for what it’s worth.
I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.
I honestly believe we'd be better off with informational hygiene standards, too. The last two decades have taught me this lesson - free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society, and when you find a security hole that big, you patch it.
I recognize there's a balance to be found, and reasonable people will disagree on where the tipping point is.
How does this work? What danger represents freedom of speech? With lack of it dangers is understandable: it is a giant "welcome" sign for bloody totalitarian dictatorship.
But this has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not in any way cancel out responsibility for fraud.
Fire in a crowded theatre? CP? Threats of violence? Hate speech?
(And no, I don't understand how this is a serious position that serious people can seriously hold, but then that is how I feel about libertarianism in general.)
The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central planning organizations on the planet for so long. If central planning is libertarian then I'm a blue whale.
The term "free market" gets misused just as much. It's not a free market if the government (or the Fed, which is just an arm of the government) has its thumb on the scales.
See, this is why libertarianism doesn't make sense. If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place. The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check. The alternative is Oliver Twist, ecological disaster, maybe even feudalism.
But we agree that there's a lot of hypocrisy on the Right in general. A lot of insider trading and "I'm a free speech absolutist" and then buying up mass media to censor people who don't agree with you.
And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.
Also, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food, I've got some oceanfront property in North Dakota I'd like to sell you. You do know, don't you, that antibiotics in your beef, for example, is done all the time in factory farming with government approval?
Well that seems like a bad faith interpretation of my argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Bradford_sweets_poisoning
Sure, with reduced life expectancy. If you're fine dying out in your 30's, maybe 40's at best you can eat whatever you want. Your body is pretty resilient to poison short term.
>, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food
Extremist takes aren't doing you a favor here. Like I just said, we can resist a surprising about of poisons short term. Many people indulge in alcohol after all. We have no need to strive for "all bad things" out of our food.
Narrator: "Most humans didn't survive past year five due to preventable illnesses and food born contamination, the humans' ancestor's infant mortality rate was rather high before the age of food safety and soap".
Of what? Where are you getting this from?
A ban on X and Meta would be a start.
If you want to argue that you need to fact check all that information to, for example, decide how to vote in elections, none of that information is of any value for that purpose either, because it's basically all propaganda at this point. There are no "independent" sources of information that you can trust, other than your own eyeballs and brain. (Possibly you are lucky enough to have some friends and family whose eyeballs and brain you can also trust.)
Then there is the "liberty at all costs" types, the fringe of which idolizes the David Koresh lifestyle.
There are plenty of folks who also think it is OK to ruin someone's entire life if they post something sexist to Twitter.
Americans are not so easily generalized; they come in many flavors.
Meanwhile money basically dictates who gets elected on your side of the pond, whith billionaires being crazy over-represented in your political offices, despite being a tiny minority in your population.
Also, the people advocating for smaller government are often on board with executive power consolidation and increased police and army funding, so I think it's little more than a stance.
You can't "discover the truth" on your own, no one can. Are you able to go everywhere something happens in the wordl to get a first hand account of the event and then build your own conclusions? Of course not, you rely on media (social or legacy) to digest the facts for you, and they might (and do) influence you and how you think about the world. It can't be another way, so fighting obvious lies isn't a bad thing in my book.
I prefer it to a name that's more accurate because it signals what the purpose of the law is, which I consider more important than its implementation.
Now that I think of it that also works quite well when naming things in software. Don't name things after their implementation, when you can help it.
In Germany copyright law there is actually one provision for the real transfer of copyright: death. So as far as copyright is concerned, the transfer of copyright requires literally death of the author - which might get a chuckle out of people into media studies.
Copy in copyright is a term for the actual writing that gets published on ads, or magazines, or in a news paper. "I need to get the copy from marketing for this campaign." "The editor hasn't approved the copy for the article yet."
Typically, people not in/around the industry aren't familiar with the term, which leads to the confusion.
Nowadays of course copyright covers much more than text, and includes such “copies” as the public performance of a theatrical work or reproduction of a sculpture, so the modern copyright clearly doesn’t have the meaning you’re using.
I see what you mean about it not helping to answer the question in a direct way.
Where I’m coming from is I think that if copy and copy were of a different origin completely, like from French vs Greek or something, and the homophone-ness (homophonity?) was a coincidence, then I could see the authors of the law using the much less common industry term without considering whether people would get confused.
