Funny how people are suddenly on Elsevier's side. It's clear to me that AI training is transformative fair use under existing law. Maybe this will be the case to prove it.
I also find it funny, I said this regarding the other thread and article[0]
'"They then copied those stolen fruits"
How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?
Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
And you would be hard pressed to prove that LLM's haven't advanced the arts and sciences, so at bare minimum transformative, ie fair use.'
>How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?
If you write a book and I take it and embed its knowledge into my product that is so pervasive that no one needs to buy your book any more (and I don't even credit you so no one knows where that knowledge came from), to you really still have what was stolen? And I didn't even buy a copy of your book to copy it.
Yes. That's not to say that something damaging wasn't done, but nothing was stolen. Stealing/theft requires deprivation of property. It's like receiving a normal nonlethal punch in the face and calling it murder. Murder requires someone dying.
> Theft [...] is the act of taking another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing
Theft is not the breach of any property right. It's specifically the deprivation of property without consent. Yes, I have checked the definition in my jurisdiction.
Getting punched in the face also violates rights, yet isn't murder. Murder is specifically about dying.
Cool cool cool. So all the code and data you send to anthropic and chatgpt should be mass distributable to forward other peoples arts and science? All your meeting notes with ai summarizers, slack chats with bots? Might as well put your entire company and all plans for it on github mit licensed. Ill take a peek, see if there's anything valuable to me in that. Don't worry you can keep it all on your github too. It's still yours afterall. Copilot will be training on it too though btw
No it's not. You exposed that data to an LLM. Should have read the fine print. The laws around that don't make sense to me anymore so therefore I own that stuff now. That's how this works right? You do know chatgpt etc can read everything you write, right?
Also social media profile pics. Great way to get faces for deep fake ads. Most people are just 1 phone call away from being voice cloned. Our likeness isn't all that important either if you think about it.
Maybe meta will clone your writing style and sign into your meta account and message your friends telling them about this awesome new product. Meta owns the account and you uploaded data to it.
I think Anthorpic has pledged to not use team and enterprise user's data for training purposes. I don't mind if they do some verification or whatever as long as it doesn't end up in the responses it gives others.
You were swiftly corrected about your misunderstanding under your original comment. Reposting it here, removing the quote farther from its context, and hoping to not be downvoted again is very weird!
I find it grating that so many AI boosters try to frame pushing back against the AI industry as a sudden about-face for everyone that spent the last 20 years pushing back against the copyright industry. I’m also in favor of decriminalizing or legalizing small amounts of pot for personal use. That doesn’t mean I’m behind industrialized narcotic production on such a huge scale that it that it starts to distort the economy, and companies looking for new ways to add methamphetamine to every goddamn product.
It would be disingenuous framing because the argument against copyright stems from a belief that information should be free. Meta does not do things in this spirit. There's no about face needed...
Speaking of ai and meth, have you seen videos of the palantir CEO Alex karp? Dude looks like he's regularly getting the same meth shots Hitler used to get.
But I hear you. One of my biggest tells that someone can't be reasoned with is when they resort to whataboutism without any consideration for how 2 situations can actually be different even if there is some commonality. It's a powerful bad faith argument technique. When that style of argument comes up I nod my head and walk away. Some people are just doomed.
I am not s copyright maximalist, but I would tell you be careful of a world where copyright and IP is meaningless. Might as well let any other country/company one shot your entire industry.
Elsevier is shitty to people doing stuff that (imo) should be allowed. Meta is making money doing the same thing and not getting the same shittiness from Elsevier.
Elsevier at least works within the (admittedly broken) system, Meta does not.
The items they call out around training the models (and attempting to claim that each subsequent model generation should count as an additional instance of infringement) seem far less grounded in the current court interpretations of AI training.
Absorb all "our" IP without consent, in doing so remove "our" own source of revenue, and then repackage it as their own product. Not really fair use IMO.
It actually depends on evilness of the company. Elsevier is just less evil that Zuckerberg and Meta, while publishers are even less problematic. I dont think there is anything funny in that.
Or anything to defend on Meta. If they go out of business, humanity profits.
> It's clear to me that AI training is transformative fair use under existing law. Maybe this will be the case to prove it.
That is not what this case is about. It is more about the illegal violation and piracy of copyrighted content done by Meta for commercial use and Zuck knew they were doing it.
Why did Anthropic settle [0] with a multi-billion dollar payout to authors after commercializing their LLMs that was trained off of copyrighted content that was illegally obtained and kept without the authors permission?
There's a reason why they (Anthropic) did not want it to go to trial. (Anthropic knew they would lose and it would completely bankrupt them in the hundreds of billions.)
AI boosters will do anything to justify the mass piracy and illegal obtainment of copyrighted material for commercial use (not research) which that is not fair use in the US. There is no debate on this. [0]
If i could ask for a summary from an llm vs buy a book id go with the summary. That eats into commercial use and the supreme court case sided with Gerald Ford when a newspaper published a small gist of his autobiography because it ate into the sales
Yea nope. I like the full book without any loss of information. Even if I don't want to read the entire book. LLMs love to respond even when something is outside of their training set.
"Funny" is how dishonest snipes are framed. It such a common trope of internet quips, it's wearing me out. Can we please try to just format our disagreements without the snideness?
A lot of people would be very pleased if this leads to Zuckerberg getting even the statutory minimum damages ($750?) on each infringement.
The previous infringement case with Anthropic said that while training an AI was transformative and not itself an infringement, pirating works for that purpose still was definitely infringement all by itself. The settlement was $1.5bn, so close to $3k for each of the 500k they pirated, so if Zuckerberg pirated "millions" (plural) it is quite plausible his settlement could be $6bn.
What's frustrating is all those kids who got criminal charges for running MP3 sites back in the day [1], and this guy rips off every piece of media in existence and will walk away literally because he's too rich to be charged.
It's the increase in emotionality, principles loosely held, it allows a particular goal they get tossed, Tbc this extends far beyond the current topic and commenters.
I'm kinda being upset because on top of his ridiculously amoral and sometimes illegal behavior there are people which lives were ruined because they shared few mp3 files. Now this person once again — have absolutely no responsibility for his actions even for something so idiotic like copyright infringement when others were severely punished.
A company being "worth" some amount doesn't mean it has that much money and real property; it means there exist people willing to buy shares, on the margin, at a price which works out like that. One of the common (very rough) approximations is that a business is worth as much as the profit it's expected to make over the next 20 years. But one of the reasons (there are many) that this is only a rough guide, is that if you tried to sell too much of a big company all in one go, it usually depresses the price a lot, and the other way around (trying to buy a whole company) tends to raise the price a lot; both effects are because most people have different ideas about how much any given company is really worth despite that rough guide, and trade their shares at different prices while you're doing it. You may note this is a circular argument, this is indeed part of the problem.
