A lawsuit filed by several authors against Meta centers on Meta’s alleged use of pirated books for AI training data and the technical details of BitTorrent which was used to obtain them. Yesterday, Meta filed a motion for summary judgment, while countering the authors’ request to resolve the copyright claims in their favor. Meta’s request includes new information, including the revelation that its uploads of ‘pirate’ library data were roughly 30% of the data it downloaded.
Who cares? I’m confused. Why is their upload relevant in the first place? I thought all the IP holders were out there arguing that the download was the issue.
Never mind that in this case there is a profit reason for the download in the first place. Even in notoriously lenient areas with copyright that is a bigger strike than whether they reseeded anything in a peer to peer platform.
But hey, here we are, I’m rooting for Meta here. Absolutely put all the money in dismantling overreaching copyright regulation. Let’s find some Duck Tales comics or whatever in there. Disney vs Meta in court over copyrights. The Godzilla vs Kong our generation deserves. Let’s do it.
Downloading isn’t the issue, it’s seeding (uploading to other peers, which is considered distribution of copyrighted material).
Their only chance at a defense (and it’s incredibly bad) is arguing that they only stole the stuff but didn’t distribute it to others. Kinda like buying drugs is typically not as severely punished as selling them.
But yeah I really don’t think copyright laws are gonna change in a way that makes happy little individual piracy easier. Meta might want that at this very moment, but they’ll for sure feel differently about THEIR intellectual property.
Without even thinking about big vocal IP holders like Disney.