[joshe]

I stole a lot of books too, reading them and all. Just integrated them into my worldview, and don't pay a license fee when I use the ideas in new contexts. Sometimes I even quote from them. A lot of them I didn't even pay for, I borrowed them from libraries or friends.

[anileated]

Have you considered that you have some traits that make you eligible to read books and access information freely in the country you live in*? Something about being a conscious human being enjoying human rights, perhaps? An implement that does the same but (A) at scale and (B) without thought or free will or agency, completely at the bidding of its operator, for profit, has no such protections. Instead, the operator carries all responsibility (in this case, Meta).

If a software service had legal protections like that, sure, I could build one that returns you any book you request and say that the service had integrated it into its worldview. Who can check, eh?

* Actually, in some countries you could be in trouble for reading a book and incorporating it into your worldview, to say nothing about quoting it, but let’s set that aside.

[gruez]

>Have you considered that you have some traits that make you eligible to read books and access information freely in the country you live in*? Something about being a conscious human being enjoying human rights, perhaps?

Not a relevant factor when it comes to copyright law. Fair use (the law that's most applicable here) applies regardless if you're a student using incorporating news articles into your work, or google making thumbnails and displaying them on their search results.

[Paradigma11]

So, your argument is similar to cryptobros who argue that much of defi is not plain financial fraud because it runs on a blockchain only reverse.

[maeil]

Didn't know Meta paid for them or borrowed them from libraries. In fact, I don't think they did.

[furyofantares]

Maybe not but even if Meta did buy 1 copy of every book I doubt it would stop anyone from making bad analogies to theft. (Not that the analogy on the other side to a human reading is any better.)

[irjustin]

> I stole a lot of books too, reading them and all. Just integrated them into my worldview, and don't pay a license fee when I use the ideas in new contexts.

That... doesn't make it okay...

> A lot of them I didn't even pay for, I borrowed them from libraries or friends.

This 2nd sentence doesn't fit your first. What is your message?

[philistine]

Did you get those books through torrents? That's what's at stake. Distribution, not the parsing, which might (might!) have been legal.

[recursivecaveat]

The "and then fed them into an AI" part of "facebook pirated a bunch of books and then fed them into an AI" part is irrelevant. It would be equally illegal if they pirated them and then sat around reading them. Unless you somehow hope that the entirety of copyright will be overturned by this court case (not a chance) then you should strongly hope that facebook loses, because the alternative is literally "rules for thee but not for me" where corps can pirate whatever they want, but nothing changes for ordinary citizens.

[ClumsyPilot]

So first there was this ‘corporations are people’ and not we have ‘computers are people’.

So I expect to see that either you are no longer allowed to own computer software

Or a return of slavery.

Also if we find indecent portrayal of minors in a data centre I expect that we treat it as a strict liability crime and the entire data centre or corporation that owns it gets a long prison sentence, just like a human would. However that is suppose to work.

[SecretDreams]

I can't tell if your implication is what meta did is fine or just that your brain is as good as an AI?

Could you clearly speak your point?

[whynotminot]

This viewpoint is one widely shared inside the AI community — that AI systems should be able to learn from material just as humans do.

Extrapolated out into some new future a hundred years from now when we have embodied AI humanoids walking alongside us, would it be weird if those humanoids were barred from buying a new book or charged a different rate than the humans they coexist with?

I’m still deciding how I feel about some of this too.

[hedora]

The courts have already ruled that training on data is similar to reading it (sufficiently transformative) to be considered fair use, in the same way that I cannot claim a copyright on your brain because you read this comment.

On the other hand, they torrented books and then open sourced LLM weights. No punishment is too severe for that!

If you still don’t understand, I strongly suggest watching Max Headroom, “Lessons”, which you can get here:

https://archive.org/download/max-headroom-complete

[wang_li]

I think he’s saying he works for meta and when the company employees committed mass copyright violation that’s ok because once someone read Winnie the Pooh to him at story hour at the library.

[Guthur]

Honestly, if people continue to conflate human development with a mega corps trawling copyright material to build a mathematical model and then wrap it up and charge a subscription for it, then there's really not much you, I or anyone else can do to avoid the inevitable fallout and we really deserve everything we get for it.

[23B1]

OP is making the spurious argument that technology should have the same ethical entitlements as humans. It's on par with "information wants to be free".