But if one refers to the other, it seems implausibly confusing for them to use the way less common meaning and not expect anyone to get confused in a way that would change the meaning of the law. Or was the copyright law written by the characters of mad men??? Seems more like an overreach by certain media publishers.
In particular, the original Statute of Anne (the first law establishing a copyright) is officially titled:
> An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Copies, during the Times therein mentioned
No doubt people used the word "copy" in the sense you mean, but "copy" in "copyright" is absolutely about copying as in copying some data.
According to Meta's motion the claim about "seeding" (cf. the claim about removing CMI) relates to Cal Penal Code 502(c), the "Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act".
Whether the data accessed is "copyright protected information" is irrelevant to section 502(c). 502(c)(2) applies to "any data".
https://www.calpers.ca.gov/sites/default/files/spf/docs/ca-p...
Actually this is something that has always perplexed me about corporations that want to meddle in our government. Obviously they must know that it is going to involve the government following the interest of… some corporation. The voters are pretty fickle and having the government work for your competition seems like a pretty rough spot.
I guess it is like a prisoner’s dilemma type thing or something.
That's the best part, it's forever copyright! Because the creators are corporations that never die, or a huge number of humans, whomever dies last.
that's exactly how it's called in french - droit d'auteur
But never seed your honor, that would be illegal!
Man, that's such an ignorant type of thing to say. Copy does not only mean the act of making a duplicate. Copy also means the words/text directly. Terms like copy editor refer to those that make edits to the copy=>words/text, not those that make edits to the duplicates. Maybe you are unfamiliar with the use of the word in that manner, but that's not the rest of the world's problem. That's a limited knowledge problem on your end.
Even in the "rules" of copyright, you're allowed to make copies. Back in the days of the olds being young and in school, we had to go to places called libraries to look things up. We could pay the librarians to make copies of things for us to take home to use in whatever task we were assigned. The fee wasn't for any kind of rights usage, but simply to cover the library's expense in providing that copy to you.
It's amazing how quickly information is lost from the lack of use
Do you think freedom of the press involves the right to make any kind of juice you want?
And in this case we know that copyright refers to the production of copies, not of copy:
> the Statute of Anne is formally titled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Copies, during the Times therein mentioned"
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne#Text )
There are no controls other than on making printed copies.
It’s very common in litigation for the plaintiff to accuse the defendant of every violation they might be guilty of or liable for (“throwing the book at them”), and for defendants then to systematically try to strip them away.
As far as I know, Meta is not yet claiming their activities were completely lawful.
Here is the actual filing: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Kadre...
I'm not going to murder someone, steal their car, then put out a statement that I was unaware the car had expired tags and I shouldn't be prosecuted for it.
Defending yourself from an accusation using a hypothetical admission doesn't actually admit to it. e.g. I didn't murder anyone, and I didn't steal that car, but if even if I did murder them, and steal their car, the car's expired tags wouldn't apply to me because [reason].
If you care about justice, you want to enable every truth to come out, and be decided on. If you prohibit someone from making an argument, because it might imply something that is separate, you limit the the possible outcomes to something strictly less fair. If someone did murder a person them and took their car, they should be prosecuted for that, but just because you did commit crime a, and crime b, doesn't mean you should be convicted of crime c. Even if crime c is the least significant. That's still not just.
Aside from murder , he faced:
- criminal possession of a weapon
- illegal possession of a silencer
- illegal possession of an automatic weapon (it wasn't full auto, but somehow due to the large capacity magazine, NY state considers it an automatic weapon)
So had he used a hammer or a knife, he might be able to get out again because murderers in NYS can be out in as little as 20 years. But all the firearms charges can effectively double his sentence.
Fair enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if none of those methods pan out.
1) Given the timeline, it seems unlikely that anyone was doing a packet capture.
2) Why would anyone at META have been paying attention to, or logging, which blocks were being seeded and which weren't? Who would have personal knowledge such that they could admit that transmission didn't seed the declaration of independence 6 million times?
Other examples of evidence include an admission from a Meta employee during a deposition that they were instructed to download a bunch of copyrighted material and the undertook the efforts to do so.
Or, perhaps the plaintiffs seized the machines used in the scheme (happens all the time following a TRO and discovery motion) and found whole copies or traces of the copyrighted works on them, or even local client logs that suggest that it was done.
