Ex-Meta Researcher Torrented Pirated Books, Deleted It 'Due to Litigation'

Posted by WesleyGrant782 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by Aboutplants 1 day ago

Yes… I also deleted all of those MP3s I downloaded in the 90’s and 00’s…

Comment by raverbashing 1 day ago

I guess I still have an HD somewhere with some of these

Comment by spwa4 1 day ago

Yeah, the excuses courts come up with to allow code are becoming SO absurd they're kind of funny. For example:

https://www.courthousenews.com/coders-lose-appeal-in-copyrig...

To avoid open source copyright the court is treating AI models as people for the purpose of copyright (after all, only people can generate copyrighted works according to the law).

Who wants to take bets on whether the court is actually willing to grant personhood to AI models? Because that would, of course, mean that all these companies are holding them hostage. That would mean any fine tuning they do violates the 1st amendment by preventing their speech. And so on and so forth. I mean, it's SO absurd and literally any excuse judges can find to let the billionaires avoid liability is grabbed with both hands.

I don't understand how OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft ... get to do this. Because let's face facts, if I can just openly violate hundreds of millions of copyrights like OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft, I have NO trouble coming up with a billion-dollar business idea. Let's start with making the Netflix people actually want ...

Hell, since courts are letting Microsoft violate copyright of programmers surely there cannot be any legal problem with illegally selling MS Office, right? I mean just how absurd would any other judgement be?

Courts: "pay the billionaire, peasant".

Comment by jasomill 17 hours ago

Regrettably, hypocrisy is not a defense in any legal system I'm aware of.

Comment by hulitu 1 day ago

> I don't understand how OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft ... get to do this

They wrote the law to serve them. They will modify the law to serve them. It is funny how some people are more equal than others.

Comment by spwa4 1 day ago

That doesn't matter since they committed their copyright crimes BEFORE the law was changed to allow it. Congress cannot change the law retroactively, so what happens afterwards does not matter.

Comment by sejje 1 day ago

Maybe in theory.

In practice, I bet it matters a lot.

Comment by spwa4 22 hours ago

You mean their money matters a lot, and the law does not matter.

Just like copyright technically being perfectly fine downloading of copyrighted files (only uploading violates copyright) never mattered before when it was small fry downloaders vs billionaire corporations. With absurd excuses like that copying in the buffers of internet routers and network cards and transmission equipment was a crime. Of course it wasn't a crime for the other billionaire corporations (the telcos), who did the vast majority of such copying. It was a crime for the poor 9 year old in their basement, because they "organized the crime", and only for them. And they're still doing that by the way!

And now when it is megacorps totally ignoring and illegally exploiting the copyright of small individuals ... suddenly using other people's copyright without license, without compensation is ... not a crime! In fact the US is threatening European countries, because some European courts want compensation for their copyright. By which we mean European media conglomerates, of course, not small authors.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20251111-german-court-...

I guess when you said that courts aren't consistent that was both far more true than you imagined, with the outlandish excuses courts make, and yet far less true at the same time. The consistency is simple: courts always find a way to let billionaire corporations get away with whatever they want.

There's just a fight left between courts, not over justice, of course, but over which billionaire corporations get the money.

My question is: if large scale crimes are allowed, it's very easy to come up with billion dollar company ideas. The Netflix everyone wants, for example. But how do I get courts to judge me like they judge Sam Altman and Dario Amodei? They committed hundreds of millions of copyright violations, and instead of hundreds of jail time and extreme fines, they just got away with it! How do I do that?

Comment by sejje 9 hours ago

Move somewhere it's not a crime. Bingo bango.

Comment by 0x20cowboy 1 day ago

Aren't corporations treated as people and money as free speech? Or is that an old wives tale?

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by nico 1 day ago

It’s interesting that it’s supposed to be very bad to destroy evidence, especially after litigation has started. But in the end, usually the consequences are better for the person destroying the evidence, than actually preserving it

If the evidence was very damning, and it’s not there anymore, the judge/jury can’t really properly make a determination about it if it’s gone

I’m not a lawyer, so someone with more legal experience could pitch in, but that’s my impression from seeing these big corporate cases on the news, as well as some personal experience in smaller civil cases in court

Comment by 0x20cowboy 1 day ago

Even if they had bought all the books, wouldn’t people still be mad they trained an AI with it? I doubt it would quell the “It can emulate an Author’s style” complaints.

Comment by dehrmann 1 day ago

Maybe, but that part's settled.

> the court ruled last year that training Llama on books was fair use

Comment by 0x20cowboy 1 day ago

That’s just the US though right?

