Technology

He also said as much in their documentary TPB AFK.

Maybe the issue was they didn't make enough money? If they had truly been greedy bastards they could have used that money to win the court case? What a joke.

It's not the same issue at all.

Piracy distributes power. It allows disenfranchised or marginalized people to access information and participate in culture, no matter where they live or how much money they have. It subverts a top-down read-only culture by enabling read-write access for anyone.

Large-scale computing services like these so-called AIs consolidate power. They displace access to the original information and the headwaters of culture. They are for-profit services, tuned to the interests of specific American companies. They suppress read-write channels between author and audience.

One gives power to the people. One gives power to 5 massive corporations.

So why are Meta, and say, Sci-Hub are treated so differently? I don't necessarily disagree, but it's interesting that we legally attack people who are sharing data altruistically (Sci-Hub gives research away for free so more research can be done, scientific research should be free to the world, because it benefits all of mankind), but when it comes to companies who break the same laws to just make more money, that's fine somehow.

It's like trying to improve the world is punished, and being a selfish greedy fucking pig is celebrated and rewarded.

Sci-Hub is so villified, it can be blocked at an ISP level (depending on where you live) and politicians are pushing for DNS-level blocking. Similar can be said for Libgen or Annas-Archive. Is anything like that happening to Meta? No? Huh, interesting. I wonder why Meta gets different treatment for similar behavior.

I am willing to defend Meta's use of this kind of data after the world has changed how they treat entities like Sci-Hub. Until that changes, all you are advocating for is for corporations to be able to break the law and for altruistic people to be punished. I agree they're the same, but until the law treats them the same, you're just giving freebies to giant corporations while fucking yourself in the ass.

I think what they are saying is that Meta is powerful enough to get away with it. You are attempting to equate two different things.

Meta isn't using the books for entertainment purposes. They are using another IP to develop their own product. There has to be a distinction here.

I'm advocating that if we're going to have copyright laws (or laws in general) that they're applied consistently and not just siding with who has the most money.

When it's small artists needing their copyright to be defended? They're crushed, ignored, and lose their copyright.

Even when Sony was suing individuals for music piracy in the early 2000's, artists had to sue Sony to see any money from those lawsuits. Those lawsuits were ostensibly brought by Sony for the artists, because the artists were being stolen from. Interesting that none of that money made it to artists without the artists having to sue Sony.

Sony was also behind the rootkit disaster and has been sued many times for using unlicensed music in their films.

It is well documented that copyright owners constantly break copyright to make money, and because they have so much fucking money, it's easy for them to just weather the lawsuits. ("If the penalty for a crime is a fine, that law only exists for the lower classes.")

We literally brought US courtroom tactics to a foreign country and bought one of their judges to get The Pirate Bay case out the fucking door. It was corruption through and through.

We prosecute people who can't afford to defend themselves, and we just let those who have tons of money do whatever the fuck they want.

The entire legal system is a joke of "who has the most money wins" and this is just one of many symptoms of it.

It certainly feels like the laws don't matter. We're willing to put down people just trying to share information, but people trying to profit off of it insanely, nah that's fine.

I'm just asking for things to be applied evenly and realistically. Because right now corporations just make up their own fucking rules as they go along, stealing from the commons and claiming it was always theirs. While individuals just trying to share are treated like fucking villains.

Look at how they treat Meta versus how they treat Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub exists only to promote and improve science by giving people access to scientific data. The entire copyright world is trying to fucking destroy them, and take them offline. But Facebook pirating to make money? Totes fucking okay! If it's selfish, it's fine, if it's selfless, sue the fuck out of them!

You can be sued in any court for copyright infringement, but the US is generally unique in that punitive damages can be awarded - ie the rightsholder can be awarded more than the damage they actually suffered. In other, more reasonable jurisdictions, only actual damages are awarded. Thus it is not worthwhile to prosecute in those jurisdictions, because the damages are less than the cost of prosecution.

On top of this, I believe copyright is one of the rare exceptions in the US where legal costs of the plaintiff are paid by the losing defendent. Given that the plaintiff in copyright has so much money, they can afford to front the cost of the most expensive lawyers, further penalising their target. Other jurisdictions generally award costs to the winner by default (both ways), rather than only in specific exceptions, but they also limit those costs much more reasonably.