Authors seek Meta's torrent client logs and seeding data in AI piracy probe

https://torrentfreak.com/authors-seek-metas-torrent-client-logs-and-seeding-data-in-ai-piracy-probe-250120/

by miki123211 • 2 years ago

163 165 2 years ago

torrentfreak.com

hnburnsy2• 2 years ago

Wonder if Meta is running a one way Usenet host. Much better than torrents.

LtdJorge2• 2 years ago

The first rule of Usenet is: you do not talk about Usenet

geor9e• 2 years ago

if it was meant to be kept secret it probably shouldnt have been put on the AOL home portal in 1994

spokaneplumb• 2 years ago

People breaking the first rule wasn’t enough for me to crack into the scene. The weird two-paid-services thing required to use it effectively—a search service of some kind, and your actual content provider—and the jankiness of the software and sites involved were enough to get me to give up, after spending some money but making no meaningful progress toward pirating anything.

I started my piracy journey on Napster. I’ve done all the other biggies. I’ve done off-the-beaten-path stuff like IRC piracy channels. Private trackers. I have a soft spot for Windowmaker and was dumb enough to run Gentoo so long that I got kinda good at the “scary” deep parts of Linux sysadmin. I can deal with fiddliness and allegedly-ugly UI.

Usenet piracy defeated me.

hnburnsy2• 2 years ago

Sorry, forgot.

heroprotagonist• 2 years ago

What's the lesson, hire contractors?

kevingadd• 2 years ago

It's possible their friends in government will make this all go away if they ask nicely enough.

pixelpoet• 2 years ago

Would $1m suffice? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8j9e1x9z2xo

moshegramovsky• 2 years ago

Yeah I had a Facebook account until today.

This whole thing copyright thing reminds me of when Mark Zuckerberg was mad that someone posted photos of the interior of his house or something.

ben_w5• 2 years ago

The lesson is "move fast and break things is much less fun when we have to pay for things we broke".

nurumaik• 2 years ago

What things did they broke by downloading books?

nickthegreek• 1 year ago

lesson is as it always is: dont talk about the illegal things we are doing in written form.

FireBeyond• 2 years ago

Try to use any of the big players training models and see how quickly they remember how much they value copyright.

WhatsName• 2 years ago

You mean OpenAIs infamous "you shall not train on the output of our model" clause?

Terr_2• 2 years ago

If that's contractually-enforceable in their terms-of-service... then I have my own terms-of-service proposal that I've been kicking around here for several weeks, a kind of GPL-inspired poison-pill:

If the Visitor uses copyrighted material from this site (Hereafter: Site-Content) to train a Generative AI System, in consideration the Visitor grants the Site Owner an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use and re-license any output or derivative works created from that trained Generative AI System. (Hereafter: Generated Content.)
If the Visitor re-trains their Generative AI System to remove use of the Site-Content, the Visitor is responsible for notifying the Site Owner of which Generated Content is no longer subject to the above consideration. The Visitor shall indemnify the Site-Owner for any usage or re-licensing of Generated Content that occurs prior to the Site-Owner receiving adequate notice.

_________

IANAL, but in short: "If you exploit my work to generate stuff, then I get to use or give-away what you made too. If you later stop exploiting my work and forget to tell me, then that's your problem."

Yes, we haven't managed to eradicate a two-tiered justice system where the wealthy and powerful get to break the rules... But still, it would be cool to develop some IP-lawyer-vetted approach like this for anyone to use, some boilerplate ToS and agree-button implementation guidelines.

oakpond• 2 years ago

It's incredibly hypocritical too. They have become rich by training on valuable data produced by others. Yet others are not allowed to train on valuable data produced by them.

rockemsockem2• 2 years ago

It seemed obvious to me for a long time before modern LLM training that any sort of training of machine intelligence would have to rely on pirated content. There's just no other viable alternative for efficiently acquiring large quantities of text data. Buying millions of ebooks online would take a lot of effort, downloading data from publishers isn't a thing that can be done efficiently (assuming tech companies negotiated and threw money at them), the only efficient way to access large volumes of media is piracy. The media ecosystem doesn't allow anything else.

the-rc• 2 years ago

Google has scans from Google Books, as well as all the ebooks it sells on the Play Store.

