They also didn’t seed,
Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to “avoid” the “risk” of anyone “tracing back the seeder/downloader” from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as in “stealth mode.” Meta also allegedly modified settings “so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,” a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.
Rarely any person is arrested for piracy in the US. In most cases copyright infringement is a civil case, not a criminal case. That means that you are prosecuted by the copyright holder and not the state. The copyright holder has to take you to civil court to sue you.
If we downloaded multiple terabytes of books, I think it is unlikely that there would be any consequences.
For it to become a criminal case, you basically have to be charging money for pirated content. If Facebook is profiting from the piracy, it is possible that they are doing criminal copyright infringement.
Is meta making an AI for fun or profit?
I dunno, it feels like a song and dance to convince investors that there’s future large-scale growth in Meta and that they haven’t hit their functional market cap.
I know what you are saying and you have to also consider fair use. For example, many people on youtube use clips from movies that they pirated in videos that they made for money. I’m not a lawyer.
My point is that it’s really hard to get arrested for copyright infringement unless you’re like selling bootleg DVDs on the side of the road.
If you did the same thing as Facebook, where you downloaded a bunch of books and fed it into an AI and somehow made money that way, without distributing exact copies of the book. I still doubt you would be arrested.
My professors aren’t allowed to upload more than 20% of a selected publication or else they get fired, even if the reading is like 20 years old.
Copyright law only exists to punish the working class and rob artists of their work.
Regular people are getting fined like $20K per infringement for downloading copyrighted material. 81.7 TB of data is a heck of a lot of numbers of infringements, especially where it’s clear it’s being used for profit
That’s just not true. You made that up. If people were getting fined $20k per infringement, piracy would be much less common and you’d see it on the news all the time. Piracy laws in the US are very loose. Most people have pirated books or music or movies or games. Most people have not been fined for it.
Here’s how piracy is “prosecuted” in the US in most cases. Copyright holders hire a “troll agency” to monitor public peer-to-peer filesharing of their content. The troll agency records IP addresses of the file sharers. The troll agency then sends threatening emails to the ISPs of the file sharers. In many circumstances, the ISP just deletes the threatening email without even telling you. Sometimes the ISP forwards the email to you. You are not obligated to respond to the email. In order to be “fined” for infringement, the copyright holder has to actually take you to court and prove that you infringed the copyright, which is very difficult to prove.
And if you use a VPN, they would never even find your ISP.
Here’s an article from last month describing how RIAA and MPAA uses troll agencies to threaten ISPs.
https://torrentfreak.com/eff-sides-with-cox-to-protect-piracy-accused-internet-users-from-copyright-trolls-250109/
Under the law, people can actually be charged up to $150,000 per infringement. In reality, it is in the $10k to $20k per infringement range, but I don’t think this happens much anymore. There were a bunch of lawsuits 10-15 years ago.
For example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/11/minnesota-woman-songs-illegally-downloaded
Sure I agree, i doubt any punishment will be issued in this case.
Or to send a message