IIRC, Facebook's cash is more like $81-82 billion.
At the same time, isn't Zuck's worth based on his shares of evilCorp while evilCorp's shares are what you just said. Ergo, the Zuck isn't worth all that either???
Yup. All the headlines following the pattern "${billionaire} {gains|loses} ${x} billion this week" are mostly just fluff, the marginal share price of any given stock wanders all over the place even without forced sales or people trying to buy them out.
There's some interesting exceptions, like how Musk has managed to sell Tesla shares totalling more or less as much as the business itself has made in total lifetime revenue; but even then, Musk's theoretical net worth is very different from how much he could get if he was forced to sell all his shares suddenly.
Owner-CEOs like Musk and Zuckerberg get all the effects of such randomness, but the only examples I can think of such people getting into billion-dollar legal troubles tend to be examples which go on to sink their companies completely, so I'm not sure what impact a fine of "merely" 10% of cash reserves would do to investor confidence as expressed in share price. And this is not the only legal case Meta's facing right now.
MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos' ex wife) show it can be turned into real money. As of December 2025 She had given away $7.1 billion in 2025 charitable donations, and $26.3 billion since 2019.
In reality there is the ability to execute on the shares to turn them into real money.
Jeff Bezos holds less than 10% of Amazon stock himself. Which is a huge amount of money, and a not insignificant amount of which can be turned into "real" money and even with some decline is still a phenomenal amount.
In that same time period the stock valuation has more than doubled.
Plus, the money he borrows is not taxable. If he sold stock he would have to pay taxes before he could spend the income. Sure, he now owes money to someone, but he can refinance those loans again and again, and live tax-free the rest of his life while we, poor working stiffs, pay the taxes that built the airport where he parks the private jet he bought with the money he borrowed.
People seem to get the weird idea that borrowing against their stock holdings is some special thing rich people get to do with products that the rest of us don't have access to. It's not. Margin loans are widely available to the tune of ff+1%ish or lower, and if your brokerage's publicly offered rates are probably a ripoff, they're almost certainly negotiable. The bar for access to "institutional" rates is basically 100k, the regulatory requirement for portfolio margin.
Yes, there are specialized products catered to billionaires. But those aren't getting them better rates than someone with a $200k portfolio (Zuck is not conventionally a less risky borrower than the Options Clearing Corporation!). They exist to work around the fact that some borrowers can't just casually liquidate their stock on the open market, let alone at face value. By all accounts these products are more expensive than retail.
Mostly this is an expensive (but maybe still less expensive than taxes, depending on the rate environment—it's more of a no-brainer in ZIRPland) way to diversify out of a single-stock portfolio without selling by adding leverage. At Zuck's age, it's still very unlikely to make sense to borrow instead of sell to spend. He's been known to pay real taxes in the past, they just look small relative to his imputed wealth growth because rich people don't spend a lot relative to their wealth growth because they, quite by definition, have a lot of wealth.
I think people take issue with the taxes loophole. They have GAINED from the VALUE of their stocks, but they don't pay taxes on that. It should be law if you realize value from stocks you pay capital gains on those stocks. So if a loan is collateralized by $1,000,000 worth of stock value taxes should be paid on $1,000,000.
The trouble is that a bank is not lending against the nominal value of the stock as collateral. That number is almost entirely fictional. Taxation of capital gains at time of sale is less a loophole than a reflection of the difficulty of assigning a fair price to assets that are not perfectly liquid.
Also, you'd totally gut retail home equity lending as collateral damage, with disastrous social policy consequences.
That's why billionaires use shares as collateral to get loans. It's money once removed, and it continues to be spendable so long as the share price stays high.
I sincerely doubt that Meta's share price would crash as a result of Zuckerberg getting an expensive judgement.
I had to block meta's ASN on my personal cgit server a few weeks ago because they were ignoring robots.txt and torching it. Like hundreds of megabytes of access logs just from them, spread around different network blocks to clearly try and defeat IP based limiting. I couldn't believe it.
Yeah, I dont know how anybody stays sane without it. I have a list of over a thousand ASNs I blackhole at this point...
Mine is a daily bash cronjob that fetches a text-based database and uses grep to build an nftables-apply script with all the IPs for the blocked ASNs. I keep meaning to share it, but it's embarrassingly messy I haven't had time to clean it up...
It's been a real game of cat and mouse over the last few years. I used to do daily iptables updates to block repeat scrapers on my small niche stats site I run. About 5-6 ago it become more common to see broader ranges - so I started blocking ASNs which worked great (esp for the regulars like Alibaba, Tencent, compromised DigitalOcean/OVH, ...). In the last 2-3 years though the overall bot traffic has skyrocketed - it's easy to spot bot activity after the fact (no requests to the CDN for static assets, user agent changes from one request to the next, predictable ID enumeration, etc) but not in a real time. They're also often using residential-based proxies and Cloudflare bot detection has become pretty bad.
It's a real pain in the ass because in the absence of ASN based blocking, you often have to give something a long list of IP ranges in CIDR notation, and be certain you don't "miss" even one ipv4 /23 or /24 or a crawler will get through.
I've wondered what the legalese justification for letting liability evaporate as it does so often with corps. So far the reasons I'm left with are 'shrugs' and 'the relevant provision (seemingly? apparently?) simply don't apply', neither of which are any good.
I was going to make a joke about how we should attach magnets to Aaron Swartz' corpse, since that'd make for a pretty potent energy source, given how fast he must be spinning. But honestly, I think he would have seen this sort of thing coming, given how his case was handled and how things really haven't gotten any better.
Alternate reality Aaron Swartz escaped canonization and is now running an AI/crypto startup that pays you to upload training data with his YC alum buddies
I should hope that if Zuckerberg isn't severely punished for this, it at least sets a legal precedent for every other person to do the same with immunity.
All the Aaron Schwartzes of the future could freely share scientific papers with the world.
I'd love for that to come out during discovery when the lawsuit hits, but it probably never will. Blowing the whistle is also not a great option in this economy, although I wish more people did.
When the AI scrapers were just getting started, that is basically what I thought - their plan was to scrape / suck up everything they possibly could before people realized what was happening and blocked them.
The rate at which they were spidering and scraping was so far beyond what any other supposedly legit spider was doing, it seemed like the logical explanation.
Just gonna say... Aaron Swartz faced years of prison time and ultimately decided to take his own life... for downloading scientific journal articles... to share freely with the world (aka not even profiting from it).
But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that data set? Meh, sounds like Silicon Valley disruption, give the man a medal!
Aaron Swartz was treated unjustly because copyright sucks. we should oppose such laws and treatment, not wield them as retributive tools against our opponents
it is wrong to advocate for everyone to be treated equally unjustly. better to advocate for the removal of the bad laws/structures
One man illegally downloading copyrighted material is a crime. Multinational corporations illegally downloading copyrighted material is the only remaining growth area in the US economy and vital to national security.