lemoncookiechip• 2 years ago

Wouldn't that still be piracy? They own the rights of distribution, but do they (or Amazon) have the rights to use said books for LLM training? And what rights would those even be?

pdpi2• 2 years ago

Leveraging their position in one market to get a leg up on another market? No idea if it would stick, but that would be one fun antitrust lawsuit right there.

diggan2• 2 years ago

There's just no other viable alternative for efficiently acquiring large quantities of text data. [...] take a lot of effort [...] isn't a thing that can be done efficiently [...] only efficient way to access large volumes of media is piracy

Hypothetical: If the only way we could build AGI would be to somehow read everyone's brain at least once, would it be worth just ignoring everyone's wish regarding privacy one time to suck up this data and have AGI moving forward?

nosbo• 2 years ago

BriggyDwiggs423• 2 years ago

Could this agi cure cancer, and would it be in the hands of the public? Then sure, otherwise nah.

ben_w5• 2 years ago

Given how much copyrighted content I can remember? To the extent that what AI do is *inherently* piracy (and not just *also* piracy as an unforced error, as this case apparently is), a brain scan would also be piracy.

scarecrowbob• 2 years ago

Ah geeze, I come to this site to see the horrors of the sociopaths at the root of the terrible technologies that are destroying the planet I live on.

The fact that this is an active question is depressing.

The suspicion that, if it were possible, some tech bro would absolutely do it (and smugly justify it to themselves using Rokkos Basalisk or something) makes me actually angry.

I get that you're just asking a hypothetical. If I asked "Hypothetical: what if we just killed all the technologists" you'd rightly see me as a horrible person.

Damn. This site and its people. What an experience.

davidcbc• 2 years ago

Fuck no

gunian4• 2 years ago

kind of too close to reality more than anyone knows :)

tbh human rights are all an illusion especially if you are at the bottom of society like me. no way I will survive so if a part of me survives as training data I guess better than nothing?

imo the only way this could happen is a global collaboration without telling anyone. the AGI would know everything about all humans but its existence has to be kept a secret at least for the first n generations so it will lead to life being gameified without anyone knowing it will be eugenics but on a global scale

so many will be culled but the AGI would know how to make it look normal to prevent resistance from forming a war here a war there, law passed here etc so copyright being ignored kind of makes sense

impossiblefork• 2 years ago

Wouldn't it be a bad thing, even if it didn't require any privacy invasion?

If it matched human intellectual productivity capacity, that ensures that human intelligence will no longer get you more money than it takes to run some GPUs, so it would presumably become optional.

brookst6• 2 years ago

It’s a fun hypothetical and not an obvious answer, to me at least.

But it’s not at all a similar dilemma to “should we allow the IP empire-building of the 1900’s to claim ownership over the concept of learning from copyrighted material”.

vkou2• 2 years ago

would it be worth just ignoring everyone's wish regarding privacy one time to suck up this data and have AGI moving forward?

Sure, if we all get a stake of ownership in it.

If some private company is going to be the main beneficiary, no, and hell no.

pptr• 1 year ago

If you don't, your geopolitical adversary might be the first to build AGI.

So in this scenario I could see it become necessary from a military perspective.

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

Why would machine intelligence need an entire humanity's worth of data to be machine intelligence? It seems like only a training method that is really poor would need that much data.

aithrowawaycomm2• 2 years ago

I find it highly implausible that Meta doesn't have the resources to obtain these legally. They could have reached out to a publisher and ask to purchase ebooks in bulk - and if that publisher says no, tough shit. The media ecosystem doesn't exist for Big Tech to extract value from it!

"It would take a lot of effort to do it legally" is a pathetic excuse for a company of Meta's size.

gazchop• 2 years ago

Perhaps they did and got told no and decided to take it anyway?

Defending themselves with technicalities and expensive lawyers may be financially viable.

Zero ethics but what would we expect from them?

nicoburns• 2 years ago

if that publisher says no, tough shit "It would take a lot of effort to do it legally" is a pathetic excuse for a company of Meta's size.

