'Meta Torrented over 81 TB of Data Through Anna's Archive, Despite Few Seeders' * TorrentFreak

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I assume you probably want to know how this kind of leftism is different from others or other ideologies calling themself leftist, rather than for me to write an essay on myself.

What confuses me is that you argue that property owners should be able to demand payment for the use of their property without any further consideration. That is a very conservative capitalist stance. It's not compatible with any flavor of socialism that I am aware of. In fact, most pro-capitalists would reject it as too far right. The only ideologue, I can think of, that holds this stance even for copyrights is Ayn Rand. Your ideas seem compatible with hers. I don't understand why you would think of that as socialist or even left.

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When you think payment you think „money” but I think „fair” We’ve been broken by capitalist hegemony to the point it’s hard of thinking of something different.

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Still sounds like Ayn Rand and not socialism.

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GPT, Meta, Deepseek and Google have probably all been trained on the data.

The problem is, training on the data, and actually training for knowledge of the data are VERY different things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GkHZQYFOGM

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It sounds like a European soviet republic. Most of them were working reasonably well and were really good at preventing poverty but were stuck in-between being exploited by Russia and artificially cut off from half the world (big reason why they had to fail). Those countries solved problems progressive western democracies couldn’t ever solve, for example gender wage inequality (to the point it endures today). Unfortunately all of us in the „west” are stuck in a death spiral after US and Russia went tits up in the 70s/80s. Maybe we’ll have another go once this is finally done.

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If buying ain't owning, than downloading...

oh wait, that's our slogan

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He already referred them to the justice department, this is a civil case, he cannot sentence them criminally.

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I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. Do you think that soviet states would have negotiated with owners of private property before using it for public benefit?

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Agreed. Seed forever and release the AI weights and model. That would be fair payment.

The entirely of Annas archive would be an excellent benchmark training set.

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Annas archive. Keep up. Pffff.

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No, why would they? There’s a difference between strong taking from the weak and state taking surplus from everyone.

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But this is America

Maybe they hosted their servers in Eritrea, Turkmenistan or San Marino. No copyright laws there

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Assuming 2.6 MB per book.

81 TB would be 32,667,175 books.

At $250k per book that would come out to:

$8.17 trillion.

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I'm trying to follow you. It would be ok if a soviet government did it, but if a private company does it, then it's stealing. Because a soviet government is strong? Has control of the military and all that, unlike some start-up or even an established company?

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I’m not sure I’m following you either, it appears to me that you don’t see a difference between tax and theft. It was common to outgrow this belief but it appears to be common now. I’ll try to explain.

When Meta takes from everyone it’s a bully that takes from the weak who can’t fight back. Meta does it so that they become the biggest fish in the pond as an end goal.

When a state takes from everyone and rich in particular it’s because we don’t to have this kind of big fish in the pond. We just want to chill.

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Oh look, another tech giant treating open knowledge initiatives like their personal data buffet. Let me translate this corporate nonsense for you:

Meta: "We need training data for our AI!"
Also Meta: Let's leech 81.7TB from a community project without contributing anything back.

The absolute audacity of downloading terabytes through torrents while their employees were internally admitting it was "legally problematic". And the best part? They couldn't even be bothered to seed properly - just grab and go, classic corporate behavior.

Remember when companies actually contributed to open source instead of just parasitically consuming it? But no, they'd rather burden volunteer-run projects with massive bandwidth costs while their lawyers probably bill more per hour than these projects' entire monthly budget.

Pro tip Meta: If you're going to pilfer knowledge from the commons, at least seed back properly. Your "move fast and break things" motto isn't supposed to apply to community archives.

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I’m not sure I’m following you either, it appears to me that you don’t see a difference between tax and theft.

That's an odd thing to write. Why do you believe that?

When Meta takes from everyone it’s a bully that takes from the weak who can’t fight back. Meta does it so that they become the biggest fish in the pond as an end goal.

When a state takes from everyone and rich in particular it’s because we don’t to have this kind of big fish in the pond. We just want to chill.

Ok, I think I get this now. You believe in far-reaching intellectual property, and that property is inviolable, except to limit inequality. So, you reject US-style Fair Use which has a public benefit in mind. Instead, copying only doesn't require permission if the rights-owner is wealthier than oneself. So, most people could freely copy Taylor Swift songs but perhaps not songs by some street musician. Does that cover it?

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It’s not Meta vs us, but opensource vs Google and Openai.

I never said it's Meta vs us. It's Meta vs (in this particular case) the book publishing industry. You can't reduce the whole situation to open source vs closed source, there's other "axes" at play here as well.

They are being sued for copyright infringement when it’s clearly highly transformative

They downloaded the entire Libgen and more. Going by the traditional explanations of piracy, that's like stealing several hundred bookstores worth of books all at once, and then claiming it's alright because your own writing is not plagiarised from any of the books you've stolen. (Piracy is not the same as actual stealing of course, but countless people have been being legally bullied and ruined with that logic.) Meta also got its data from Internet Archive; unless they only obtained their materials that are public domain or under a similar license, they've obtained a lot of material that IA has been sentenced for allowing unlimited access to back in 2020 (if you've followed the Hachette v. Internet Archive case). The brainfucking conclusion of your and Facebook's case is that using illegal services is perfectly legal as long as you sufficiently transform the results of the illegal activity.

The rules are fine as is

Actually they're not. Copyright law is insanely restrictive, and I don't think you've dealt much with media if you think it's fine (but I don't wish to delve into this further as it's beyond the scope of discussion).

Meta isn’t the one trying to change them

Of course they're not trying to change them, that's the point, they will get away with breaking them while being perfectly fine with other actors not being able to do so.

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'Meta Torrented over 81 TB of Data Through Anna's Archive, Despite Few Seeders' * TorrentFreak