this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

This is honestly a win-win. Either the courts recognize that the LLM uses stolen copyrighted content, or they recognize that torrenting is legal by default.

Though with the way courts have been bending case law into knots recently, I wouldn’t be surprised if they somehow word the ruling in a way that favors Meta and makes torrenting outright illegal.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Ahh, but you’re forgetting the Rules for Thee clause that protects any and all wealthy, white, corporate gremlins from facing the same or similar consequences that any of the poors might face for the same infraction.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Life is simpler when that clause exists.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

You think it's actually going to go to court and have a verdict?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Well, at least they released llama for free, But honestly, their hypocrisy is so pathetic.

Hey, who knows? Maybe now they're gonna like start funding legal defense funds for people torrenting. Part of their whole corporate social responsibility, If they feel so strongly about it... right? /s

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

Let's just make legal the evil we do...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

At the very least they’ll create a legal precedent.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago

They'll just settle if the case isn't going their way.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 13 hours ago

My class action Spidey sense is tingling

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

This is why I try to find legitimate sites offering direct downloads instead of illegally uploading during torrenting. There are many sites offering direct downloads, but I often have trouble finding them.

[–] [email protected] 80 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So not just they pirated them, which may or may not be a crime and where I may or may not be impartial, but they are also leeches who would be banned on any decent torrent tracker of the olden days.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Truly despicable. Seeding to at least 1 to 1 is the bare minimum of courtesy and humanity. If you dont, its unethical

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

Yeah, I always went for 2:1. It doesn't really cost me anything, so why not?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Hey now some of us just have wildly shit upload speeds and couldn't hope to reach 1:1 without spending an entire year seeding a single movie.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

That's a big part of why I stick with my ISP. My download speeds aren't super competitive for the price, but my upload is half my download, which is nice.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (2 children)

Seeding shouldn't be done on ratios - being the only one seeding 10 seasons of a tv show and getting it to 0.4:1 is way more helpful than seeding the same movie as everyone else and getting to 20:1, you're noy contributing anything there other than decreasing your bandwidth for things that aren't already at 100,000% availability

[–] [email protected] 13 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I'd you are the only one seeding it and get to 0.4, you just left others hanging with incomplete downloads.

However I do agree in general

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

That's what I'm saying

It's better to not even half-way seed a torrent with low availability than it is to seed one that everyone else is seeding, regardless of how high your ratio goes - it's a point on how pointless it really is to waste your resources seeding something like that

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago

The lazy approach is the best approach IMO. Seed everything, and if the ratio gets high, drop it. That way you get rid of useless popular torrents and keep the less popular ones. If everyone does that, things will work better.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

Seeding to ratios is self correcting, in my inexperienced opinion as I only share ISOs.

Unpopular thing sits on someone's computer (not mine) for ages just happily waiting until it's useful. Popular thing is in and out. Purely for files intended to be churned; try a distro (in facebook's case a book), use it, and delete it.

1:3 could be said to be a minimum (1 for to pay back, 1 to pay forward, and 1 to pay for a leecher)

Things that are going to be archived can be set as limitless as long as strain on hardware can be tolerated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

What hardware strain are you concerned about? Seeding is just a read, which is pretty gentle on hardware, especially if it's an SSD.

The bigger concern IMO is saturating your bandwidth, making other things perform poorly, but then you can just cap bandwidth.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Me? None. But I left room for someone who might.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is irrelevant because Meta should not be tried for this the same as a private individual would be.

The case for torrenting being illegal for private individuals is one or both of:

  1. Downloading in of itself is stealing.
  2. Uploading is giving unauthorized access to someone else who otherwise might have had a harder time finding it. Anything else, such as watching, reading, listening, learning, etc. is not illegal (or does not make sense to make illegal). The exception might be publishing. This is rare for private individuals (e.g. using pirated FL studio to make a commercial song).

For corporations, a lot change. Firstly, a corporation downloading a torrent is necessarily making unauthorized material available for some people of the company. It's like a group of 20 friends all downloaded and uploaded to each other. Secondly, they used this copyrighted material commercially (like playing pirated music in a public night club). Both should be illegal.

However, all of this is still a distraction. The real issue is using copyrighted materials to train commercial AI. Does Meta require permission from copyright holders to make AI based on their work? The law is grey on this, and desperately needs regulations.