It's absolutely unthinkable that Meta and friends aren't still using a corpus containing the entirety of every book they can obtain. There is no way they're building frontier LLMs without it. You can be sure as hell the Chinese are doing it, so the US corps are absolutely still doing it.
Because meta will delay any case for several years. Then the lawyers will settle for 1/100th to 1/1000th of what they stole quietly. Meta will rebrand and change its name again just like it did after its last major scandal.
No accountability for rich people has funny patterns like this.
They might not need to change their name. I don't think that copyright infringement is seen as bad by Americans compared to the privacy stuff that Facebook is known for—not that most Americans care about privacy, I guess I don't really know why Facebook rebranded.
Personally, I would be happy if AI companies are what finally take down intellectual monopoly (intellectual property). I know being anti-intellectual-monopoly isn't a common view, but i don't see average people thinking it is so important—as you can see by the huge increases in piracy recently. Could be wrong about this, I haven't done research on public opinion about copyright.
Honestly, this whole case could be great. Either copyright loses, good for us. Or Zuckerberg loses, also good for us.
I would say that copyright loses is better for society than Zuckerberg loses because, my wish for Zuckerberg to lose is from hatred, while my wish for copyright to be abolished is from my wish to help humanity.
Even Supreme Court justices[1] have said the case for copyright is thin.
In 2024, voters signaled that they don't care about corruption when they reelected the most corrupt administration in American history. Since then, there has been a widespread understanding that the rich will not face consequences in this country. For example, take a look at the Trump administration's suppression of the Epstein files. Or the Trump families cryptocurrency schemes. Or the ridiculous ballroom.
Anyway, the point is - there will be no justice until the citizens of the united states demand it.
If it elicits rage that has nothing to do with me. It's interesting that no one was able to defend their positions. So of course you guys jump to just flagging everything and doing a whole "investigation" of my posts.
Trump won because he's popular and none of the slander is sticking. Take it out on me I guess.
Your username is familiar. Are you the moron who was swearing two months ago that Trump and Co definitely had a plan to deal with Iran? That there wouldn't be a war and even if there was it would be over quickly? That the USA could do whatever they want without consequences?
Why would anyone take anything you say seriously when you have shown such disastrously poor judgement in the past?
Granted, it’s far more likely that they don’t believe a single word of the drivel they’ve been spreading across this forum, but regardless of intentionality the result is the same.
This article doesn’t even remotely itemize all of Trumps corruption, but it’s long and extremely damning.
I would hope that anyone still supporting this administration reads this article and does some introspection on why. I’m guessing that ship probably sailed 6 years ago, though.
Also that there are over 2,000 emails with Peter Thiel. Or maybe the part where Sergey Brin was helping Epstein shop for an aircraft carrier (also after conviction). Honestly it was incredibly revealing that none of these people care that he raped kids. I would love to see the Trump files which were withheld but clearly thats never gonna happen.
Anyway, congrats to everyone involved on the MAGA golden age!
> a Meta spokesperson said, “AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use. We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
> Authors have sued AI companies for copyright infringement before - and lost.
they'll litigate how meta acquired those materials to train. you can do whatever you want with a book after it's in your house. but how did it get there?
They’re already on record as hoovering up Library Genesis and Anna’s Archive. For their “fair use” copyright bonfire to train their LLM.
So not are these publishers rightfully pissed, Meta didn’t even give them the $6.99 for each epub to begin with. They’ve stolen the whole thing as part of this “fair use” campaign to destroy human authorship free of even the most basic remuneration.
Until Sony, Nintendo, Disney... sues them and Zuck craps down his pants. And the NSA themselves, too; because for sure they are half-backed from them. If they keep pirating down Japanese and European media, these can just wipe their asses with USA licenses and declare all media from the US un-Copyrighteable Europe and Japan.
Shouldn't this stuff trigger RICO? Why do torrent site operators get led off in cuffs for running operations that usually lose money, but Zuck doesn't?
RICO specifically cites "criminal infringement of a copyright" as laid out in 18 U.S. Code § 2319. If the CEO tells his employees to download hundreds of thousands of works illegally in order to carry out his money-making scheme, how is that not organized crime even if (dubiously) LLM training on the material is fair use?
> As used in this chapter — (1) “racketeering activity” means (A)[...]; (B) any act which is indictable under any of the following provisions of title 18, United States Code: [...], section 2319 (relating to criminal infringement of a copyright),[...]
> (c) It shall be unlawful for any person employed by or associated with any enterprise engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce, to conduct or participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise’s affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity[...].
“Meta — at Zuckerberg’s direction — copied millions of books, journal articles, and other written works without authorization, including those owned or controlled by Plaintiffs and the Class, and then made additional copies of those works to train Llama,” the suit says. “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement. Meta also stripped [copyright management information] from the copyrighted works it stole. It did this to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.”
> Meta also stripped [copyright management information] from the copyrighted works it stole. It did this to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.
How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?
Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
And you would be hard pressed to prove that LLM's haven't advanced the arts and sciences, so at bare minimum transformative, ie fair use.
I think you are confusing the idiom "stolen fruits" with an actual accusation of criminal theft. Aside from its use in this phrasing, neither "theft" nor "steal" appears anywhere else in the article.
Who will be the first to implement a one-layer three-weight model and add it to BitTorrent? Let it “train” on all downloaded files. That makes it fair use. Am I doing this right?
Tired of the double standard that CEOs get away when bad things happen (because they can’t be everywhere all the time) but all the benefits when the company makes a great profit (because they’re personally driving results!).
I don't have strong opinions on Zuck needing to be punished for this, because I have friends and family doing the same thing, although perhaps not at the same scale. I myself do not download copyrighted content. I think "rules for thee, not for me" goes both ways.
Consider the case of someone who gets banned but Facebook keeps collecting money on their business account. Or consider the case of Facebook's video metrics scandal, or... whatever. It's a little fuzzy translating how much value equates to how much stock price equates to how much real-world is-this-useful-to-me but it does matter when FB is accused of marketing (Aaron Greenspan, thinkcomp, has brought this up, in his 2019 testimony to UK parliament) advertising to more people in a region or country than actually physically exist
So fraud builds on itself, you have more fraud money to pay lawyers to try to defend you in fraud cases
>But the latest lawsuit alleges that Meta and Zuckerberg deliberately circumvented copyright-protection mechanisms — and had considered paying to license the works before abandoning that strategy at “Zuckerberg’s personal instruction.” The suit essentially argues that the conduct described falls outside protections afforded by fair-use provisions of the U.S. copyright code.
