In one of the AI lawsuits faced by Meta, the company stands accused of distributing pirated books. The authors who filed the class-action lawsuit allege that Meta shared books from the shadow library LibGen with third parties via BitTorrent. Meta, however, says that it took precautions to prevent ‘seeding’ content. In addition, the company clarifies that there is nothing ‘independently illegal’ about torrenting.
Fuck meta, this isn’t about meta, this is about the legal fact that downloading is not infringement. Just because you don’t like this particular downloader does not mean we have to set the precedent that downloading is infringement.
Sure, but you also don’t need to give them full benefit of the doubt just because that’s how the court operates. It’s a perfectly reasonable stance to not believe their claim that they loopholed the law by not seeding, which I don’t think is contradictory with supporting piracy. And comparing the mass ingestion of human creative work into an exploitative AI model to an individual person pirating for human consumption as if someone who is against one must be against the other is absurd.