Comment by RetardedBastard 1 day ago

I attempted to kill him but he didn’t die! People would still be angry if I killed him

Comment by 0x20cowboy 1 day ago

Lol I more mean that at the time they were likely just looking for training data to make a better model, and only recently did people figure out it could “steal people’s style”. If that second part didn't happen I don’t think people would have gotten so mad about the first part.

To say it more plainly, if AI would have wound up being a helper instead of a “job stealer” I think people would have thought of it more like a google ranking than an enemy.

(By the way I didn't down vote you)

Comment by xbar 1 day ago

You wouldn't steal a book....

Comment by zzgo 1 day ago

I would download a house over a 1200 bps modem if I could.

Comment by cyanydeez 1 day ago

Its not stealing if its for private equity purposes.

Comment by lioeters 1 day ago

It's fair use if it's done by corporations on a global scale.

Comment by reorder9695 1 day ago

I don't know why, but piracy seems awful to me for things like books or music when it's one or a small group of people producing the media, but it doesn't seem too bad for films/series where they're often hard to get legally, and are created by large groups of people. It's not like any less human effort goes into them, it's just something I've noticed feeling and I can't put my finger on why. Maybe it's just that human connection, whatever that really means.

Comment by someothherguyy 1 day ago

meta has issues with employees using its network to pirate things, or its just a good time to try to eat with the AI scraper assumption

https://torrentfreak.com/meta-pirated-adult-film-downloads-w...

Comment by WarmWash 1 day ago

So is piracy good or bad?

Comment by prpl 1 day ago

Personal consumption is vastly different than corporate ladder climbing.

Comment by deadnomore 1 day ago

It's based on means testing.

Comment by jbjbjbjb 1 day ago

Reverse means testing

Comment by brookst 1 day ago

Is cutting people with knives good or bad?

Does context matter, like if it’s OJ Simpson vs a surgeon?

Comment by whoanoway 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by chaosharmonic 1 day ago

That depends. Is it about cultural enrichment via the arts, or financial enrichment by selling a bootleg generator?

I personally am in the camp that capitalism just isn't a very good model for getting artists paid, but that isn't really the same thing as believing all creative work should be up for grabs by any arbitrary business and/or political campaign for any arbitrary purpose.

You know how talking about wage gaps doesn't necessarily mean that you're a full-blown Communist, or that you're literally saying everyone should be universally paid the same? It's sort of like that.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by jonathanstrange 1 day ago

In my experience, real pirates have a strong code of ethics. I've never seen a pirate site that didn't at least say "buy it if you like it". Leechers are a different story, but to be fair most of them just don't have the money to buy the stuff they download.

To cut a long story short, I'd personally say pirating is bad if you have the money to buy it and you don't just pirate to try first, whereas if you don't have the money it's okay (permissible) and doesn't take away any sales.

Comment by TFNA 1 day ago

That doesn't accord with my experience. I've been involved in academic book piracy since the early millennium, and there definitely was no "buy it if you like it" ideal. Virtually no one will spend the 100-400€ that a typical scholarly book costs except libraries. And since this was a community that reads heavily outside their research as well, once works of fiction started to be more heavily hosted on these servers, it came to seem a waste to ever actually spend money on media if you could just read it all for free -- nevermind that a lot of users were in the former USSR or the Third World where media was not available for sale locally even if you wanted to spend the money.

Comment by cyberpunk 1 day ago

These people tend to outgrow that tho. I def would have pirated books as a youth as it’d save me a trip to the library. Now i’m old and have money, I would never pirate a book as I value both contributing to the author and owning the physical thing. Maybe some exceptions if it’s in some niche tech or something and don’t wanna commit yet..

Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where book piracy is rampant than one where many people just don’t read anything?

Comment by TFNA 1 day ago

I don't think this a youth thing that "people outgrow", lol. For over a decade now adult (and now middle-aged) peers who are heavy readers were asking me to put books on their ebook readers, since they knew I had the hookup, but now since Anna's Archive is so convenient, they are just getting the books themselves. A surprisingly large number of normie bibliophiles knows AA now.

For the majority of literature, buying the book won't contribute to the author because the author is deceased. For that minority where the author is alive, many people won't see a need to make an exception to their policy of not paying. Indeed, your second paragraph gets to the heart of it.

Comment by sejje 1 day ago

> I don't think this a youth thing that "people outgrow",

Totally agree. Also, we're applying western ethics to the third world.

They don't share our values on IP, I assure you.