I think this is an easy distinction to make: copyright is bullshit and knowledge should be free. I have no problem with pirates sharing information freely. I do have a problem with a company taking someone else's work and profiting from it. The only thing worse than copyright as it exists is copyright that can be selectively ignored when the powerful will it. Attempt to use copyright to promote Free software with the GPL? Ha, nope, copyright for me and not for thee; I'll train on your code and sell it back to you. You want to preserve access to a game or film that's unavailable or unplayable? Time to send the C&D and destroy you. Only bad things are possible.
Until we progress as a society to the point that we can put this system behind us we should at least fight to make enforcement uniform. In fact, uniform enforcement is probably a good starting point for arguing for abolition, as the pain of that enforcement is felt by proles and elites alike.
People who don't believe in copyright shouldn't be punished for "breaking" it.
Corporations believe in copyright so if they "break" it they should get punished for breaking rules they made up themselves.
Generally the law should be more strict for corporations than for real people.
edit: People downvoting can you argue why you disagree? I do think it's fair for the law to be more strict on the powerful rather than on the powerless.
I'm gonna have to go dig up the link, but isn't there a guy that Nintendo basically has on indentured servitude for the rest of his life?
Ah, found it:
>In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison having served 14 months of a 40-month sentence. Good behaviour reduced time behind bars, but now his options are limited. For a while he was crashing on a friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions, which he needs to ease chronic pain, were costing hundreds of dollars every week, and he didn’t have a job. And soon, he would need to start sending cheques to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m (£11.5m), and he’s probably going to spend the rest of his life paying it back.
I'm not even a tiny bit supportive, but there is precedent.
American executives have been pushing to criminalise copyright infringement for decades, and America has worked hard to pressure countries all round the world to do this as part of trade deals. There is, for example, a Brit serving an eleven year sentence right now *.
"American executives have been pushing to criminalise copyright infringement...Why should Zuckerberg be exempt?" Implicit relevence in the comment to which I'm replying.
Zuckerberg saying anything about copyright infringement is irrelevant to the actions Meta has taken in consuming and promoting the practice, and he should face criminal liability.
I hear you, though I was replying only to the comment I replied to, so the misunderstanding is more of targe. I don't really care either way, was more being pedantic regarding the comment's internal premise and conclusion.
The non-strawman way to interpret the parent comment is that they want them to be treated the same as normal copyright violators. Jail is a common result of (criminal) copyright prosecution, with 44% of convicted offenders being imprisoned, averaging 25 months [0].
Now, I personally find the idea of imprisoning people for copyright offenses horrific, but I don't think it's remotely insane that someone else might come to that conclusion, given that we broadly accept it as a society.
From [0]: "In fiscal year 2017, there were 80 copyright/trademark infringement offenders who accounted for 0.1% of all offenders sentenced under the guidelines." This is such a low number that I assume most prosecuted cases are settled without ever making it to sentencing, or alternatively copyright infringement is just hardly ever prosecuted criminally at all.
I don't understand how the fact that 80 people were prosecuted for copyright violation in one year is an argument that one person shouldn't be prosecuted for copyright violation.
For better or for worse, the idea behind incorporation is that you, as an owner of part or all of the company, are separated from it financially and legally in most circumstances.
Zuckerberg may be CEO, majority shareholder, and on the board of Meta, but he didn't break copyright law, Meta did. So if there were to be a consequence, Meta would pay out the fine. Not sure how you jail a company.
Now, in a company with a real corporate governance structure, the board would look at the loss incurred by said fine, look at Zuckerberg, and immediately fire him for causing the loss. However, like I said before, Zuck's in charge of Meta, so that's not going to happen, and the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares, which are the main repository of his wealth. So if he thinks he can make himself richer violating copyright law in the future, he will likely direct Meta to do so.
TL;DR, in the famous words of Bender from Futurama, "Hooray, the system fails again!"
> Zuckerberg may be CEO, majority shareholder, and on the board of Meta, but he didn't break copyright law, Meta did.
I'm still stuck on how Z telling Meta (or the relevant people at Meta, whatever) to go out there and do illegal shit doesn't make a court say that he's functionally done said illegal shit, or at least encouraged the company to do, and that he should thus be liable for that. It's not like there's much plausible deniability here. It'd be one thing if the lower ranks thought it'd be fine and did it of their own accord. It's quite another for Z to tell people to go nuts doing illegal shit.
The DMCA makes facilitation of copyright infringement illegal. Telling people to do copyright infringement is surely facilitation of copyright infringement. Surely then, Z having broken the DMCA is a fairly open and shut case, modulo calculating the damages. But apparently not?
I’ve sometimes pondered this about the legal personhood of a company - it has most of the rights as a human being but can’t suffer any of the major consequences, such as jail.
It could be possible to construct a legalistic jail for a company whereby if it has committed the type of crime that a human could be jailed for, then it could be frozen for the duration, say ten years, and all its assets, shareholder funds, contracts, everything were frozen and impounded.
Of course this seems completely ludicrous because it’s so “out there” but it’s worth having the thought experiment. Things like “corporate manslaughter” really have few consequences for the corporation itself - if it was actually jailed for twenty years and shareholders and officers left frozen out and on pause, then it might be the kind of punishment that really counted for something.
In this case, they'll be right. That, again, is the purpose of incorporation. It's also the same concept that keeps someone from emptying out all of your personal bank accounts if your small business gets sued.
What you'd need is something that either removes that protection past a certain amount of value, or, to tell entities like Meta - which are basically sole proprietorships with window dressing - that they're not entitled to the protection of incorporation if they don't enact a real corporate governance model.
There aren't enough things an executive can go to jail for.
Fines don't do anything to deter bad behavior. Either:
* The company pays
* They pay and the company mysteriously increases next year's comp / grants a "loan" / etc
* D&O insurer pays
In all three cases the money comes out of the shareholders' hides. It provides zero personal deterrence. The payoff matrix, as seen by a sociopath, makes it rational to always defect against the common good.
The only punishment that can really focus attention is physical imprisonment in a facility they can't choose.
SOX did this for financial reporting and gee shucks it turned out executives can follow the law after all!
> I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?
They stole the life's work of millions of people.
In less civilized times, they likely would have been drawn and quartered by strong horses, and had their limbs drug to the 4 corners of the continent as a warning to anyone else that would consider doing it again.
this dude got in over his head with the evil empire, it is interesting how he learned judo and tried to surf, that being said I despise social media and what it did to society
I mean the act of reproducing the copyrighted material is what is illegal. LLMs I've used for coding has outputted exact copyrights for code verbatim into my code before. When that happens it feels kind of fishy to be honest.
There's a huge difference in scale. The human mind can only process a limited portion of all works available over a lifetime. Human learning is therefore naturally limited to small-scale reuse, which serves to keep it proportional.
A machine training on all copyrighted materials in the world for commercial purposes at an industrial scale makes it disproportionate.
It would hardly make a dent. And if you hired hundreds of savants, the knowledge would still be spread over hundreds of separate minds.
