Comment by userbinator
9 months ago
If this was 15-20 years ago, arguably at the peak of P2P filesharing, I suspect most people would side with Meta.
9 months ago
If this was 15-20 years ago, arguably at the peak of P2P filesharing, I suspect most people would side with Meta.
I think people would dunk on Meta for not seeding
Why do we have to play this purity game where we take a situation, remove context, and wag our finger at each other?
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.
The difference being... what? Just scale?
To be clear, Meta didn't "[resell] the laundered data": or at least they're claiming there's no proof of seeding.
Yes, scale matters, a lot. I can feed my neighbor some rycin and I'm a murderer. If I poison the state's water supply with rycin and millions die, I'm not just a murderer any more. I'm now a terrorist and an entirely new set of laws apply to me. Same with blowing up my neighbors barn vs blowing up a large building. Scale matters and these "what's the difference except the scale" comments seem unconsidered or naive to me.
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The difference is scale AND that META does it for profit, violating plenty of licensing terms in the process as well.
the laundering is training AI with the stolen data
they don't sell the data directly, but use it to train software that they use as part of their product
if they want to make the library argument, they should have to manually visit and scan library data like everyone else... otherwise I should be available to access the entirety of my local library remotely without restriction
It's today and everyone on HN still should side with them.
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.
Okay so here’s the issue for me. I totally hate copyright, and think it should be abolished or heavily reduced. At the same time, I hate Facebook for its ruthlessly immoral business practices. Should I be happy that Facebook gets to fuck over a bunch of authors because it’s a big, successful company rather than joe schmoe? Does the face they’re ignoring a law I don’t happen to like make it fine that the trillion dollar company can ignore the justice system and do whatever? They aren’t your friend; if they can they’ll change the law to make it specifically only legal when training models.
In the Netherlands this is still the law.
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.
11 years ago the EU made the Netherlands change their position: https://www.zdnet.com/article/downloading-pirate-material-fi... AFAIK this is still the case - the Netherlands is more poorly-enforced than other EU countries, but it's still illegal to download pirated material.
And of course the "thuiskopieheffing", a tax on any storage device that ostensibly is used to fund those whose media gets copied, is still in effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#Netherlan...
As long as I'm paying a tax for it, it is my right to copy
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Weird, TIL.
This has never been enforced though.
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These days for books at least Anna's Archive is the place to go.
https://annas-archive.org/activity
Maybe Meta has a "trading desk" in the Netherlands. :-)
I still do on this one specific argument. Just because I loathe them doesn’t mean I disagree with everything they say.