Comment by d1sxeyes
9 months ago
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?
I've seen the most people take the most issue with the insane "authors life + Xx years" that copyright lasts for, not really components of fair use.
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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.
> 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)
Copyright protects against making copies of the work, which they definitely did.
> There's an argument that copyright infringement occurs only upon distribution
Not in most countries. Certainly not in America.
> b.) they did not infringe for private or financial gain (the models they trained on this material were released to the public for free).
They definitely gained from it. If their argument rests on that then they're screwed.
> 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.
Probably their best bet but it's hard to see how that would fly given that it is commercial even if they released it for free, and fair use normally depends on how much of the work you use; they used all of everything.
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Meta has a target on its back after getting away with meme jacking / users reposting without attribution / tanking media outlets and becoming a “news source” over the last decade.
I’m all for them getting a dose of reality in this case, and nothing consistently whips tech in the pocketbook like whining their interpretation of Fair Use is legal when it clearly is not.
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.