Comment by mrweasel
9 months ago
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.
Exactly. There’s always a question of power.
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.
What's your test for when a use is ok and being held back by copyright law versus when it's damaging? Why is one ok but not the other?
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I love the idea. The problem is that we never even tried to establish some standard licensing system that encourages rewarding the creator while using their copyright. Most people would rather work around and re-invent a slightly bumpoer wheel.
Maybe. But it's hard to see how they could possibly win this case no matter how good their defence team is.
So, if Meta were found to have been seeding or making copyrighted materials available to others without permission, that's a slam dunk, I think.
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.
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They don't want to win, they want to reach a settlement where they admit no wrongdoing, but agree to pay some medium-large fee that establishes a precedent.¹ That fee is essentially trivial to Meta, but becomes an effective moat against new upstart rivals. The possibility of losing everything is the stick they wield to encourage the copyright owners to agree to accept only a medium-large fee.
¹ Not necessarily a formal legal precedent, but at least a floor on the "market value" of access to the data
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
Dropping the case does not create any precedent, that’s the point. Losing the case would.
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.
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...
I think the first statement is reporting on market cap and the second statement is reporting on revenue.
If you look at UMG's revenue, one of the largest labels, their revenue was 11B.
Meta's market cap is over $1.7 trillion. Over twice as large as the whole media and entertainment industry.
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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.