8 ms·
Meta pirated at least 101 of my books, and others
- dfedbeef 1y agoThe penalty for willful infringement in the US is pretty steep per instance.
- thedevilslawyer 1y agoGood point to think about. What specific act of training is infringing? Looks like none in this case, but happy to be corrected.
- dfedbeef 1y agoDownloading and reproducing the pirated copy of the work. It's called a COPYright for a reason.
- thedevilslawyer 1y agoDownloading is completely legal towards fair use (and hence non infringing). No reproduction happens in the act of training an LLM.
- AlexeyBelov 1y agoUsername checks out.
- CamperBob2 1y ago(Shrug) We'll see what the courts say, Gary. If training AI doesn't constitute fair use, you will lose more than you could ever possibly hope to gain. As will the rest of us. Meanwhile, sublimate your dudgeon towards advocating for free access to the resulting models. That's what's important. Meta is not the company you want to go after here, since they released the resulting model weights.
- alanfranz 1y agoDoes fair use imply that pirating copyrighted material is ok? I mean, it’s a serious question; I don’t see this as really connected. As long as an AI can “understand” the content of a book and spit out a summary of it, or even leverage what it learned to perform further inference, I’d be inclined to say that this is fair use; a human would do the same. But this has nothing to do with using pirated material for training, especially for some kind of commercial purpose (even if llama is free, they’re building on top of it) - I don’t see why it should be legal.
- ricardobeat 1y agoI get the commercial/legal angle, but from the viewpoint of AI being something we as a society have an interest in developing, how should this work? Do you want to severely limit evolution of models by having them pick (and buy) a tiny subset of all books? Should every training run put money into a pool that gets paid out to every rights holder of every book that has ever been published? Should Meta buy a physical or electronic copy of every book they want to use for training? That has zero impact on revenue for individual authors. Would they be paid by word, by token, by book? This makes little sense. We don’t charge people for the knowledge they acquired while going to the library over 50 years, AI just squeezes this into weeks. Our legal framework simply doesn’t fit.
- card_zero 1y ago> Should every training run put money into a pool that gets paid out to every rights holder of every book that has ever been published? That could actually work. Bearing in mind that all copyright laws are messy and terrible, this proposal is at least not impossible. "Ever been published" means in the last 100 years.
- ricardobeat 1y agoOk, 130 million books against $100M training costs. You charge an (unrealistic) 100% tax for the book usage. Each author will get less than a dollar. What is the point other than enriching publishing companies?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fsckboy 1y agowhat would be interesting to learn is, "Mega can regurgitate virtually any excerpt from any of my books, there for they have stolen them" versus what is not interesting such as "my books are in libgen therefore they stole my work, even though I can't find direct evidence of the theft" >The most damning thing? It appears that Meta knew exactly what they are doing, and chose to proceed anyway. that is not the most damning thing. It might trigger worse damages or elevation of the severity of an infraction, but it is not evidence of guilt per se, which is what I would call "damning"
- CaffeineLD50 1y agoI guess Zuck's new found interest in manly combat sports is based on his expectation of seeing PDiddy, SBF, and Luigi in club fed over his l33+ pir8cy. It all makes sense now. #freezuck
- CaffeineLD50 1y ago[flagged]
- moscoe 1y agoThe idea that you can’t train on copyrighted materials is ludicrous, imho. So apparently you don’t want humanity and the future of intelligence to benefit from your work? You just want it to keep it locked up in some archive that virtually no one ever reads? Might as well say the people who read your books aren’t allowed to teach the concepts or theories. Completely asinine argument. If you don’t want the knowledge to proliferate, then don’t publish. They’re not copying and redistributing. Meanwhile, jurisdictions outside of us copyright protection will leapfrog us because we can’t get out of our own way.
- entangledqubit 1y agoMeta's more open models aside, are the other copyright abusers giving out their model for free?