Comment by whamlastxmas 1 day ago

Textbook pricing is such a scam and often self serving at expense of poor students, I find the lack of support for buying them not at all surprising

Comment by TFNA 1 day ago

I wasn't talking about textbooks, which were only a sideshow of the pre-AA academic pirate circles I was active in, but rather published research.

Comment by scotty79 1 day ago

Well, ethics is weaker, when the other is unethical in their own way.

400 euro for a book is hardly ethical. If you must charge that much for a copy you shouldn't have written it because you simply couldn't afford ro write it. Passin your poor business judgement onto others is not ethical.

Comment by TFNA 1 day ago

Prices for scholarly books are not set by the author but by the publisher. The author will often send you a PDF for free if you email and ask nicely.

Comment by scotty79 1 day ago

Sorry, I should have said "publish it" instead of "write it".

Comment by jonathanstrange 1 day ago

That's the problem, though. One of my books costs more than $100 USD and that's even on the cheaper side, and as you rightly point out, I had zero choice or saying in the pricing. Some more established authors can influence it, either by publisher choice or by talking with the acquisition editor but that's rare.

The academic book publishing industry is very predatory, which is why so many authors nowadays support open textbook initiatives.

What I can say with certainty is that in many poorer countries scientific research would be impossible without piracy. Universities just don't have the budgets and libraries are often abysmal (unless you work in the capital and it has a prestige state library).

Comment by wildzzz 1 day ago

Lol the vast majority of pirates are not paying for anything. Maybe a very wealthy and ethical person is fine paying for something after they've sampled the pirated version but a good chunk of the world never had the money to afford buying it in the first place. There's plenty of ways to sample media nowadays that doesn't involve piracy, there's infinite review channels on YouTube and you can often listen to new albums for the price of watching ads. Sure, I'm sure there are many pirates willing to see a movie in theaters or attend a concert because those are experiences you can't get at home. But for something like a PC game or application, the paying customer and pirate have an identical experience (excluding online multiplayer, that often doesn't work for pirated games).

Comment by jameshart 1 day ago

Ah yes, I heard about this ‘pirate code’.

Only I got the impression the Code is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules

Comment by AbhiDunna 1 day ago

It depends on what’s being pirated and why. Someone who can’t afford a 200 euro textbook, or can’t buy it where they live, is in a different position from a company that downloads 200k books to build a commercial product. Individual piracy is a gray area. Doing it at scale for profit, with a legal team on standby and then deleting the evidence “due to all this litigation”, is much harder to defend. The ethics change a lot when the person doing it could easily have paid.

Comment by f6v 1 day ago

Look, don't die on a hill for billionaires. I think it's good if someone gets a Hollywood movie or Disney TV show for free. But it's better to support that one author who self-published a useful book.

Comment by todowhatexactly 1 day ago

Don’t watch it? Why do you feel it’s your right or a need to access these materials?

Comment by Omatic810 1 day ago

There's no right or need claimed, so your question is irrelevant. The person you're responding to said it's "good", not that there was a need or right.

People don't have a right or need of reading The Bible, but many think it's good if people do. It's to the degree that sometimes they're printed at cost and distributed for free. The point is, there can be benefits for humans who can't purchase media to be able to experience it anyway. Now, whether that extends to copyright infringement and piracy being some noble act is a separate bridge to negotiate.

Comment by todowhatexactly 1 day ago

If you say something is good you imply access to it is good.. nice intellectualizing but Disney ain’t no Bible.

Comment by pessimizer 1 day ago

This is organized crime, because the organization knew (and depended on the fact) that he was doing this, and it is also the intentional destruction of evidence.

The fact that he was seeding a torrent is the thing that least matters here. They weren't making billions from seeding a torrent, they were spending bandwidth to do it. The fact that they downloaded a bunch of copyrighted works illegally in order to create their business is.

Copyright violation is civil, but conspiracy is criminal, and destruction of evidence is criminal. These AI companies are criminal. Everything associated with these enterprises should be seized and either run by the state, or run on behalf of the civilly injured parties.

edit: keep downvoting it, but I will keep posting it. This behavior is just getting by through nerve, bribery, and the fact that the US economy depends on it being successful. It is unambiguously criminal, and anybody aware of it who participated (everybody) is implicated. It is so bizarre how you people think you're better than people smuggling counterfeit designer bags or selling bootleg DVDs. You're worse.

Comment by nbajka 1 day ago

You wouldn’t download a car.

Comment by tossandthrow 1 day ago

This always hit me a odd.

If I could, I would.

And it would be incredibly immoral to demand excessive profits for your downloadable if distribution was free.

