this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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252
SoA day of action following allegations of Meta’s mass theft of authors’ work (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

https://societyofauthors.org/2025/04/01/soa-day-of-action-following-allegations-of-metas-mass-theft-of-authors-work/

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.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The right thing for meta to do is to implode and cause a complete crash on the stock exchange as it is erased from history.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago

So ordered.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

And some people still complain that US tech companies keep getting petty fines in Europe.

We're the only ones trying to enforce even an anemic degree of antitrust, since the US just allows them to do whatever.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

A dbzer0 user agitating against Fair Use? You a narc or something?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

It's the hypocrisy, not the law

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

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 22 hours ago

Unfair Use

[–] [email protected] 4 points 22 hours ago

Piracy cant be illegal if laws arent real!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

A small British trade union vs a 1.5 Trillion dollar American corporation?

LOL, good luck

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

Yet it still must be done

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

Anything is better than nothing!

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

I was getting confused, not understanding why Structure of Arrays needed a day off action. Except perhaps to point out the benefits of locality of the same type of data for parallel processing, etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

In my language SOA is STD. Which made me pause for a sec too on the title.