They are addressing both the second and third counts. The "Direct Copyright Infringement" isn't being addressed by these claims. This is even quoted on the filing you provided:
Sounds like Meta are banking on the entertainment industry looking at it and deciding that the risk of losing this case is too high given Meta’s almost infinitely deep pockets to mount a legal defence.
If this does break the stranglehold that copyright has over creative acts, especially in the US, this feels like a net good.
But Meta's contention is 'you don't have any proof of that'.
I think there is enough existing case law and ambiguity in the law as it's written that Meta stand a reasonable (although not a good) chance of being able to argue that they did not commit any crime because a.) they did not create the infringing copy (or that the infringing copy that they received was a technical copy, and they did not create an infringing copy themselves) b.) they did not infringe for private or financial gain (the models they trained on this material were released to the public for free). There's an argument that copyright infringement occurs only upon distribution, and as far as I'm aware, there's no case law that just downloading a copy is illegal.
Meta may also be able to argue that their use of the material could be considered 'fair', as it is non-commercial, transformative, and that the use of the material does not harm the market for the original work.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not arguing about the merits of these arguments, just that they seem to me to be plausible.
Copyright protects against making copies of the work, which they definitely did.
> There's an argument that copyright infringement occurs only upon distribution
Not in most countries. Certainly not in America.
> b.) they did not infringe for private or financial gain (the models they trained on this material were released to the public for free).
They definitely gained from it. If their argument rests on that then they're screwed.
> Meta may also be able to argue that their use of the material could be considered 'fair', as it is non-commercial, transformative, and that the use of the material does not harm the market for the original work.
Probably their best bet but it's hard to see how that would fly given that it is commercial even if they released it for free, and fair use normally depends on how much of the work you use; they used all of everything.
I agree. But a good lawyer might be able to argue that they only received a copy, they didn’t make one themselves.
> Not in most countries. Certainly not in America.
I think the law itself is clear that reproduction is its own right, but I couldn’t find any case law where someone was prosecuted only for reproduction. There are certainly some concerns with the law as it’s written (such as the first sale doctrine, or home ripping of CDs, etc.).
> They definitely gained from it. If their argument rests on that then they're screwed.
Yes but were the gains private and financial? Again, a good lawyer might be able to argue that actually, Facebook invested a lot (financially) into training the models, and then released for free, so are net negative financially.
> fair use normally depends on how much of the work you use
Fair use is a very difficult one to put an exact definition on, and whatever definitions exist do not determine based purely on the amount of the work used. There is case law that a full work can be considered fair use, and that even minimal parts of the work are not. Again, a good lawyer could perhaps make this argument successfully.
I don’t think anyone without access to a legal team that costs millions would stand much of a chance here, but Meta might.
¹ Not necessarily a formal legal precedent, but at least a floor on the "market value" of access to the data
Precedent that LLMs get to keep & use copyrighted data
LLMs get to keep & use copyrighted data without legal precedent
I bet the industry will file amicus briefs to try to support the plaintiffs
If you’re going to have this fight, wait until you have it with a worse-prepared and worse-resourced opponent where you’re more confident of the win.
Facebook could simply buy most of the companies involved if they give them too much shit. We've consolidated way too much power into a few large tech companies. I don't see it very likely that Hollywood could win this.
[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/walt-disney/marketcap/ [2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/comcast/marketcap/ [3] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/meta/market-cap/
Is that a problem for them ?
Doesn’t meta make more money than the entire industry of Hollywood including all home entertainment revenue ?
I am certain they do.
EDIT: 2024 full year revenue for meta is ~160B as compared to (roughly) 140B for the entirety of the film industry .
The U.S. Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry is the largest in the world at $649 billion (of the $2.8 trillion global market) and is projected to grow to $808 billion by 2028 at an average yearly rate of 4.3% (PwC 2024).
https://www.trade.gov/media-entertainment
Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook Inc., continues to dominate the digital landscape with impressive financial growth. In 2024, the company's annual revenue reached a staggering 164.5 billion U.S. dollars, marking a significant increase from 134.9 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year. This upward trajectory reflects Meta's ability to monetize its vast user base across multiple platforms, solidifying its position as a tech giant.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of...
If you look at UMG's revenue, one of the largest labels, their revenue was 11B.
Google paid about $1b to Viacom in the YouTube piracy dispute. That's a lot of money, but do you recall anything seriously changing when that happened?
To me, the funniest product is Beat Saber. The best VR game by far. 99% of the value is tied up in violating musician's rights. Meta saved that game. Did people stop making music? No.