The music industry's monopoly is luckily being eroded these days. Now they can try to work on market terms.

Comment by eterm 1 day ago

It's a joke on the actual advert, which was, "You wouldn't steal a car".

Comment by AbhiDunna 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by zzgo 1 day ago

I would download a Chinese EV and drive it down the middle lane of the widest interstate I could find.

Comment by todowhatexactly 1 day ago

Depends.. you mean a physical one? Well then.. no not yet.

Comment by Omatic810 1 day ago

With the cost of storage media these days? No way.

Comment by bluefirebrand 1 day ago

No, you have to pay a subscription for a car :)

Comment by ashkankiani 1 day ago

Meta shares responsible for genocide and we're still too fucking scared to go after them for that properly.

Comment by r_lee 1 day ago

what do you hope to achieve with this?

Comment by ok123456 1 day ago

Send Zuck to The Hague.

Comment by Catloafdev 1 day ago

Based on their comment, presumably justice for their involvement in a genocide. Was that unclear?

Comment by skygazer 1 day ago

Well, they got me to google what at first seemed like a far fetched conspiracy theory, but actually seems to have some truth to it.

For those similarly unaware, I guess in 2017 Myanmar's military launched a campaign of mass killings, sexual violence, and destruction of Rohingya, and 700 thousand fled to neighboring countries, according to the UN, and amnesty international, but a 150B USD lawsuit against meta by the survivors was thrown out because section 230 of the CDA makes meta immune, and the dismissal was upheld by the 9th circuit. The court did not determine that meta's behavior was harmless, just that the case was barred. At issue was poor moderation, and algorithmic amplification of genocidal messaging on the platform. Apparently facebook was repeatedly warned for years that they were contributing to enthnic hatred and violence by amplifying false narratives and took no action.

Comment by shimman 1 day ago

To throw a few Meta executives in The Hague for a decade or two.

Comment by nekusar 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by red_candle_wax 1 day ago

Maybe we can just hit his little hideaways with one of those bunker buster bombs.

Comment by f6v 1 day ago

Well, we have this whole organization that's supposed to prevent genocides. It obviously doesn't work. Let's be real.

Comment by jjtheblunt 1 day ago

i think that's a modus ponens fail if i've ever seen one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_ponens

Comment by ashkankiani 1 day ago

I'm stupid so explain it in small words for me.

Comment by otherme123 1 day ago

Modus ponens is a valid "If A happens, B happens in consequence. A happens. Then B also happens". A "modus ponens fail", also called "affirm the consequence" is the invalid "If A happens, B happens in consequence. B is observed. Then A happened".

Valid: if someone is hit by a train, he dies. Someone was hit by a train, then he is dead.

Invalid: if someone is hit by a train, he dies. Someone is found death, thus he must have been hit by a train.

Comment by snejj5 1 day ago

I need this for most HN comments myself. Glad I joined this site to learn where I fall on the bell curve.

Comment by t0mpr1c3 1 day ago

non sequitur

Comment by jarym 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by AbhiDunna 1 day ago

Everyone is arguing about whether piracy is good or bad, but that’s not what this case is about. It’s about whether the rules apply equally. A student who torrents a textbook risks a lawsuit. Meta, reportedly, torrented hundreds of thousands of books, had an employee delete his copy “due to all this litigation,” and is now arguing over which server logs it has to hand over. They could have licensed these books. The likely reason they didn’t is that the cost of getting caught is lower than the licensing fee. A court has already called the training fair use, but how the books were acquired is a separate question, and that’s where this should be decided. If an individual did this at scale, no one would call it a gray area.

Comment by pessimizer 1 day ago

I agree, and also

> A court has already called the training fair use

isn't dispositive. Another court, a less stupid or corrupt one, could decide differently. SCOTUS could decide differently.

But using illegally obtained material as the foundation of your business and destroying it for fear of litigation, both of those things are clearly criminal.

Comment by bethekidyouwant 1 day ago

I can torrent as much crap as I want and nothing will ever happen to me. (Canada)

Comment by sporedro 1 day ago

If you turn around and make a billion dollars a year off the stuff you torrented I’m sure something will happen to you.

Comment by bethekidyouwant 1 day ago

Correct, rules for them not for us.

Comment by AbhiDunna 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by pigeons 14 hours ago

Lose your ISP and be fined in BC.

Comment by pessimizer 1 day ago

Most people can. But you can be sued in Canada just like anywhere else; it isn't legal. According to a search, the damages per offense may be capped at $5K CAD, though, which is great compared to the US.