• @rottingleaf
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    3210 hours ago

    So not just they pirated them, which may or may not be a crime and where I may or may not be impartial, but they are also leeches who would be banned on any decent torrent tracker of the olden days.

    • @Podunk
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      139 hours ago

      Truly despicable. Seeding to at least 1 to 1 is the bare minimum of courtesy and humanity. If you dont, its unethical

  • Mohamed
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    3111 hours ago

    This is irrelevant because Meta should not be tried for this the same as a private individual would be.

    The case for torrenting being illegal for private individuals is one or both of:

    1. Downloading in of itself is stealing.
    2. Uploading is giving unauthorized access to someone else who otherwise might have had a harder time finding it. Anything else, such as watching, reading, listening, learning, etc. is not illegal (or does not make sense to make illegal). The exception might be publishing. This is rare for private individuals (e.g. using pirated FL studio to make a commercial song).

    For corporations, a lot change. Firstly, a corporation downloading a torrent is necessarily making unauthorized material available for some people of the company. It’s like a group of 20 friends all downloaded and uploaded to each other. Secondly, they used this copyrighted material commercially (like playing pirated music in a public night club). Both should be illegal.

    However, all of this is still a distraction. The real issue is using copyrighted materials to train commercial AI. Does Meta require permission from copyright holders to make AI based on their work? The law is grey on this, and desperately needs regulations.

    Just my thoughts.

        • @[email protected]
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          29 hours ago

          Except in the good ol’ days just about everything on the 'net benefited most of us in some way … and it was free. Now it sure as hell ain’t free and it’s been co-opted to benefit billionaires only.

          I started torrenting 23 years ago and it was easy. Just a client, no VPN required. Now I need not only a VPN, but a good router that I can flash with a (still mostly free) program, hours of working out how best to set up the router with wireguard etc, then scroll through dozens of links to try and find a stable stream to watch hockey.

          It’s fucking exhausting.

  • @molten
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    3515 hours ago

    Of course that fuck isn’t a good seeder. Leech.

  • @[email protected]
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    7017 hours ago

    Another example of Republican principles. Corporations are protected by laws but not bound by them, while the average citizen is bound by laws but not protected by them.

  • daikiki
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    2715 hours ago

    It’s not illegal to download books without yourself offering them for upload. What’s illegal is when you feed those books into your reality devouring content monster and it outputs all that copyrighted content in a slightly different order and you profit off that content vomit.

  • @latenightnoir
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    12319 hours ago

    So, piracy is legal if you don’t distribute? What the fuck is Zuck smoking?

    • @[email protected]
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      19 hours ago

      Well, that’s how it tends to be in most places.
      You don’t get caught for downloading; you get caught for uploading.

      Using a similar logic to distribution via DVDs. Only the seller gets into trouble. The buyer does not.

      • umami_wasabi
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        19 hours ago

        The buyers/downloaders don’t get caught is just because there are too many of them and going after the distributor is an easy target.

        • gon [he]
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          1918 hours ago

          Not the case, necessarily.

          In Portugal, for example, it’s legal to download pirated content. It’s not a matter of not pursuing it because it’s hard or being difficult to catch or distributors are an easier target, it’s just that, legally, you’re not doing anything wrong.

          • @OwlPaste
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            1018 hours ago

            sooooo… vpn should point to Portugal…

        • @SchmidtGenetics
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          918 hours ago

          In Canada it’s legal to download and watch content for personal use, so it’s when it’s shared that it becomes an issue.

          Just like you could record anything with a vcr, you just couldn’t share it with your friends.

        • @[email protected]
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          319 hours ago

          Is it not also because it was easier to feign ignorance for the time the laws were passed?
          And that nobody thought of Tor, while at the same time, leechers who don’t seed are actually being worse for the Torrent?

      • @latenightnoir
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        119 hours ago

        Eh. Makes sense from the perspective of protecting profits, I guess, because the actual thing which bothers them is the volume of lost potential customers…

    • @Lost_My_Mind
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      1717 hours ago

      Elitism. He is of the belief that he is better than you, and doesn’t live in the same world as you.

    • @regrub
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      518 hours ago

      And the copyright owners have no problem with them profiting from derived works that were made using pirated content?

  • JackOP
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    3517 hours ago

    Also I love how they they don’t say they didn’t seed, just say there is no proof

    • @FireTower
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      915 hours ago

      This is a motion to dismiss not an answer. That’s how those work. It is linked to by the journalist in the article.

  • @[email protected]
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    412 hours ago

    That’s true, it’s not really your problem in most areas if you don’t seed, basically scraping them. If a legal person comes your way it’s not good but for facebook they have lawyers. They will just say not our problem, we never hosted it, just scraped it. not many people would decide to go against facebook lawyers bc they can pay to drain you.

  • Singletona082
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    4719 hours ago

    So where’s the MAFIAA? Here you go guys, literal industrial scale piracy.

    Or are you afraid to go after someone that isn’t a teenager in their parent’s back room?

    • @Omgpwnies
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      310 hours ago

      The real shit deal is if there was a ruling against Meta in this, it would still be worse for everyone because there would be precedent to litigate against people who only consume pirated content (which has been tried in several countries and found to be legal)

      • Singletona082
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        39 hours ago

        …Oh god…

        you described a situation where i want Meta to win…

      • Singletona082
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        2519 hours ago

        I am aware. I was simply demonstrating they were never about money, simply bullying people who couldn’t fight back.

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
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          18 hours ago

          Especially since in the height of my pirating years during teenagerdom, no amount of cajoling or coercion could get me to pay for whatever it was because I didn’t have any money. Which not at all coincidentally was why I was pirating it in the first place.

          These dweebs always operate from the frankly invalid preconception that if the pirate had not pirated the media they would have paid for it and therefore they’re “owed” a sale, but that’s not how it works. I imagine that if the vast majority of people were unable to pirate their thing, they simply would not watch/listen/read/play/consume the thing at all.

  • @brightandshinyobject
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    1517 hours ago

    So it’s okay if we download content from well known online repositories?

  • @[email protected]
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    1719 hours ago

    I mean isn’t that at least some extent technically true to a level.

    I mean if we weren’t talking a shitty corporation to begin with. If this were say, a 20 year old mcdonnalds worker pirating game of thrones.

    IMO the bigger concept is still rather than if they got it… defining whether using that data after the fact is legal. I mean hypothetically speaking lets just say they bought 1 copy of each of the millions of books, or bought used copies, or say had a machine that could scan every book in a library. IMO the issue shouldn’t be whether or not anyone managed to download the books in their pure form afterwards. The focus should be the AI trained on their books, is going to be distributing portions of their book to millions of people, and any potential profits of such will be going to meta and uncredited to the original authors. The idea that meta’s involvement in torrenting may have let little timmy get a copy of his text book 15 seconds faster… shouldn’t be the driving force here.

    • Ulrich
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      1019 hours ago

      I mean isn’t that at least some extent technically true to a level.

      It’s completely true. That’s why a lot of people don’t seed. And why your ISP won’t bother you if you don’t.

  • bean
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    313 hours ago

    Rules for thee and not for me, plus we PROFIT off of it to boot. But none of you guys can do that. Only for Richys.

  • @kingblaaak
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    818 hours ago

    You wouldn’t download car…and then upload its stats to a centralised system

  • John Richard
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    318 hours ago

    Well good news if they are successful in their arguments it can set precedent to make piracy legal.