And even if we grant that those savants are also very skilled at creating "market substitutes" based on their training that are capable of competing with the original works, their maximum creative output would only be a relatively small number of new works, because they can only work at human speed.
This goes back to the original purpose of copyright, which is to serve as an economic incentive for individual creators and artists to make more art, by securing exclusive rights to use their own works commercially for a specified time. The goal is both the creation of more works, but also to protect the economic viability of artists.
This principle is quite universal and can be found in many places, including the US constitution and US (supreme) court decisions, many international jurisdictions, treaties and conventions.
I don't understand why it should be allowed for one savant to study and answer questions about one book, but wrong for a company to hire one million savants to answer questions about one million books.
And I'm asking where in the law or case law this is supported.
The human savant will remember where they read it and give you credit. It might lead more people to read your work, and ultimately you make money.
The AI won't even know where the page of text it's seeing came from, and people will avoid your book as they can just ask the AI. So you make less money. (Talking about specialized technical books here.)
No one is asking human savants about what they read 1 million times per day.
Suppose they did, and some guy was filling stadiums regularly to hear him recite an entire audio book. That would probably get the attention of someone's lawyers.
I don't think anyone is arguing that the consumption is illegal. It's the reproduction that is illegal.
Read a book, that's fine. Write a book, that's fine. Read a book and then write a book that is 99.9% the same as the book that you read and sell it for profit without a license from the original author, that's infringement.
No, if you read the article, the point is in the training, not the reproduction.
That's what all these lawsuits are about - it's the training not the reproduction. I already agreed in my first comment that the reproduction is off limits.
In this case, it appears that Meta torrented illegal copies of the work to do the training. Obviously that's bad. But conflating that with training itself doesn't follow.
The point of these lawsuits is the piracy. My parent comment was about the general situation, not this specific article.
Pirating content is illegal, regardless of if it is to train an LLM.
Usage of LLMs trained on unlicensed content (basically all of them) might or might not be illegal.
Using any method to reproduce a copyrighted work by using that original as input in a way that supplants the market value of the original is probably illegal.
Well - maybe so. But the common belief is that training itself is a violation of copyright, no matter how it's done. That's the argument I'm countering here.
The issue is that the trainers have not sought licenses for the data and instead outright pirated it.
I don't think anyone thinks that all training is a copyright violation if all the training data is licensed. For example a LLM trained on CC0 content would be fine with basically everyone.
The problem is that training happens on data that is not licensed for that use. Some of that data also is pirated which makes it even clearer that it is illegal.
But why should separate licensing be required at all? A search engine reads and indexes every word of every page it crawls. No one argues that requires licensing, only that the outputs must respect copyright. Why should training be different?
But that's about the output, not the training. We agree: outputs that supplant the original are the problem. A model constrained to produce only fair use outputs causes no such harm — regardless of what it was trained on.
Sharing copyrighted material is illegal. Presumably, if Meta blocked all seeding on the torrents they downloaded, they wouldn't have broken copyright, right?
If copyright law doesn't extend to the works being used for training, why should it extend to the model that is produced as a result? AI model creators have set up an ethical scenario where the right thing to do is ignore copyright laws when it comes to AI, which includes model use. It might never be legal, but it has become ethical to pirate models, distill them against ToS, etc.
>The problem is producing the copyrighted work, not processing it beforehand.
the distinction isn't particularly clear cut with an open source model. If it is able to reproduce copyright protected work with high fidelity such that the works produced would be derivative, that's like trying to get around laws against distribution of protected works by handing them to you in a zip file.
It's a kind of copyright washing to hand you the data as a binary blob and an algorithm to extract them out of it. That wouldn't really fly with any other technology.
And that's really where a lot of the value is mind you, these models are best thought of as lossily compressed versions of their input data. Otherwise Facebook ought to be perfectly fine to train them on public domain data.
I tend to agree - but you assume that it would not be possible to create a model that can train on copyrighted work and only output text which would be considered fair use.
That seems very possible to me, and undermines the "training is copyright violation" argument. It's not the training, it's the output.
So is it a problem when humans produce and monetize competing works? My understanding is that there quite an industry in humans reading books and synthesizing their points. Cliff's Notes, for example.
I did some quick googling and most of cliffs notes guides are on public domain works so no problem there, they've also paid to license content, and also have been protected by fair use as parody
We're not talking about rights, we're talking about illegal acts. If it's illegal for a machine to do it, how can it be ok for a human?
Just from a rational argumentation point of view. Clearly if a law is written saying as much, then sure. But there is no such copyright law like that yet.
The issue is certainly not so simple. But it seems to me, purely theoretically, that the rules don't necessarily have to be the same for living people and non-living machines.
Well - actually - it is pretty simple. For something to be illegal, there must be a law saying it's illegal. There are no laws distinguishing humans from machines in copyright law.
My apologies - I'm speaking loosely of course. Translate all my claims about machines breaking the law into claims about humans using machine breaking the law.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be pedantic. I was trying to make the point (which I think is in line with your point) that the fact that AI is involved here doesn't make a difference. It is a tool, but the people using the tool are (as always) responsible for the outcome.
There's nothing in the law to support your argument either. The law however does say, very unambiguously, that copying without permission isn't allowed . There aren't exceptions for "training" just because it's superficially similar to a human activity (reading a book). A human isn't allowed to hand-copy Harry Potter. Even if they bought all the Harry Potter books.
The problem is people at large companies creating these AI models, wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it, but these large companies also want to keep copyright protection intact, for their regular business activities. They want to eat the cake and have it too. And they are arguing for essentially eliminating copyright for their specific purpose and convenience, when copyright has virtually never been loosened for the public’s convenience, even when the exceptions the public asks for are often minor and laudable. If these companies were to argue that copyright should be eliminated because of this new technology, I might not object. But now that they come and ask… no, they pretend to already have, a copyright exception for their specific use, I will happily turn around and use their own copyright maximalist arguments against them.
>wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it
Learning from copyrighted content is legal - for both humans and AI. If Meta is in hot water for anything, it's piracy and/or storage of copyrighted material.
I think it's more that the little guy gets the book thrown at them while the rich bitch gets a slap on the wrist. This is widespread, and is BAD regardless of your personal opinion on copyright.
I take issue with the use of tense used in this framing. Its not 'infringed' its 'infringing' and to say that it happened is wrong, its happening and happening continuously in these models that are in use. To say a one time payment settles it is missing the whole scope of this theft.
Royalties are owed and continuously owed as these models are deployed and doing inference. How is it any different to paying a small pittance to someone every time a song is played?
Royalties for inference are unrealistic in a way that even royalties for training aren't.
The LLaMA models were released openly. Copies exist everywhere in the world. You aren't going to be able to charge someone for running `llama.cpp`; a court order ceases to have practical relevance at that point.
