• GasMaskedLunatic@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    19 hours ago

    What a relief. I was really concerned that they may have given somebody else a copy of the books they found useful enough to download themselves. /s

    Fucking bottom-feeders.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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    1 day ago

    Damn leechers. And doubly so. First they steal the books, and then they don’t even give back to the pirates. And it’s not like Anna’s Archive or Libgen weren’t struggling already. So Meta is just harming everyone involved.

  • Singletona082@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Meta, even if you aren’t seeding it still counts, because if you had the books already you wouldn’t need to grab them from elsewhere, and you refusing to seed makes you a fucking leech.

    ‘We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.’

    So where’s the RIAA/MPAA/etc now that it’s a Big Company doing this? They were the ones screaming murder about torrenting in years past. So go on. Go after these guys who are doing piracy on a literally industrial scale.

  • Obelix@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    Seeding is something to help your fellow pirates. You donate your bandwidth to help them get their files. It’s totally in character for meta to just leech everything, take stuff, not give back anything and then to run to the bank laughing

  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    For the record, the reason this matters is because distributing a copyrighted work confers a much higher penalty than simply copying it for yourself. If Meta seeded those books they could be on the hook for a staggeringly large amount of damages. It’s on the order of hundreds or even thousands per download. And that’s across all the thousands of different books Meta grabbed.

        • patatahooligan@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          It’s much more complicated than this. Given that models have been shown to spit out verbatim copies of some training material, it can be argued that the weights do in fact encode the material, just in some obfuscated way. Additionally, it can be argued that the output of the model is a derivative copy of the original work regardless of whether the original work can be “found inside” the model weights, just by the nature of the process. As of now, there is no precedent that I know of on whether this constitutes redistribution of copyrighted material.

    • mkwt@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      The statutory penalty in the US is on the order of $100,000 per infringement. “Statutory” means that the number is written into the law, and the aggrieved party doesn’t have to establish or prove actual losses.

      • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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        17 hours ago

        “Corporations are people, my friend.”

        No, it applies to “anyone,” its just that corporations can drag lawsuits on for years, so they get to make sweet heart deals for their crimes that the test of us dont.