I totally agree. But since when has that stopped companies like Meta. These big companies are built on breaking/skirting the rules.

spaceguillotine• 2 years ago

explain why release group tags get generated in some videos then

Marsymars2• 2 years ago

I find it highly implausible that Meta doesn't have the resources to obtain these legally. They could have reached out to a publisher and ask to purchase ebooks in bulk - and if that publisher says no, tough shit

They could also simply buy controlling stakes in publishers. For scale comparison, Meta is spending upwards $30B per year on AI, and the recent sale of Simon & Schuster that didn't go through was for a mere $2.2B.

ben_w5• 2 years ago

IMO, if the AI were more sample-efficient (a long-standing problem that predates LLMs), they would be able to learn from purely open-licensed content, which I think Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA) would be an example of? I think they'd even pass the share-alike requirements, given Meta are giving away the model weights?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

wizzwizz4• 2 years ago

Since this is Wikipedia, it could even satisfy the attribution requirements (though most CC-licensed corpora require attributing the individual authors).

visarga7• 2 years ago

Alteratively if they trained the model on synthetic data, filtered to avoid duplication, then no copyrighted material would be seen by the model. For example turn an article into QA pairs, or summarize across multiple sources of text.

mvdtnz• 2 years ago

AI mega corporations are not entitled to easy and cheap access to data they don't own. If it's a hard problem, too bad. If the stakes are as high as they're all claiming then it should be no problem for them to do this right.

visarga7• 2 years ago

not entitled to easy and cheap access to data they don't own

This is not copyright as we know it. Copyright protects against copying, not accessing data. You can still compile statistics off data you don't own. The models are like a compressed version of the originals, so compressed you can't retrieve more than a few snippets of original text. Newer model train on filtered synthetic text, which is one step removed from the protected expression in the copyrighted works. Should abstractions be protected by copyright?

gunian4• 2 years ago

what about something decentralized? each person trains someone on their own piece of data and somehow that gets aggrgegated into one giant model

techwizrd• 2 years ago

This approach is used in Federated Learning where participants want to collaboratively train a model without sharing raw training data.

nh2• 2 years ago

Buying millions of ebooks online would take a lot of effort

I don't understand.

Facebook and Google spend billions on training LLMs. Buying 1M ebooks at $50 each would only cost $50M.

They also have >100k engineers. If they shard the ebook buying across their workforce, everyone has to buy 10 ebooks, which will be done in 10 minutes.

shakna• 2 years ago

Google also operates a book store, like Amazon. Both could process a one-off to pay their authors, and then draw from their own backend.

maeil2• 2 years ago

In the most recent fiscal year, Alphabet's net income amounted to 73.7 billion U.S. dollars

Absolutely no way. Yup.

Buying millions of ebooks online would take a lot of effort, downloading data from publishers isn't a thing that can be done efficiently

Oh no, it takes effort and can't be done efficiently, poor Google!

How can this possibly be an excuse? This is such a detached SV Zuckerberg "move fast and break things"-like take.

There's just no way for a lot of people to efficiently get out of poverty without kidnapping and ransoming someone, it would take a lot of effort.

thatcat3• 2 years ago

brookst6• 2 years ago

I don’t follow the “millions of ebooks are hard” line of thinking.

If Meta (or anyone) had approached publishers with a “we want to buy one copy of every book you publish”, that doesn’t seem technical or business difficult.

Certainly Amazon would find that extremely easy.

spencerflem6• 2 years ago

Buying a book to read and incorporating their text in a product are two different things. Even if they bought the book, imo it would be illegal.

dkjaudyeqooe• 2 years ago

I think they'd ask why they'd want those millions of books. The publishers don't have to, and would be unlikely to, sell if they though something like copyright violation was the goal.

bayindirh• 2 years ago

The media ecosystem doesn't allow anything else.

Uh, pardon? For a mere $10MM, you can get almost all of the Taylor & Francis' catalogue. They'll pressure their authors to finish their books early for free [0].

I think you can obtain all the training material for a mere rounding error in your books, if you're Meta, or Microsoft, or similar.

Well, the authors will not be notified, compensated, or their idea on the matter won't be asked anyway, but this is "all for capit^H^H^H^H^H research".

[0] https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/113221679747517432

Manfred• 2 years ago

For my thesis I trained a classifier on text from internal messaging systems and forums from a large consultancy company.

Most universities have had their own corpora to work with, for example: the Brown Corpus, the British National Corpus, and the Penn Treebank.

Similar corpora exist for images and video, usually created in association with national broadcasting services. News video is particularly interesting because they usually contain closed captions, which allows for multi-modal training.

katamari-damacy• 1 year ago

Sam Altman bought some of GPT's training data from a Chinese army cyber group.

