Comment by gruez
9 hours ago
>and the DOJ has done nothing against the AI companies and their IP violating antics.
For good reason. Courts have so far ruled AI training is fair use, and it doesn't look likely to be overturned by the supreme court. Theres also the matter of some labs pirating books to get training data, which is illegal (they lost in civil court), but it's unclear whether that can be criminally prosecuted.
Courts have also ruled that sharing in P2P network is enough to get hit with 150k in statutory damages per shared work.
AI companies did quite a bit of uploading while e.g. getting Anna's archive over BitTorrent.
It's transformative. Not aimed at exact reproduction, so not in the scope of copyright law.
They participated in uploading the files as part of the downloading the torrent from other peers. Their use of the BitTorrent protocol to acquire these files would not have been transformative.
6 replies →
I think you misread. There is nothing transformative about bittorrent automatically sharing parts of a file you're downloading with your peers.
The supreme irony that they're now trying to peg distillation as illegal.
Hacking other companies is illegal as far as I understand.
1. OP specifically mentioned "IP violating antics", not hacking
2. All the hacking legislation (and criminal law in general) require proving intent, which so far as we can tell didn't exist in those cases. At best you can try some "reckless" or "negligent" angle, but that would a novel legal argument and would be risky to prosecute
> All the hacking legislation (and criminal law in general) require proving intent
No, they don't, see laws that make negligent behavior illegal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
But officer, I didn't mean for my autonomous bank vault busting robot to autonomously bust any bank vaults!
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Okay, and? If anything, the Swartz case was even more direct fair use. There's very little to use JSTOR for which isn't some form of teaching, scholarship, or research!
Clearly the fact that the end-use is (possibly) fair use isn't the only thing that matters.
It wouldn't be ruled fair use in a sane society without bribery and lobbying with competent technologically savvy law interpreters.