[waffletower]

I have hated Microsoft for decades and am somewhat of an extremist when it comes to avoiding their products. That being said, this piracy shaming headline for a Microsoft research project example, not a product integration, is entirely misleading and hysterical. The lengths that stooges will go to protect copyright monopolies and eradicate fair use is also extreme and should be embarrassing.

[teachrdan]

> The lengths that stooges will go to protect copyright monopolies and eradicate fair use is also extreme and should be embarrassing.

Microsoft has a market cap of almost $3 trillion. I think they can afford to pay for the texts they use in their AI research.

[waffletower]

Their lawyers would argue, and I agree, that they legally don't have to. It is called Fair Use; there is an epidemic of publisher backed groupthink trying to deny its existence.

[hulitu]

> That being said, this piracy shaming headline for a Microsoft research project example, not a product integration, is entirely misleading and hysterical

Tell that to people haunted by BSA.

[Guillaume86]

Yeah it’s hilarious seeing people lose their shit over this and not like, every commercial LLM vendor...

[anonymous908213]

The title does not shame piracy. It factually describes that the linked article is a Microsoft-published guide to piracy, wherein the instructions tell readers to commit the (illegal for normal people) act of downloading pirated material, while linking to said pirated material (also illegal for normal people), with further instructions on how to use that just-downloaded pirated material for LLM inference (maybe even illegal for corporations; Anthropic settled for $1.5B for using pirated books in its training) and publishing derivative works without license (illegal for normal people).

I hate the current copyright environment as much as anyone, but I do not abide double-standards, with a two-tier justice system wherein a corporation gets to freely enforce the draconian copyright regime against individuals while also getting to abuse individuals' creative works in ways much more egregious.

[waffletower]

Read Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Microsoft lawyers would, and may have to, argue that their use of Harry Potter without permission is for valid research purposes. You are actively trying to negate Fair Use with your specious argument. That document may have been naive but it certainly isn't a piracy manual.