To help train AI models, Meta and other tech companies have downloaded and shared pirated books via BitTorrent from Anna’s Archive and other shadow libraries. In an ongoing lawsuit, Meta now argues that uploading pirated books to strangers via BitTorrent qualifies as fair use. The company also stresses that the data helped establish U.S. global leadership in AI.
They are saying that seeding is inherently part of torrenting, not that it’s fair use. I mean, at least they weren’t a leech.
My stance is fuck the copyright companies and fuck Meta for everything they do except in this case, because seedings a good thing and so is Anna’s archive.
Seeding is NOT needed for downloading.
To be fair, I did say inherently part of. It would have been rude of them not to seed.
Those bastards stole all our data! But hey, at least they seeded it. Would have been pretty darn rude, otherwise.
It’s not stealing to download media.
We can hate zuckerberg and still not care that they torrented books.
Don’t be a hypocrite just to feel like you got some win.
I hear you, but hear me out… They’re creating products from the consumed torrents, which absolutely contained copyrighted materials. I’m not trying to capitalize my torrents. Although, I did use cracked photoshop back in high school for a $200 job.
And to be completely honest with you, I don’t really care about copyright infringement so much, after it’s become a tool for organizations like Disney or whoever to abuse as they please. But the main body of work torrented here would be corpus’ of text, music, … a lot of stuff that independent producers created and rely on for income.
I found this particular video quite insightful on the impact within the music industry: https://youtu.be/QVXfcIb3OKo
To be fair to Meta, I’d have to say that I don’t really know what models they’re training via that data and how they’re using the resulting products. This is Meta, though, a pioneer and industry leader in the process of surveillance capitalism. I don’t particularly have high expectations for them.
I’m not pro-copyright. I actually steal content, as in pirate it and then watch it. I don’t consider it stealing to do it to train AI on it tbh.
“Our” data implies we collectively own it, yet we don’t, copyright companies for the most part do.