This book torrenting thing is complex. The main thing plaintiffs want is discovery of the training data. It's not complicated. There's no justification for the court to block that, it's a fishing expedition yes, but one that will turn up a lot of fish. Then all AI companies will have to acquiesce to it. That is the "win" for the industry.
If anything, the law should require that they seed their training data so that the competitive landscape converges on actual technological innovation and not moat building through data destruction.
The books copied by Meta, explicitly disallow it, and require payment for distribution.
I'm not unhappy about it; but was never consulted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster_Corp._v._Tickets.....
Things should be free, as in speech, not as in beer. Especially in this case. The giants of Silicon Valley could in fact purchase these rights.
Few authors care about people personally enjoying a product through otherwise means. They do care about mass distribution without attribution, without royalty, and without regard.
Used to, but more recently it's probably LLM agents using Google not people. And even if it's not yet, it will be. Last time I searched for something on Google it messed up so bad I quickly returned to GPT-4o+search.
The answer to bad products is not to throw away the idea of people getting to control their own content.
a) Meta are (so far) releasing their models for free.
b) There's nothing stopping non-mega-corps from doing the same, especially if this precedent was established. (Training is of course expensive but this is a challenge, not an absolute block.)
That’s enough to bankrupt individuals but industries fighting industries can see it to the end, if they don’t settle
https://www.omm.com/insights/alerts-publications/trump-admin...
After all, the main people hurt would be Hollywood, which is run by people supporting the Democrats. And it would be popular with many voters (not an issue for Trump but it is for Republicans).
Counter example: ownership of Amazon MGM Studios and its parent Amazon.
They would probably benefit by handicapping Netflix/Disney/WBD/etc.
Historically, copyright cases fell in favor of big media corporations based on the notion that they were very rich and powerful and could fight things endlessly, bribe/lobby politicians, and cause laws to be changed (e.g. the DMCA).
However, AI companies are wealthier still. Some have revenues exceeding the GDPs of most countries. Surely, rich enough to outright buy out some of these media companies. At which point it would stop being copyright infringement because they'd own the copyrights. I'm sure some other arrangement will be found that is less mutually disruptive than a lot of court cases. Both sides are making too much money for anything else to happen. Forget about small book publishers making much of a difference here.
Trump could make Grok, Facebook, Google and OpenAI's actions legal in response to a bribe from Musk.
Or he could step up enforcement actions against Facebook, Google and OpenAI while issuing a pardon to Grok.
(It's Tom Lehrer, for any who don't recognize it.)
/kickban
>These torrents are not meant for downloading individual books. They are meant for long-term preservation. With these torrents you can set up a full mirror of Anna’s Archive, using our source code and metadata (which can be generated or downloaded as ElasticSearch and MariaDB databases). We also have full lists of torrents, as JSON.
They have the money and legal team to push it to any conclusion, but that conclusion would risk so many huge industries in the Us that too many parties would be effected. That would incentivize companies to drop this case against meta and the status quo can continue.
I'm under absolutely zero illusion this will set some precedent for one way or the other. It's too valuable to too many people involved.
A single person self representing against a company that is essentially one of the largest law firms on the planet, and can outspend them tens of thousands times over - what's to be gained?
Expect Meta to "win" as in the plaintiffs just give up and calculate it's not worth pursuing. It would stun me if they even settle.
Not to mention the LLMs themselves are creating unauthorized copies of copywriten content. But again, Meta has unlimited money. Different rules for them.
Like how do you know that (say) Netflix actually has the right to stream you every show that they do? And how do you know that some random ad supported website doesn't?
However, in this scenario you'd very likely have a good "innocent infringement" defense, which would allow the judge to lower the statutory damages to as low as $200. Since the damages available are so low it wouldn't be worth suing over.
Try this as a citizen.
This is mostly leftover before computers were a thing (think cassettes and paper copiers).
In practice, it's a racket and OSA is a mafia that doesn't pay to anyone. Also, the fees are rather small considering the the purpose (I think it's capped at ~$5 per device), but since authors don't actually get money from it(OSA practices) , it doesn't really matter.
Anyway, downloading audiovisual media is fine, seeding is not.
The Berne Convention has a special provision for this. Something about if the biggest rights organizations agree then a country can have laws that allow some free copying. So a tax on empty media (in Sweden also covering the computer hard drives and the flash memory built into phones) is used to pay off the big music and movie companies.