- 4agdsF 1y ago[flagged]
- uezajh 1y ago[flagged]
- throwaway150 1y ago> The idea that you can’t train on copyrighted materials is ludicrous, imho. Let us for a minute accept that it is ok to train on copyrighted materials. I don't believe that but I'll humor you. So let's accept it. To train on copyrighted materials, they need to purchase the copyrighted materials, correct? If you wanted to train a model on all O'reilly books, you'd purchase the O'reilly books first, wouldn't you? Do you think it is ok to make illegal pirated copies of the book to do your training?
- philistine 1y agoPeople on this board have mischaracterized this case so much it looks like Facebook employees trying to astroturf.
- sepositus 1y ago
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoIn contrast to typical corporate crime, it seems there is documentation of upper management signing off on the decision. Are there other juicy examples where the C-suite can be directly implicated? Always assumed that management knew how to leave instructions vague enough so as to keep their hands clean (a la meddlesome priests). The bad actor was always some middle-manager gone rogue.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- acomjean 1y agoI think the main issue is that authors published books with the intention of human not machine consumption. Nobody though to put a contract in a book saying "human consumption only, not to be used to Train AI". Meta pirated the books in question, but what if they had bought a copy. Oddly cracking the encryption, a violation of the DMCA might be the infraction.. The courts have some tough questions to answer here.
- card_zero 1y agoThe illustration shows a page from Matter by Iain M. Banks. I don't suppose that's an IP violation, but it implies a human artist with attention to detail. Mind you, it's page 1 and the book is not on page 1.
- spudlyo 1y agoSpeaking broadly, the publishers who hold the copyrights on these materials have often behaved poorly. From overbroad DMCA takedown demands that chill fair use, to threatening libraries, students, and scholars with lawsuits and stiff penalties for minor infringements, to "copyright trolling" campaigns sending mass settlement demands to alleged infringers -- I have little sympathy for copyright holders. I'm still angry about how publishers and the Authors Guild sued Google over Google Books. Intellectual property is why we as a society can't have nice things. While I'm not a fan of Meta, their open weight models are probably one of the best things they've ever done, and I'll back big tech over publishers every time.
- puppycodes 1y agoi really dont get this and i personally beleive the world would be a better place without IP in any form. But also no one is selling "your book", the product is completely different in literally every conceivable way. you have never (and no one ever should) own words arranged in a certain way. You own the right to sell a book. Not the words themselves. meta does bad things and im not a fan, but this really pales in comparison.
- card_zero 1y agoWell, if you own copyright for a song, you can claim licensing fees for any public performance of those lyrics. I wonder if an equivalent to Performance Rights Organizations will emerge as a channel for LLM publishers (so to speak) to pay fees.
- puppycodes 1y agoand that is equally atrocious and should be eliminated from a society that wants to share ideas freely. Idk if your in the US but you also massively oversimplify in your example, copyright law is waaaaaaaay more complex than that and it would take a set of special circumstances way beyond doing what you say it siphon money from an infringment claim
- card_zero 1y agoYes, of course. I struggle to have an opinion here since I don't like either side in this fight, but I eventually squeezed one out, and there it is.
- philistine 1y agoCopyright law is enshrined in a knotted web of trade deals across the world, meaning it will never change for as long as anyone on this board is alive. It's so tiring on here with the constant copyright law shouldn't exist. We know! How do we get rid of it? What's your argument for everyone to break all the world's trade deals to give you this one thing that would unmake our whole artistic sector?
- spatialspice 1y agoIt feels like there are two equally valid sides to this argument that get muddied because of our current model’s/regulations inability to differentiate one over the other. On the free-information side, I don’t think anyone would argue that AI shouldn’t be allowed to offer a general synopsis of a given book / series. From an author/creator’s POV, it feels like extortion to be able to summarize/recreate any given chapter/subsection to the point that the entire work could be reproduced near-verbatim. IMO the question is, can we meaningfully draw a line between the two, and if so, how?
- rich_sasha 1y agoI don't think anyone is stopping AI learning on the synopses of books. Or learning on books having paid licensing costs. It's the wanting to have cake, eat cake and for free that is falling.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]