Ex-Meta Researcher Torrented Pirated Books, Deleted It 'Due to Litigation'

nbajka

You wouldn’t download a car.

Aboutplants

Yes… I also deleted all of those MP3s I downloaded in the 90’s and 00’s…

ashkankiani

Meta shares responsible for genocide and we're still too fucking scared to go after them for that properly.

WarmWash

So is piracy good or bad?

someothherguyy

meta has issues with employees using its network to pirate things, or its just a good time to try to eat with the AI scraper assumption https://torrentfreak.com/meta-pirated-adult-film-downloads-w...

xbar

You wouldn't steal a book....

AbhiDunna

Everyone is arguing about whether piracy is good or bad, but that’s not what this case is about. It’s about whether the rules apply equally. A student who torrents a textbook risks a lawsuit. Meta, reportedly, torrented hundreds of thousands of books, had an employee delete his copy “due to all this litigation,” and is now arguing over which server logs it has to hand over. They could have licensed these books. The likely reason they didn’t is that the cost of getting caught is lower than the licensing fee. A court has already called the training fair use, but how the books were acquired is a separate question, and that’s where this should be decided. If an individual did this at scale, no one would call it a gray area.

pessimizer

This is organized crime, because the organization knew (and depended on the fact) that he was doing this, and it is also the intentional destruction of evidence. The fact that he was seeding a torrent is the thing that least matters here. They weren't making billions from seeding a torrent, they were spending bandwidth to do it. The fact that they downloaded a bunch of copyrighted works illegally in order to create their business is. Copyright violation is civil, but conspiracy is criminal, and destruction of evidence is criminal. These AI companies are criminal. Everything associated with these enterprises should be seized and either run by the state, or run on behalf of the civilly injured parties. edit: keep downvoting it, but I will keep posting it. This behavior is just getting by through nerve, bribery, and the fact that the US economy depends on it being successful. It is unambiguously criminal, and anybody aware of it who participated (everybody) is implicated. It is so bizarre how you people think you're better than people smuggling counterfeit designer bags or selling bootleg DVDs. You're worse.

0x20cowboy

Even if they had bought all the books, wouldn’t people still be mad they trained an AI with it? I doubt it would quell the “It can emulate an Author’s style” complaints.

nico

It’s interesting that it’s supposed to be very bad to destroy evidence, especially after litigation has started. But in the end, usually the consequences are better for the person destroying the evidence, than actually preserving it If the evidence was very damning, and it’s not there anymore, the judge/jury can’t really properly make a determination about it if it’s gone I’m not a lawyer, so someone with more legal experience could pitch in, but that’s my impression from seeing these big corporate cases on the news, as well as some personal experience in smaller civil cases in court

reorder9695

I don't know why, but piracy seems awful to me for things like books or music when it's one or a small group of people producing the media, but it doesn't seem too bad for films/series where they're often hard to get legally, and are created by large groups of people. It's not like any less human effort goes into them, it's just something I've noticed feeling and I can't put my finger on why. Maybe it's just that human connection, whatever that really means.