”Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed
arstechnica.com
Meta’s alleged torrenting and seeding of pirated books complicates copyright case.

They also didn’t seed,

Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to “avoid” the “risk” of anyone “tracing back the seeder/downloader” from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as in “stealth mode.” Meta also allegedly modified settings “so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,” a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.

  • OgdenTO [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    13·
    14 hours ago

    Regular people are getting fined like $20K per infringement for downloading copyrighted material. 81.7 TB of data is a heck of a lot of numbers of infringements, especially where it’s clear it’s being used for profit

    • dead [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      101·
      12 hours ago

      That’s just not true. You made that up. If people were getting fined $20k per infringement, piracy would be much less common and you’d see it on the news all the time. Piracy laws in the US are very loose. Most people have pirated books or music or movies or games. Most people have not been fined for it.

      Here’s how piracy is “prosecuted” in the US in most cases. Copyright holders hire a “troll agency” to monitor public peer-to-peer filesharing of their content. The troll agency records IP addresses of the file sharers. The troll agency then sends threatening emails to the ISPs of the file sharers. In many circumstances, the ISP just deletes the threatening email without even telling you. Sometimes the ISP forwards the email to you. You are not obligated to respond to the email. In order to be “fined” for infringement, the copyright holder has to actually take you to court and prove that you infringed the copyright, which is very difficult to prove.

      And if you use a VPN, they would never even find your ISP.

      Here’s an article from last month describing how RIAA and MPAA uses troll agencies to threaten ISPs.

      https://torrentfreak.com/eff-sides-with-cox-to-protect-piracy-accused-internet-users-from-copyright-trolls-250109/