Comment by isaacfrond
9 months ago
It's certainly nice to see someone accused of bittorrenting with the bankroll to come up with a decent legal defense team.
9 months ago
It's certainly nice to see someone accused of bittorrenting with the bankroll to come up with a decent legal defense team.
Isn't Meta going to be battling the full legal team of the entertainment industry with this argument? I think Meta did something stupid with this argument, because there is no way that Hollywood or the music industry is going be pleased with a precedence for legally downloading copyrighted material. They will now do everything in their power to get Meta found guilty.
Or, more likely, drop the case to avoid establishing a precedent.
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.
Awesome. And just to be clear, Meta will walk away scot-free, but Billy Torrent is definitely still going to be fined $500,000 if he pulls down "Sleeping Beauty" from 1959.
1 reply →
As much as I dislike the idea of individual copyright owners, like visual artists or writers, having their works scraped for AI without compensation…
If this does break the stranglehold that copyright has over creative acts, especially in the US, this feels like a net good.
4 replies →
Maybe. But it's hard to see how they could possibly win this case no matter how good their defence team is.
5 replies →
what is worse to them:
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
1 reply →
The combined market cap of Disney and Comcast (who owns NBC and the like) is about 350 billion dollars [1][2]. Facebook alone is worth about 1.7 trillion [3]. I had trouble finding exact numbers on this, but it seems like the movie industry itself in the US is worth less than $100 billion.
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/
Market cap is not money in the bank.
The current admin and the judges they installed are favorable towards Zuck and antagonistic towards most of the entertainment industry. If this case is seen through (which is not likely) & Meta wins (even if via appeal to higher courts), the legal decision will likely involve a very specific carve out that says what Meta did, and only what Meta did, was fine. It will have no affect on you or me.
“… the full legal team of the entertainment industry with this argument …”
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 .
Meta already runs three of the top eight copyright-violation distribution networks.
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.
Meta is a couple of times larger than the entire entertainment industry combined...
I think its reversed, and that's just the USA -
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...
4 replies →
There's more money to make for entertainment artists in licensing their image and voice for content creation at scale (for the average joe). They need the LLM to exist, so there's no point in crying about how it was made.
The unfortunate side effect is that a megacorp gets to vacuum up the sum of human knowledge for free, boil it down, and sell it back to us for a nice profit.
Ah you mean like Google Search?
Google doesn't "vaccuum up" anything. Every site indexed by Google is still available without using Google at all. They are _copying_ information, not moving or removing it.
13 replies →
Google Search brings you traffic and revenue. LLMs do not.
1 reply →
I still own my content. Google links to it and sends me traffic. We both win. This sort of relationship is not present when my content is anonymously fed into a training model intended to be used to extract users before they are sent to me. And, yes, I am aware Google has pulled some cute shit with this definition, and when they do it then it's also bad.
2 replies →
How long before a handful of entities, having already ingested the available content into their proprietary systems, bankroll assaults on Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.
Likely never, as those platforms are continuously updating at no cost to the siphons training their LLMs on them
Really?
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.)
This isn't a decent defence, it's a losing desperate one.
Meta's real (nigh invincible) defence is 'we have way more money than you and can keep this going forever'.
Money doesn’t keep it going forever, only about 2-4 years, even with appeals
That’s enough to bankrupt individuals but industries fighting industries can see it to the end, if they don’t settle
1 reply →
The noun phrase was "legal defence team" not "legal defence". A decent team can put forward a poor defence
They can just bribe the president.
Not sure if he has the power to, and if everyone else will let him, but some EOs opening up the copyright system would be very welcome. There are already some things he's done around this:
https://www.omm.com/insights/alerts-publications/trump-admin...
1 reply →
Maybe Trump will legalise internet-based copying.
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).
2 replies →
Probably no need. Elon Musk already did that. And one of his companies just published a shiny new version of grok. I wonder where they get their training material. I'm sure it's all just tweets and no stashes of ebooks or other material got downloaded in some way or otherwise fell of the proverbial wagon.
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.
1 reply →
As the richest man on Earth, with multiple investigations into him by various government agencies shown us, nothing is desperate with billions of dollars "in the bank".
At some point I expect we'll see the "shareholders made me do it" defense. You know, the fiduciary-duty-to-keep-making-billions-regardless defense.
Yeah, kinda surprised they haven't just flat out denied it, hoped it would blow over.