The weird thing is that only the biggest industries are paid off. No matter what you use your storage for, it is the big movie and music companies that receive the money. No other industries are paid off as far as I know, so most others just have to accept that their stuff is legally copied for free, without compensation (a few things like software are always illegal to copy, so those industries are not affected).
Not that I am a lawyer.
The article lists the "Published works [that] may be used for private use" and that paragraph closes it with:
> This Article does not apply to computer programs.
[1] https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1993/1798_1798_1798/en#ar...
It's been a while since I've been in one, but our public libraries had coin operated photocopiers, you can just walk in, grab literally any book from the shelf, and copy away.
The Netherlands works the exact same.
... as a private individual, you are toast.
I think the more appropriate quote to paraphrase would be one from Dennis Hopper's character in the film Speed (1994): "Oh, no. Poor people are pirates, Jack. We are tech innovators!"
> A paraphrase or rephrase is the rendering of the same text in different words without losing the meaning of the text itself
It wouldn't have succeeded, just like this won't.
Lawyers will deploy any possible argument, just in case, even if it has a 0.1% chance of working because why wouldn't you?
Meta's wholescale theft, however, is pretty hard to defend, and Meta knew it. That's why they went to some lengths to hide it.
Similarly, that OpenAI whistleblower, the one whose family was calling for a murder investigation, might be alive today if it wasn't pretty well known that stealing the work of thousands/millions of people to make a for-profit imitation machine isn't exactly cool or legal.
Edit: egregious typo.
He intended to make journal articles publicly available. They should be, as many are publicly funded, and academic publishers like Elsevier do not pay for these articles. Scientists provide them to journals. Universities, libraries, and we then have to buy back access.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
I think they have about a coin flip of a chance that it passes muster in the courts.
I listened to other people's music and learned some of their songs before writing my own music, that doesn't mean my songs are distribution of theirs.
I read other people's books and short stores and news articles before writing my own, that doesn't mean my writing is distribution of theirs.
It's a travesty that we let the RIAA and MPAA sue defenseless kids and elderly for impossibly large sums, forced them to settle out of court to avoid expensive legal fees, and then use those acts of terrorism to establish the insane idea that filesharing was tantamount to "theft" or should be restricted.
I hope Meta wins. I hope we see a reversal of the attacks on fair use and the end of abusive fraudulent DMCA takedowns, and I'm happy to finally have a powerful ally in the resistance against oppression from the copyright cartel.
Downloading is fine, uploading is not.
We used to have a sort of national library of every single media on Usenet back in the day.
As long as I'm paying a tax for it, it is my right to copy
Your comment doesn't even make sense! The intention was never to make piracy okay, it was to offset a tiny fraction of the financial losses. These financial losses are still occurring even now that piracy is formally illegal, so the tax is still justified.
More generally this seems a form of freeloading: picking the parts of the EU that you like, ignoring the parts that don't. Who cares about society, it's just me me me. Pure selfishness.
None of that really has anything to do with me, I'm not a bureaucrat. But they chose to still tax me, so as far as I'm concerned I have the moral right to download as much as I want.
Anyway, feel free to lobby the NL to drop this tax and then we can talk.
This has never been enforced though.
There's an ENORMOUS difference between college students pirating some movies or albums and the company worth $2 trillion doing it programmatically across millions of works and then reselling the laundered data.
This is a completely unserious discussion without considering context.
To be clear, Meta didn't "[resell] the laundered data": or at least they're claiming there's no proof of seeding.
It doesn't make it legal at all, it just makes it no longer interesting for IP owners to sue you.
Of course the rights holder would have trouble proving whether you did save it, but that's a different issue.
Nonetheless its the same thing: if they can prove you watched it, the damage is small for you and because IP holders are splittered, and you didn't just watch content of one, its probably not worth it to sue you.
My instinct/gut says that an AI model is a derivative work from the training data (in that it quite literally takes training data to produce a new creative output, with the "human addition" being the selection of training data to use), but there's not really clear judgements on it either way for the time being, which leaves room to argue.
The actual methodology used ("isn't an LLM like a computer reading a book for yourself?") is an irrelevant distraction in this regard. Computers aren't people and don't get that sort of protection; they're ultimately tools programmed to do things by humans and as a rule we hold humans responsible when those tools do something bad/wrong. "Computer says no" works on the small scale, but in cases like this, it's not really an adequate defense.