First, LLMs do not reliably cite works. They are not looking things up in a database and repeating them. I think this false idea occurs a lot in people who don't understand what LLMs are or how they work.
Second, royalties are not required to cite a source.
Can you imagine how disastrous it would be to everything from news reporting to scientific publishing if that was the case?
Yeah well then I want my robot running this crap locally in its brain so I can get it to farm my two acres and haul water for me and I'll unplug from the rest of this nonsense going forward lol.
... LLMs cannot reliably provide citations. If you ask for citations, and the model did not use a web search tool, then whatever "citations" you receive are unreliable. Please do not trust these models to be honest. Just because they can discuss a topic doesn't mean they "know" where the knowledge came from in the same way that you don't need to have studied physics to catch a ball.
Even better, what if you transform that stolen CD into an MP3, so the data isn’t the same as a lossy process was used, then share the MP3 with the world as your own work?
I don’t get why the training process doesn’t count as any other form of transformation but then I’m not a lawyer.
'"They then copied those stolen fruits"
How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?
Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
And you would be hard pressed to prove that LLM's haven't advanced the arts and sciences, so at bare minimum transformative, ie fair use.'
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026207#48029072
If you write a book and I take it and embed its knowledge into my product that is so pervasive that no one needs to buy your book any more (and I don't even credit you so no one knows where that knowledge came from), to you really still have what was stolen? And I didn't even buy a copy of your book to copy it.
> Theft [...] is the act of taking another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing
maybe you should look up the definition of property, which is a set of legally recognized rights over a thing, typically including:
* possession (what you're focusing on)
* use
* exclusion
* transfer
The last 3 seem like they have been breached, in legally that's theft.
Getting punched in the face also violates rights, yet isn't murder. Murder is specifically about dying.
Also social media profile pics. Great way to get faces for deep fake ads. Most people are just 1 phone call away from being voice cloned. Our likeness isn't all that important either if you think about it.
Maybe meta will clone your writing style and sign into your meta account and message your friends telling them about this awesome new product. Meta owns the account and you uploaded data to it.
But I hear you. One of my biggest tells that someone can't be reasoned with is when they resort to whataboutism without any consideration for how 2 situations can actually be different even if there is some commonality. It's a powerful bad faith argument technique. When that style of argument comes up I nod my head and walk away. Some people are just doomed.
Elsevier at least works within the (admittedly broken) system, Meta does not.
The items they call out around training the models (and attempting to claim that each subsequent model generation should count as an additional instance of infringement) seem far less grounded in the current court interpretations of AI training.
Or anything to defend on Meta. If they go out of business, humanity profits.
That is not what this case is about. It is more about the illegal violation and piracy of copyrighted content done by Meta for commercial use and Zuck knew they were doing it.
Why did Anthropic settle [0] with a multi-billion dollar payout to authors after commercializing their LLMs that was trained off of copyrighted content that was illegally obtained and kept without the authors permission?
There's a reason why they (Anthropic) did not want it to go to trial. (Anthropic knew they would lose and it would completely bankrupt them in the hundreds of billions.)
AI boosters will do anything to justify the mass piracy and illegal obtainment of copyrighted material for commercial use (not research) which that is not fair use in the US. There is no debate on this. [0]
[0] https://images.assettype.com/theleaflet/2025-09-27/mnuaifvw/...
The previous infringement case with Anthropic said that while training an AI was transformative and not itself an infringement, pirating works for that purpose still was definitely infringement all by itself. The settlement was $1.5bn, so close to $3k for each of the 500k they pirated, so if Zuckerberg pirated "millions" (plural) it is quite plausible his settlement could be $6bn.
[1] See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace#Legal_pro...
He bought the best protection around for breaking the law.
IIRC, Facebook's cash is more like $81-82 billion.
There's some interesting exceptions, like how Musk has managed to sell Tesla shares totalling more or less as much as the business itself has made in total lifetime revenue; but even then, Musk's theoretical net worth is very different from how much he could get if he was forced to sell all his shares suddenly.
Owner-CEOs like Musk and Zuckerberg get all the effects of such randomness, but the only examples I can think of such people getting into billion-dollar legal troubles tend to be examples which go on to sink their companies completely, so I'm not sure what impact a fine of "merely" 10% of cash reserves would do to investor confidence as expressed in share price. And this is not the only legal case Meta's facing right now.
MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos' ex wife) show it can be turned into real money. As of December 2025 She had given away $7.1 billion in 2025 charitable donations, and $26.3 billion since 2019.
In reality there is the ability to execute on the shares to turn them into real money.
Jeff Bezos holds less than 10% of Amazon stock himself. Which is a huge amount of money, and a not insignificant amount of which can be turned into "real" money and even with some decline is still a phenomenal amount.
In that same time period the stock valuation has more than doubled.
Yes, there are specialized products catered to billionaires. But those aren't getting them better rates than someone with a $200k portfolio (Zuck is not conventionally a less risky borrower than the Options Clearing Corporation!). They exist to work around the fact that some borrowers can't just casually liquidate their stock on the open market, let alone at face value. By all accounts these products are more expensive than retail.
Mostly this is an expensive (but maybe still less expensive than taxes, depending on the rate environment—it's more of a no-brainer in ZIRPland) way to diversify out of a single-stock portfolio without selling by adding leverage. At Zuck's age, it's still very unlikely to make sense to borrow instead of sell to spend. He's been known to pay real taxes in the past, they just look small relative to his imputed wealth growth because rich people don't spend a lot relative to their wealth growth because they, quite by definition, have a lot of wealth.
Also, you'd totally gut retail home equity lending as collateral damage, with disastrous social policy consequences.
Any asset a bank is willing to take is collateral has the same issue, it’s just very pronounced in this instance.
If you take your idea at face value, anyone who borrows against their property to renovate/upgrade would be up for tax.
I sincerely doubt that Meta's share price would crash as a result of Zuckerberg getting an expensive judgement.
Mine is a daily bash cronjob that fetches a text-based database and uses grep to build an nftables-apply script with all the IPs for the blocked ASNs. I keep meaning to share it, but it's embarrassingly messy I haven't had time to clean it up...
I've wondered what the legalese justification for letting liability evaporate as it does so often with corps. So far the reasons I'm left with are 'shrugs' and 'the relevant provision (seemingly? apparently?) simply don't apply', neither of which are any good.
I was going to make a joke about how we should attach magnets to Aaron Swartz' corpse, since that'd make for a pretty potent energy source, given how fast he must be spinning. But honestly, I think he would have seen this sort of thing coming, given how his case was handled and how things really haven't gotten any better.
This does not comfort me.
All the Aaron Schwartzes of the future could freely share scientific papers with the world.
The question to answer is, did it happen and if so is this copyright infringement (not covered by fair use), not which company official authorized it.
The rate at which they were spidering and scraping was so far beyond what any other supposedly legit spider was doing, it seemed like the logical explanation.