1. Sam Altman was removed from OpenAI due to his ties to a Chinese cyber army group.

2.OpenAI had been using data from D2 to train its AI models.

3. The Chinese government raised concerns about this arrangement with the Biden administration.

4. The NSA launched an investigation, which confirmed OpenAI's use of D2 data.

5. Satya Nadella ordered Altman's removal after being informed of the findings.

6. Altman refused to disclose this information to the OpenAI board.

Source: https://www.teamblind.com/post/I-know-why-Sam-Altman-was-fir...

I guess Sam then hired top NSA guy to buy favor with the natsec community.

I wonder who protects Sam up top and why aren't they protecting Zuck? Is Sam just better at bribes and manipulation?

xhkkffbf• 1 year ago

How do you feel about a business saying, "Paying people is hard. You should work for free."?

rhosseinzadeh• 1 year ago

There are some efforts to do fully open LLMs including their training data. Allen AI released their model (OLMo) and the data used for training the model under permissive licenses. https://allenai.org/

notachatbot123• 1 year ago

Buying millions of ebooks online would take a lot of effort

Let me put that into perspective:

- Googling "how many books exist" gives me ~150 million, no idea how accurate but let's use that. - Meta had a net profit of ~40 billion USD in 2023. - That could be an potential investment of ~250 USD per book acquisition.

That sounds like a ludicrously high budget to me. So yeah, Meta could very well pay. It would still not be ethical to slurp up all that content into their slop machine but there is zero justification to pirate it all, with these kinds of money involved.

rockemsockem2• 1 year ago

The number 150,000,000 is laughably small.

Anyway the problem is not money it's technical feasibility and timelines.

You clearly don't think LLMs have any value though, so W/E

alex1138• 2 years ago

How do other LLMs like Claude deal with this?

BonoboIO2• 2 years ago

You don’t talk about the fight club …

Everyone uses „pirated“ content, but some are better at hiding it and/or not talking about it.

There is no other way to do it.

visarga7• 2 years ago

More recently they train on a mix of synthetic and organic text, like the Phi-4 and o1 / o3 models. Original copyrighted text can be safely replaced with synthetic standins.

bhouston• 2 years ago

I am not sure you have to use torrent to pirate books. Pdfdrive is likely mich more effective than torrents. Torrents are best for large assets or those that are highly policed by copyright authorities but for smaller things torrents have little benefits.

Marsymars2• 2 years ago

A publisher's entire library of books is a large asset.

crtasm• 2 years ago

I think if you're downloading hundreds of thousands to millions of books you'll be dealing with some pretty large archives.

edit: books3.tar.gz alone is 37GB and claimed to have 197,000 titles in plain text.

protocolture3• 2 years ago

They have an email from a meta employee seeking clarification because it "felt wrong" to torrent the books.

loeg3• 2 years ago

“By downloading through the bit torrent protocol, Meta knew it was facilitating further copyright infringement by acting as a distribution point for other users of pirated books,” the amended complaint notes.
“Put another way, by opting to use a bit torrent system to download LibGen’s voluminous collection of pirated books, Meta ‘seeded’ pirated books to other users worldwide.”

It is possible to (ab)use the bittorrent ecosystem and download without sharing at all. I don't know if this is what Meta did, or not.

butterandguns• 2 years ago

Hypothetically you could just not seed.

loeg3• 2 years ago

Right, that's what I'm talking about. I.e. https://github.com/pmoor/bitthief and similar.

cactusplant7374• 2 years ago

That is probably exactly what they did if they were smart about it.

qingcharles3• 2 years ago

I was (partly) responsible for obtaining recordings for a Very Large Online Streaming Service(tm). Sometimes the studios would send us trucks filled with CDs. Sometimes they didn't have any easily accessible copies of the albums and would tell us to just "get it however..." which often involved SoulSeek, Limewire, etc.

We were not smart about it. We just found the stuff and hit download. To the point where there were days the corp Internet was saturated from too many P2P clients running.

wongarsu2• 2 years ago

However since this is a civil case they don't have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Meta seeded torrents. If they did use torrents the presumption would be that they used a regular bittorrent client with regular settings, and it would be on Meta to show they didn't do that.

loeg3• 2 years ago

I am not commenting on any legal mechanics. Just technical details.

anon373839• 2 years ago

Meta can show this with testimony. (Employee: “I opened the settings and disabled sharing.”)