But it's not just supervised training. Maybe a model trained on reasoning traces and RLHF is not a mere derivative of the training set. All recent models are being trained on self generated data produced with reward or preference models.
When a model trains on a piece of text it won't derive gradients from the parts it knows, it will only absorb the novel parts. So what it takes from each example depends on the ordering of training examples. It is a process of diffing between model and text, could be seen as a form of analysis not simple memorization.
Even if it is infringement to train on protected works, the model size is 100x up to 1000x smaller than the training set, it has no space to memorize it.
The larger the training set, the less impact any one work has. It is de minimis use, paradoxically, the more you take the less you imitate.
That should matter when estimating damages.
This would automatically outlaw any new use of information (eg music sampling) by default.
If all novel uses were banned from the outset, cultural progress would suffer immeasurably.
What I think will suffer more is the bank accounts of AI corporations.
Because "content owners to say what can and cannot be done with their data" is quite broad.
If we want to use data owned by others and make money with it, we can do two things:
(1) just grab the data
(2) ask the content owners
I think what is fair is closer to (2) than to (1). Especially since the data was originally intended for human consumption. What you call "training" is what another person might call "mechanized processing", and would not fall within fair use of the data.
> If we want to use data owned by others and make money with it [...] ask the content owners
So is it "no commercial use without permission" you're arguing for?
> mechanized processing
Or are you arguing that training should fall under the existing mechanical license provisions for songs? I don't think you are, because those licenses are compulsory, and you seem to want an element of choice for the copyright holder.
Ok, put the chatbots aside for the moment. If [brand new use] for a book is invented, and I buy a copy of that book and want to do [that new thing] with it, should the copyright holder of that book be able to block me?
They lose that right as soon as they sell it to other people.
No, you can't sell a book to someone and then sue anyone who reads the book, upside down.
That would be ridiculous. If you don't want someone reading your book upside down, or training on it, then don't sell books.
This is a bit like saying that taking a holiday picture of someone, and putting a surveillance camera on the street are the same thing.
I think many books actually prohibit the storage into an information retrieval system and AI can be considered a form of that.
No I don't. Because a human is choosing to enact the training regardless.
Just like if a human held a book up to a rock. It would be ridiculous that an author could ban a human from "training" a rock from a book. Its their book, and they can show it to a rock if they want!
Turns out, nope, that's not ok.
It's also true that anyone can go to a public library and read all the contents for free- the point is they can't further distribute them except in a highly processed form (i.e. they can distribute original products influenced by what they have read). Here the issue is the scale of both the "reading" part and of the "producing original work" part.
Arguing that copyright forbids training AI models without paying authors is the moat that would prevent any hope that small labs, individuals, and open source communities can ever compete with these huge corpos.
The books and other artworks they are arguing over didn't come generated spontaneously from nowhere, and it's disingenuous to refuse sharing them to inform what is basically the worlds next currency : Intelligence. Doing so is just saying that knowledge and intelligence must belong to rich corpos only and never be democratized.
This is unexpected but Meta is basically being the good guy by giving away their research papers and models weight resulting from millions of $ of training.
The alternative to open source AI is everyone's subjugation to the oligarchists in charge of Intelligence. Copyrights holders who argue against free training of open source models from their work are morally and ethically wrong here.
And of course, conveniently, if you get a copyright infringement lawsuit, they can just point to that. A company promising legal defense is only worth the paper it's written on and there's always carveouts like that, with the likelihood of them being used probably being equal to the risk the company takes on with that promise. US Copyright lawsuits having pretty extreme fines makes them fairly likely to get used.
i'm beyond sick and tired of these large corpos arguing 'rules for thee but not for me.' unfortunately, in this country with no meaningful legislation around privacy or really, anything digital, it's a game of 'who has the slickest lawyers to pull one over on the judge/jury' it would seem.
Fundamentally, the ability to share what you own is a right no government has legitimate authority to restrict. Such laws are illegitimate. Governments don't own people, they govern them. Governance is scoped within limits of authority. Even slaves and prisoners can share their food,clothing and other resources with each other, preventing them is not just inhumane but beyond the authority of slave owners and prison wardens. It boils down to this: if you own something, you can give it away for free because ownership implies authority to retain and give away the property. The right to own things can be restricted, but once ownership is allowed, no one has the authority to restrict retention or free exchange of owned resources. Governments can regulate commerce, but free exchange of resources is beyond their authority since it isn't commercial activity. Keep in mind that this is a more crucial and important concept beyond basic liberty and human rights. If you can't own stuff, nothing else matters regarding your relationship with the government. Telling you that you own stuff but then stripping away the meaning of ownership so that you don't really own stuff is a sneaky way of governments exceeding the limits of their authority.
