A lawsuit filed by several authors against Meta centers on Meta's alleged use of pirated books for AI training data and the technical details of BitTorrent which was used to obtain them. Yesterday, Meta filed a motion for summary judgment, while countering the authors' request to resolve the copyright claims in their favor. Meta's request includes new information, including the revelation that its uploads of 'pirate' library data were roughly 30% of the data it downloaded.

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[–] pedroapero@lemmy.ml 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Meta’s expert [...] argued that [...] if Meta shared small blocks of data, they would be unusable to the receiver.

This is ridiculous. On a large torrent, a single piece can contain dozens of books. Pieces are contiguous unencrypted data. One piece contains several pages in any cases. What if I set my maximum ratio to 0.999, am I allowed to seed then?

[–] RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 days ago

Even setting seed to infinite, if there's just one other capable seeder, good odds no individual sends any other individual a full file.

You're just sending jibberish chunks everywhere, not your fault if someone assembles it all from multiple sources, right?

[–] Azzu@lemm.ee 95 points 4 days ago

Of course they're fucking leechers, only 0.3 ratio? Pathetic

[–] DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca 47 points 4 days ago (1 children)

30% of - what was it - 80TB? Not bad considering they claimed to have changed their configuration settings and even just leeched the lot. I hope that 24TB leak costs them very, very dearly.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 35 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The case law that results from this case may cost everyone very dearly

[–] DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

True but it'd be its own victory to see even the billion-dollar companies are as susceptible to the law as the rest of us are.

[–] solarvector@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 3 days ago

This is part of why penalties have maximums.

They could easily charge $200/file with a cap of $5M. Slap in the wrist for Facebook, ruinous for almost everyone else.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 39 points 4 days ago

Nothing will happen to meta but some peoples lives have been ruined over this.

Legal person can do no wrong under this clown regime

[–] dumblederp@aussie.zone 33 points 4 days ago

I kinda want to get a copy of this 80tb Library of Alexandria.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 18 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Using upload stats from AWS is ridiculous. Bittorrent is heavy on the upload and requires more than 10% of your download bandwidth in uploads just for protocol overhead on a small number of peers without even considering seeding

[–] LocustOfControl@reddthat.com 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

More than 10% but less than 30%? They initially said that they only downloaded, but now their argument seems to be they uploaded little enough that no-one got a complete copy of anything from them.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 3 days ago

Likely, wonder if they uploaded much of the data from Amazon to themselves?

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 13 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Who cares? I'm confused. Why is their upload relevant in the first place? I thought all the IP holders were out there arguing that the download was the issue.

Never mind that in this case there is a profit reason for the download in the first place. Even in notoriously lenient areas with copyright that is a bigger strike than whether they reseeded anything in a peer to peer platform.

But hey, here we are, I'm rooting for Meta here. Absolutely put all the money in dismantling overreaching copyright regulation. Let's find some Duck Tales comics or whatever in there. Disney vs Meta in court over copyrights. The Godzilla vs Kong our generation deserves. Let's do it.

[–] gonzo-rand19@moist.catsweat.com 22 points 4 days ago

Downloading isn't the issue, it's seeding (uploading to other peers, which is considered distribution of copyrighted material).

[–] Eiri@lemmy.ca 9 points 4 days ago

Their only chance at a defense (and it's incredibly bad) is arguing that they only stole the stuff but didn't distribute it to others. Kinda like buying drugs is typically not as severely punished as selling them.

But yeah I really don't think copyright laws are gonna change in a way that makes happy little individual piracy easier. Meta might want that at this very moment, but they'll for sure feel differently about THEIR intellectual property.

Without even thinking about big vocal IP holders like Disney.