Just my thoughts.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

AI has already stolen everyone’s work. The internet is officially a free for all.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

just like back in the good ol' days.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Except in the good ol' days just about everything on the 'net benefited most of us in some way ... and it was free. Now it sure as hell ain't free and it's been co-opted to benefit billionaires only.

I started torrenting 23 years ago and it was easy. Just a client, no VPN required. Now I need not only a VPN, but a good router that I can flash with firmware, hours of working out how best to set up the router with wireguard etc, then scroll through dozens of links to try and find a stable stream to watch hockey.

It's fucking exhausting.

[–] [email protected] 167 points 1 day ago (4 children)

So, piracy is legal if you don't distribute? What the fuck is Zuck smoking?

[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 day ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (4 children)

Well, that's how it tends to be in most places.
You don't get caught for downloading; you get caught for uploading.

Using a similar logic to distribution via DVDs. Only the seller gets into trouble. The buyer does not.


Another point, opening a web page means downloading it, so if someone wanted to frame someone for downloading something, it would be very easy to make such a trap. This, accompanied with CSAM and network monitoring could be used to easily get any person using the internet, in jail, just for opening the wrong link. So, the laws require much more information regarding intent and such.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago

Yup. In switzerland its legal to leech, illegal to seed.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

The buyers/downloaders don't get caught is just because there are too many of them and going after the distributor is an easy target.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Not the case, necessarily.

In Portugal, for example, it's legal to download pirated content. It's not a matter of not pursuing it because it's hard or being difficult to catch or distributors are an easier target, it's just that, legally, you're not doing anything wrong.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

sooooo.... vpn should point to Portugal...

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago

In Canada it’s legal to download and watch content for personal use, so it’s when it’s shared that it becomes an issue.

Just like you could record anything with a vcr, you just couldn’t share it with your friends.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago

Elitism. He is of the belief that he is better than you, and doesn't live in the same world as you.

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Another example of Republican principles. Corporations are protected by laws but not bound by them, while the average citizen is bound by laws but not protected by them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 15 hours ago

What does this have to do with the Republican party? The other party upholds the same copyright law.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (3 children)

In group and out group baybee!

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 day ago

Of course that fuck isn't a good seeder. Leech.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago

It's not illegal to download books without yourself offering them for upload. What's illegal is when you feed those books into your reality devouring content monster and it outputs all that copyrighted content in a slightly different order and you profit off that content vomit.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Also I love how they they don't say they didn't seed, just say there is no proof

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

This is a motion to dismiss not an answer. That's how those work. It is linked to by the journalist in the article.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 day ago (3 children)

So where's the MAFIAA? Here you go guys, literal industrial scale piracy.

Or are you afraid to go after someone that isn't a teenager in their parent's back room?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Fighting Meta will cost easy more money than fighting a teenager.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I am aware. I was simply demonstrating they were never about money, simply bullying people who couldn't fight back.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Especially since in the height of my pirating years during teenagerdom, no amount of cajoling or coercion could get me to pay for whatever it was because I didn't have any money. Which not at all coincidentally was why I was pirating it in the first place.

These dweebs always operate from the frankly invalid preconception that if the pirate had not pirated the media they would have paid for it and therefore they're "owed" a sale, but that's not how it works. I imagine that if the vast majority of people were unable to pirate their thing, they simply would not watch/listen/read/play/consume the thing at all.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago

So it's okay if we download content from well known online repositories?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I mean isn't that at least some extent technically true to a level.

I mean if we weren't talking a shitty corporation to begin with. If this were say, a 20 year old mcdonnalds worker pirating game of thrones.

IMO the bigger concept is still rather than if they got it... defining whether using that data after the fact is legal. I mean hypothetically speaking lets just say they bought 1 copy of each of the millions of books, or bought used copies, or say had a machine that could scan every book in a library. IMO the issue shouldn't be whether or not anyone managed to download the books in their pure form afterwards. The focus should be the AI trained on their books, is going to be distributing portions of their book to millions of people, and any potential profits of such will be going to meta and uncredited to the original authors. The idea that meta's involvement in torrenting may have let little timmy get a copy of his text book 15 seconds faster... shouldn't be the driving force here.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Double Standard!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

You wouldn't download car....and then upload its stats to a centralised system

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