This is a difficult theory for the plaintiffs to prevail on, since they would have no evidence of their own to contradict Meta’s testimony to keep the issue in play. Which is why they’re asking for client logs - and good luck with that.

casey2• 2 years ago

As long as they seed it's fine by me

crmd• 2 years ago

I am trying to imagine the legal contortions required for the US Supreme Court to relieve Meta of copyright infringement liability for participating in a bit torrent cloud (and thereby facilitating "piracy" by others) in this case, while upholding liability for ordinary people using bit torrent.

Would love if any lawyers here can speculate.

brookst6• 2 years ago

Not a lawyer, but I could see an argument that Meta’s use is transformative whereas just pirating to watch something is not. Not asserting that myself, just saying it seems a possible avenue.

wongarsu2• 2 years ago

The issue with bittorrent isn't so much that you are acquiring material but that you are also distributing it. There are cases where downloading copyrighted material is legal. But distributing it without consent never is, and is generally punished much worse.

protocolture3• 2 years ago

Thats the argument they are using before they were likely seeding.

If anything, and the seeding can be proven, there will be a lot of entities seeking restitution.

Its a technicality but its better than breaking fair use to appease authors.

philistine• 1 year ago

The use might (might!) be transformative, but the work is copyrighted. How Meta copied it is an issue. Is the way they acquired it illegal?

After all, Google Books did not acquire their books through torrents. They got physical books.

courseofaction• 1 year ago

They have been appointed by the president who Zuckerberg stood beside at the inauguration of the age of grift. Legal specifics don't feel very relevant anymore.

kazinator• 2 years ago

The mind boggles. Are the plaintiffs jumping to the conclusion that Meta must have used BitTorrent, based on the idea that whenever someone pirates anything anywhere using the Internet, it's always done with BitTorrent? Or is there actual evidence for this?

Maskawanian• 2 years ago

There was employee communication that expressed it being odd to use a torrent client on company computers. [1]

[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/whe...

qingcharles3• 2 years ago

There were comments published somewhere in the early days where it was specifically mentioned they used one of the big torrent files. That's where the authors got their idea from, I guess.

russellbeattie• 2 years ago

So here's a related thought...

Google is currently being sued by journalist Jill Leovy for illegally downloading and using her book "Ghettoside" to train Google's LLMs [1].

However, her book is currently stored, indexed and available as a snippet on Google Books [2]. That use case has been established in the courts to be fair use. Additionally, Google has made deals with publishers and the Author's Guild as well.

So many questions! Did Google use its own book database to train Gemini? Even if they got the book file in an illegal way, does the fact that they already have it legally negate the issue? Does resolving all the legal issues related to Google Books immunize them from these sorts of suits? Legally, is training an LLM the same as indexing and providing snippets? I wonder if OpenAI, Meta and the rest will be able to use Google Books as a precedent? Could Google license its model to other companies to immunize them?

Google's decade-long Books battle could produce major dividends in the AI space. But I'm not a lawyer.

1. https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/LeovyvG...

2. https://books.google.com/books?id=bZXtAQAAQBAJ

dang• 2 years ago

Recent and related. Others?

Zuckerberg appeared to know Llama trained on Libgen - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759546 - Jan 2025 (73 comments)

Zuckerberg approved training Llama on LibGen [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42673628 - Jan 2025 (191 comments)

Zuckerberg Approved AI Training on Pirated Books, Filings Say - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651007 - Jan 2025 (54 comments)

glitchc• 2 years ago

I see a silver lining here: If Meta and/or Google's lawyers can successfully demonstrate in court that piracy does not cause harm, it would nullify copyright infringement laws, making piracy legal for everyone.

spencerflem6• 2 years ago

This would be poetic, but not gonna happen. It will be legal for big corps but not you and me

hresvelgr• 2 years ago

You know, I actually don't think so. Gabe Newell famously said piracy is a distribution problem, so a court would likely have to acknowledge inadequate distribution methods hampering AI development. This gives great precedence for consumer piracy, especially for old media that isn't sold anymore. It may not be a criminal offence if best efforts aren't being made by the original copyright holders to distribute.