But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that data set? Meh, sounds like Silicon Valley disruption, give the man a medal!
it is wrong to advocate for everyone to be treated equally unjustly. better to advocate for the removal of the bad laws/structures
I’m not calling for its use as a “retributive tool”. Just that it be applied evenly.
court precedent is a useful tool of advocacy
I doubt Meta has deleted their local copy though ...
No accountability for rich people has funny patterns like this.
Personally, I would be happy if AI companies are what finally take down intellectual monopoly (intellectual property). I know being anti-intellectual-monopoly isn't a common view, but i don't see average people thinking it is so important—as you can see by the huge increases in piracy recently. Could be wrong about this, I haven't done research on public opinion about copyright.
Honestly, this whole case could be great. Either copyright loses, good for us. Or Zuckerberg loses, also good for us.
I would say that copyright loses is better for society than Zuckerberg loses because, my wish for Zuckerberg to lose is from hatred, while my wish for copyright to be abolished is from my wish to help humanity.
Even Supreme Court justices[1] have said the case for copyright is thin.
[1] (before he became a justice) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright
Anyway, the point is - there will be no justice until the citizens of the united states demand it.
Trump won because he's popular and none of the slander is sticking. Take it out on me I guess.
Why would anyone take anything you say seriously when you have shown such disastrously poor judgement in the past?
Oh yeah, here's one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687720
You have repeatedly demonstrated that you are a useful fool and nothing more. There's no further response required here.
This article doesn’t even remotely itemize all of Trumps corruption, but it’s long and extremely damning.
I would hope that anyone still supporting this administration reads this article and does some introspection on why. I’m guessing that ship probably sailed 6 years ago, though.
Also that there are over 2,000 emails with Peter Thiel. Or maybe the part where Sergey Brin was helping Epstein shop for an aircraft carrier (also after conviction). Honestly it was incredibly revealing that none of these people care that he raped kids. I would love to see the Trump files which were withheld but clearly thats never gonna happen.
Anyway, congrats to everyone involved on the MAGA golden age!
> Authors have sued AI companies for copyright infringement before - and lost.
So, basically nothing will come out of this
So not are these publishers rightfully pissed, Meta didn’t even give them the $6.99 for each epub to begin with. They’ve stolen the whole thing as part of this “fair use” campaign to destroy human authorship free of even the most basic remuneration.
RICO specifically cites "criminal infringement of a copyright" as laid out in 18 U.S. Code § 2319. If the CEO tells his employees to download hundreds of thousands of works illegally in order to carry out his money-making scheme, how is that not organized crime even if (dubiously) LLM training on the material is fair use?
-----
RICO: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-96
Definitions: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961
> As used in this chapter — (1) “racketeering activity” means (A)[...]; (B) any act which is indictable under any of the following provisions of title 18, United States Code: [...], section 2319 (relating to criminal infringement of a copyright),[...]
18 U.S. Code § 2319 - Criminal infringement of a copyright: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2319
-----
edit:
> 18 U.S. Code § 1962 - Prohibited activities
> (c) It shall be unlawful for any person employed by or associated with any enterprise engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce, to conduct or participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise’s affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity[...].
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1962
From the lawsuit:
“Meta — at Zuckerberg’s direction — copied millions of books, journal articles, and other written works without authorization, including those owned or controlled by Plaintiffs and the Class, and then made additional copies of those works to train Llama,” the suit says. “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement. Meta also stripped [copyright management information] from the copyrighted works it stole. It did this to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.”
WTF
How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?
Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
And you would be hard pressed to prove that LLM's haven't advanced the arts and sciences, so at bare minimum transformative, ie fair use.
Tired of the double standard that CEOs get away when bad things happen (because they can’t be everywhere all the time) but all the benefits when the company makes a great profit (because they’re personally driving results!).
I'd much rather prosecution focus on Zuck's more serious crimes against privacy and civilization as a whole. But maybe this is a small start?
That's not revenue.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Consider the case of someone who gets banned but Facebook keeps collecting money on their business account. Or consider the case of Facebook's video metrics scandal, or... whatever. It's a little fuzzy translating how much value equates to how much stock price equates to how much real-world is-this-useful-to-me but it does matter when FB is accused of marketing (Aaron Greenspan, thinkcomp, has brought this up, in his 2019 testimony to UK parliament) advertising to more people in a region or country than actually physically exist
So fraud builds on itself, you have more fraud money to pay lawyers to try to defend you in fraud cases
The title is clickbait at it's worst. The situation around copyright and AI is stock standard "CEO makes a decision in an area that is clear as mud".
Until we progress as a society to the point that we can put this system behind us we should at least fight to make enforcement uniform. In fact, uniform enforcement is probably a good starting point for arguing for abolition, as the pain of that enforcement is felt by proles and elites alike.
Corporations believe in copyright so if they "break" it they should get punished for breaking rules they made up themselves.
Generally the law should be more strict for corporations than for real people.
edit: People downvoting can you argue why you disagree? I do think it's fair for the law to be more strict on the powerful rather than on the powerless.
If this was you or me, we would be in prison for decades and have a fine in the millions. Time for these people to feel consequences.
As someone said, they will probably settle for around 6 billion, that is the same as say a $100 fine for us.
I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?
Ah, found it:
>In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison having served 14 months of a 40-month sentence. Good behaviour reduced time behind bars, but now his options are limited. For a while he was crashing on a friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions, which he needs to ease chronic pain, were costing hundreds of dollars every week, and he didn’t have a job. And soon, he would need to start sending cheques to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m (£11.5m), and he’s probably going to spend the rest of his life paying it back.
I'm not even a tiny bit supportive, but there is precedent.
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/feb/01/the-man-who-ow...
Why should Zuckerberg be exempt?
* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65697595
Zuckerberg saying anything about copyright infringement is irrelevant to the actions Meta has taken in consuming and promoting the practice, and he should face criminal liability.
Now, I personally find the idea of imprisoning people for copyright offenses horrific, but I don't think it's remotely insane that someone else might come to that conclusion, given that we broadly accept it as a society.
[0] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
Zuckerberg may be CEO, majority shareholder, and on the board of Meta, but he didn't break copyright law, Meta did. So if there were to be a consequence, Meta would pay out the fine. Not sure how you jail a company.
Now, in a company with a real corporate governance structure, the board would look at the loss incurred by said fine, look at Zuckerberg, and immediately fire him for causing the loss. However, like I said before, Zuck's in charge of Meta, so that's not going to happen, and the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares, which are the main repository of his wealth. So if he thinks he can make himself richer violating copyright law in the future, he will likely direct Meta to do so.
TL;DR, in the famous words of Bender from Futurama, "Hooray, the system fails again!"