Another sneaky and fraudulent thing is implied acceptance of licensing. Stamping a copyright notice,eula, ToS,etc.. means nothing. if You buy a book with cash, your exchange is with the person who sold it to you and You now own the book. It isn't licensed to you, it is yours to give away for free. The same concept applies to software, video, music,etc.. neither intermediaries, nor original content authors have the authority to enforce a licensing agreement or copyright over the content, unless a license agreement is required at point of sale, and even then the agreement is beyond the two participants. If you agree to a copyright license contract and purchase music, and then you give it away for free, it makes sense to get sued by the copy right owner over violation of that contract. But the person you sold it to has no obligation to honor a contract they did not enter. The government has no right to implicitly force people to enter a license agreement when they receive goods free of charge by someone. only the person who originally agreed to the contract should be held liable.
If I were to scrape Meta's information and use it to train AI chat bots, would they say "That's fine, go ahead" because I'm not sharing the raw information in another way?
I expect all LLMs to be illegal within a year if this is the sort of high caliber defense the top minds of meta can come up with.
Copyright agencies that monitor torrents here have actually verified that peers offer at least one offending chunk on protocol level and the Market Court has decided it's the minimum that can be considered sharing. As far as I know, nobody has yet claimed their client has been modified to download without seeding.
I wrote a modified torrent client that fake seeds. No data (not even a byte) of the content itself is ever uploaded to another peer.
I'm aware this is an asshole move, but it made the lawyers happier.
I've genuinely been wondering if someone building these models has done exactly that, precisely after discussing with lawyers. It seems like the obvious move, legally.
Are they actually claiming only that they didn't share after the torrent completed? Or is the journalist just confused?
My understanding with bittorrent is that normally during download you are also uploading. "Seeding" is just what the uploading part is called when you're not also downloading.
I think it is possible to download without doing any uploading at all, but I feel like the onus of proof should be on them to show that they actually did that.
However, while we have no idea the lengths that Meta went to (or not), I suspect they have the engineering chops to fork and tweak their own 'download-only' torrent client.
The fact we’re even discussing this shows that there’s at least some doubt that Meta could be successfully prosecuted for downloading alone.
With regards to uploading, legally speaking, it sounds like they’re right. Generally, the presumption of innocence means that whoever’s doing the accusing carries the burden of proof, and without any evidence that Meta did anything wrong, it also sets a worrying precedent that Meta would proactively have to prove their innocence in the face of no evidence to the contrary.
But at the end of the day I don't think Meta care enough. They see themselves as being above the law and likely didn't seed 'more than necessary' only because it didn't benefit them.
One of the reasons people sharing were gone after is you could aggregate the loss to one lawsuit - the person sharing was responsible for every lost sale - rather than chasing the thousands of individual lost sales, one at once, for each download. Not sure that actually made the best sense from a legal perspective as the sharer wasn't necessarily benefiting - but it was pushed for practical reasons.
In this case I'm assuming Meta downloaded as many pirated books as it could get it's hands on in order to avoid paying for them.
Seems common sense what they did is/should be illegal.
The outcome of a fair use claim by one of the world's largest corporations to ingest wholesale an entire corpus and use it for commercial purposes is probably not the same as one by an individual person who wanted to watch a movie.
It's not the same use, and is much more likely to be found unfair.
The question I see for someone sitting in the judge's chair is whether this is fair use, sufficient alteration to constitute a new work, or a derivative work requiring compensation.
This is an open-and-shut case.
It’s abhorrent that a multibillion dollar company is not just pirating the content for personal use (? wtf how can a for profit company download it for _personal_ use ?) but also _profits_ on the pirated content by using it for training material.
The whole “corporations” are people ruling is fucking stupid, and truly shows how much this country bends to the billionaire class
America:
-Selfish assholes? check! -Weirdly religious? check! -Entrepreneurial? check!
Next they'll say that "just because we downloaded the content does not mean we USED the content, and you have no proof we used the content, so we are not pirates".