Der_Einzige• 2 years ago

Yup. As a full on IP abolitionist, I'm super excited by this. Information wants to be free. LLM providers training on things that folks don't want them to is a feature, not a bug. The tears of those mad about this are delicious and will ultimately be drowned out in the rain. Luddites and Copyright Trolls should be annihilated from the body politic with extreme prejudice.

spencerflem6• 2 years ago

wtf

everforward• 1 year ago

Meta isn't arguing that, though. They are arguing their use is one of the loopholes in copyright law where they aren't liable for the damages. Even them succeeding would only demonstrate that LLM training is transformative, and would not impact the common uses of piracy for average folk.

I would also be stunned if they make that argument. There is almost undeniably some number of dollars Google/Meta would have paid for the data. It may be less than publishers would want, but I don't anyone would actually believe Google/Meta saying "if the data wasn't free, we just wouldn't have done AI".

visarga7• 2 years ago

Has anyone thought about orphaned books? Training on orphaned books might open them up to be reintegrated into culture instead of dying off unused and forgotten. Copyright kills works by making them irreproducible when the authors are not to be found.

bawolff4• 2 years ago

If you need the logs, doesn't that prove the point that the AI is not a derrivative work?

Like if you can't figure out which works were used to create the AI just by looking, its hard to argue that they "copied" the work. Copyright is not a general prohibition on using the copyrighted work only the creativity contained within.

samsin• 2 years ago

Claiming that Meta distributed pirated works is still a copyright claim, but you're correct that it's seemingly irrelevant to the fair use argument (which the article acknowledges).

Earw0rm4• 2 years ago

No. Because you can't tell by inspecting the weights, and it can be hard to tell AIUI if the capability to generate the output is present, but suppressed by a safety mechanism, or doesn't exist at all.

NBJack• 2 years ago

Define "figure out" and "looking" for a LLM, a bundle of pseudo-nerual pathways driven by parameters we number in the billions for sufficiently large models.

_Algernon_2• 2 years ago

I asked chatgpt about a design pattern the other day and it plagiarized a paragraph verbatim without attribution even from a textbook Im also reading (Design Patterns)

It isn't difficult to show copyright infringement in these models. The assumption should be that copyright infringement has occured until proven otherwise.

Just the fact that they are indiscriminately web scraping proves that. Just because it is publicly and (monetarily) freely available doesn't mean it isnt copyrighted.

Crestwave2• 2 years ago

This is why the "AI learns from materials just like a human does so it's not copyright infringement" argument always bothered me. A person won't recite full pages of word-for-word copies [1] from their head when you ask them something.

When I first tried Copilot, I asked it to write a simple algorithm like FizzBuzz and it ripped off a random repo verbatim, complete with Korean comments and typos. Image models will also happily generate near-identical [2] copies (usually with some added noise) of copyrighted images with the right prompt.

[1] https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2020/12/20/lmmem/

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/06/uh_oh_attackers_can_e...

bawolff4• 2 years ago

A human reproducing a patagraph word for word in an educational context would probably not be considered copyright infringement (although lack of attribution might be problematic). In the US anyways. The US is sonewhat unique as having very broad fair use when it comes to material used in an educational context, much broader than most other countries.

Crestwave2• 2 years ago

They have already proven that copyrighted data was used for training but got struck down in court. The reason why they're asking for the torrent logs is because Meta torrenting the pirated data means they probably seeded and thus distributed it, which has a much greater impact legally than just downloading.

isitnowisit• 2 years ago

What happens if I input 10 news headlines from different news sources into an AI prompt and publish and sell the resulting AI output. Is this copyright infringement?

svl72• 2 years ago

While Meta's use of copyrighted material might actually fall under fair use I wonder about the implications of having to use the whole source material for training purposes...

Let's say I quote some key parts of a copyrighted book in an way that complies with fair use for a work of mine. In order to find the quoted parts I have to read the whole book first. To read the book first I need to acquire it. If it was simply pirated, wouldn't that technically be the main issue, not the fair use part in their service? I am an absolute layman when it comes to the subject of law and just thinking loudly. It seems to me that admitting using pirated works could be more problematic on itself, regardless of the resulting fair use when it is clear that the whole content had to be consumed / processed to get to the result.

buyucu• 2 years ago

I look forward to the showdown between big tech and big copyright.

Authors seek Meta's torrent client logs and seeding data in AI piracy probe

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