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The SoA is organising a day of protest against Meta following revelations of pirated books being used to train their large language models
On Thursday 20 March, The Atlantic broke the story of how Meta has used the Library Genesis (LIbGen) dataset, which is full of pirated material, to develop their AI systems.
The revelations detailed by The Atlantic come against the background of the recent government consultation into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and copyright and the #MakeItFair campaign which sees the UK creative industries fighting back against the proposed changes to copyright law, which would favour multinational tech companies, but irremediably damage the creative industries.
I don't see how this fair use case is different from those in the past. There's a tech company defending. Organizations like the EFF or the Internet Archive issue supporting statements.
I don't see the hypocrisy. The content industry is suing tech companies now just like they have in the past, and just like they sue individuals now and in the past.
If I had to guess at the cause of the difference, I'd say that there is a lot of money being spent on social media PR. But perhaps it also is a result of the right-ward shift of society. I wonder how much that has to do with propaganda by the content industry.
The hypocrisy is that if an average person did something like this (such as, IDK, Aaron Schwartz) they would have already been swiftly prosecuted and made out to be an example of "look what will happen to you".
It's just the two-tiered justice system being what it is, again.
Yeah, that's another one of the deliberately deceptive talking points being spread.
First of all, average people did this. The dataset Books3 was created by a jobless individual named Shawn Presser using one of Aaron's scripts. Later he shared it with Meta. What makes the difference for Shawn is that the legal department of Meta stands between him and the copyright industry. As far as I can tell, Shawn is way more average than Aaron in that he doesn't rub shoulders with the likes of Sam Altman.
It's interesting how this talking point works. Someone shills for the copyright industry against the interests of the average person. And the justification is that the copyright industry persecuted Aaron Swartz. That doesn't make sense, does it?