I'm still stuck on how Z telling Meta (or the relevant people at Meta, whatever) to go out there and do illegal shit doesn't make a court say that he's functionally done said illegal shit, or at least encouraged the company to do, and that he should thus be liable for that. It's not like there's much plausible deniability here. It'd be one thing if the lower ranks thought it'd be fine and did it of their own accord. It's quite another for Z to tell people to go nuts doing illegal shit.
The DMCA makes facilitation of copyright infringement illegal. Telling people to do copyright infringement is surely facilitation of copyright infringement. Surely then, Z having broken the DMCA is a fairly open and shut case, modulo calculating the damages. But apparently not?
I don't even play one on TV.
I wonder if, somehow, you could use or extend RICO statutes to cover this sort of thing.
> the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares
You lack imagination :-) but you've identified both the problem and the solution.
It could be possible to construct a legalistic jail for a company whereby if it has committed the type of crime that a human could be jailed for, then it could be frozen for the duration, say ten years, and all its assets, shareholder funds, contracts, everything were frozen and impounded.
Of course this seems completely ludicrous because it’s so “out there” but it’s worth having the thought experiment. Things like “corporate manslaughter” really have few consequences for the corporation itself - if it was actually jailed for twenty years and shareholders and officers left frozen out and on pause, then it might be the kind of punishment that really counted for something.
You jail the CEO and the others will stand up and take note.
"But they'll complain" who gives a fuck.
What you'd need is something that either removes that protection past a certain amount of value, or, to tell entities like Meta - which are basically sole proprietorships with window dressing - that they're not entitled to the protection of incorporation if they don't enact a real corporate governance model.
I always heard that criminals should be thrown in jail, it's time we started doing it to the real criminals.
Fines don't do anything to deter bad behavior. Either:
* The company pays
* They pay and the company mysteriously increases next year's comp / grants a "loan" / etc
* D&O insurer pays
In all three cases the money comes out of the shareholders' hides. It provides zero personal deterrence. The payoff matrix, as seen by a sociopath, makes it rational to always defect against the common good.
The only punishment that can really focus attention is physical imprisonment in a facility they can't choose.
SOX did this for financial reporting and gee shucks it turned out executives can follow the law after all!
They stole the life's work of millions of people.
In less civilized times, they likely would have been drawn and quartered by strong horses, and had their limbs drug to the 4 corners of the continent as a warning to anyone else that would consider doing it again.
I know there's a complaint that AI can verbatim repeat that work. But so can human savants. No one is suing human savants for reading their books.
Producing copyrighted material, of course. Training on copyrighted material... I just don't see it.
EDIT: Making a perfectly valid point, but it's unpopular, so down I go.
Sarah Silverman as the most prominent example.
A machine training on all copyrighted materials in the world for commercial purposes at an industrial scale makes it disproportionate.
If a company hired hundreds of savants, then it would be illegal for them to read books?
I don't follow.
And even if we grant that those savants are also very skilled at creating "market substitutes" based on their training that are capable of competing with the original works, their maximum creative output would only be a relatively small number of new works, because they can only work at human speed.
Can you cite something in the copyright laws themselves that suggest this scale distinction?
This principle is quite universal and can be found in many places, including the US constitution and US (supreme) court decisions, many international jurisdictions, treaties and conventions.
I don't understand why it should be allowed for one savant to study and answer questions about one book, but wrong for a company to hire one million savants to answer questions about one million books.
And I'm asking where in the law or case law this is supported.
The AI won't even know where the page of text it's seeing came from, and people will avoid your book as they can just ask the AI. So you make less money. (Talking about specialized technical books here.)
Suppose they did, and some guy was filling stadiums regularly to hear him recite an entire audio book. That would probably get the attention of someone's lawyers.
If it's illegal for AIs it should be illegal for humans, too. Is that really what you're arguing? It should be illegal for savants to read books?
Read a book, that's fine. Write a book, that's fine. Read a book and then write a book that is 99.9% the same as the book that you read and sell it for profit without a license from the original author, that's infringement.
That's what all these lawsuits are about - it's the training not the reproduction. I already agreed in my first comment that the reproduction is off limits.
In this case, it appears that Meta torrented illegal copies of the work to do the training. Obviously that's bad. But conflating that with training itself doesn't follow.
Pirating content is illegal, regardless of if it is to train an LLM.
Usage of LLMs trained on unlicensed content (basically all of them) might or might not be illegal.
Using any method to reproduce a copyrighted work by using that original as input in a way that supplants the market value of the original is probably illegal.
At least that is my rudimentary understanding.
I don't think anyone thinks that all training is a copyright violation if all the training data is licensed. For example a LLM trained on CC0 content would be fine with basically everyone.
The problem is that training happens on data that is not licensed for that use. Some of that data also is pirated which makes it even clearer that it is illegal.
If you supplant the value of the original with the original as input then you probably have some legal questions to answer.
It's a "rules for thee and not for me" argument.
the distinction isn't particularly clear cut with an open source model. If it is able to reproduce copyright protected work with high fidelity such that the works produced would be derivative, that's like trying to get around laws against distribution of protected works by handing them to you in a zip file.
It's a kind of copyright washing to hand you the data as a binary blob and an algorithm to extract them out of it. That wouldn't really fly with any other technology.
And that's really where a lot of the value is mind you, these models are best thought of as lossily compressed versions of their input data. Otherwise Facebook ought to be perfectly fine to train them on public domain data.
That seems very possible to me, and undermines the "training is copyright violation" argument. It's not the training, it's the output.
How about then to grant AI all other rights, for example, to allow voting?(sarcasm)
Just from a rational argumentation point of view. Clearly if a law is written saying as much, then sure. But there is no such copyright law like that yet.
Correct. Because until very recently there was no need.
Yes it's very different. Humans need to eat, sleep, and pay taxes. You also have to pay them competitive wages.
There's nothing in the law to support your argument either. The law however does say, very unambiguously, that copying without permission isn't allowed . There aren't exceptions for "training" just because it's superficially similar to a human activity (reading a book). A human isn't allowed to hand-copy Harry Potter. Even if they bought all the Harry Potter books.
(Copied from a comment of mine written more than three years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047>)
Learning from copyrighted content is legal - for both humans and AI. If Meta is in hot water for anything, it's piracy and/or storage of copyrighted material.
Royalties are owed and continuously owed as these models are deployed and doing inference. How is it any different to paying a small pittance to someone every time a song is played?
The LLaMA models were released openly. Copies exist everywhere in the world. You aren't going to be able to charge someone for running `llama.cpp`; a court order ceases to have practical relevance at that point.
"I made enough copies for everyone" isn't a valid defense for copyright infringement.
Second, royalties are not required to cite a source.
Can you imagine how disastrous it would be to everything from news reporting to scientific publishing if that was the case?
Also I believe performing covers is legal
I don’t get why the training process doesn’t count as any other form of transformation but then I’m not a lawyer.