'Meta Torrented over 81 TB of Data Through Anna's Archive, Despite Few Seeders'
Freshly unsealed court documents reveal that Meta downloaded significant amounts of data from shadow libraries through Anna's Archive.
Oh look, another tech giant treating open knowledge initiatives like their personal data buffet. Let me translate this corporate nonsense for you:
Meta: "We need training data for our AI!" Also Meta: Let's leech 81.7TB from a community project without contributing anything back.
The absolute audacity of downloading terabytes through torrents while their employees were internally admitting it was "legally problematic". And the best part? They couldn't even be bothered to seed properly - just grab and go, classic corporate behavior.
Remember when companies actually contributed to open source instead of just parasitically consuming it? But no, they'd rather burden volunteer-run projects with massive bandwidth costs while their lawyers probably bill more per hour than these projects' entire monthly budget.
Pro tip Meta: If you're going to pilfer knowledge from the commons, at least seed back properly. Your "move fast and break things" motto isn't supposed to apply to community archives.
My seedbox is locked and load, please point me to the. Torrent in need. Archive team assemble!
This is the website listed in the article
Yes please support annas-archive!! It is a wonderful project. I can essentially get an epub file for any book (including banned books) I want. They have so much more than that too.
Not seeding is crazy ...
When you're shilling for copyright, at least pick a lane. Are they bad for "pirating" or bad for not supporting "piracy"?
I guess it doesn't matter as long as the owners collect their rent.
They are pirating, while also DOSing the providers.
Do it, Judge. Protect the wealthy and say it's not piracy. Do it.
Please! Think of the shareholders, we must protect them!
They'll be fined 100k
And they'll ham up how punished and sorry they are, and how thankful they are for the judge handing down "fair and impartial" justice.
He already referred them to the justice department, this is a civil case, he cannot sentence them criminally.
Rules for thee, not for me
But did they keep a good ratio though?
Asking the real questions.
In copyright protection terms the ratio shouldn't matter. They should pay for all the lost profits from pirating everything they've downloaded. Every time someone pirated it should be counted. And every time someone uses the AI trained on the data.
They can become the corporate Jesus of the interwebs, having paid for our sins.
Anna's Archive: Mirror our database, help us preserve Humanity's knowledge
Facebook: I'll just torrent what I need, see yaa
These big tech monopolies are a curse to humanity..
“Meta downloaded millions of pirated books from LibGen through the bit torrent protocol using a platform called LibTorrent. Internally, Meta acknowledged that using this protocol was legally problematic,” the third amended complaint noted.
Just want to make clear that Libtorrent is just the torrent application they were using, while the Libgen torrents are easily accessible on the libgen site, not through a separate "platform" called Libtorrent.
I wish people like us could help with these complaints, because then they might actually get the details more accurate to reality.
https://libgen.is/repository_torrent/
The amended complaint makes it sound like Libtorrent is a private tracker website when its just the application they were using on the publicly available torrents.
People are putting an S on the end of words like 'traffic' and 'email'. They will never understand the semantics of that correction.
Meta Horizons
Totes yeet, yo.
https://phys.org/news/2010-11-million-dollar-verdict-music-piracy-case.html
In all fairness, meta should be assessed a fee of 250k per EACH pirated work.
This would amount to forfeiting all assets to doge.
Assuming 2.6 MB per book.
81 TB would be 32,667,175 books.
At $250k per book that would come out to:
$8.17 trillion.
And I'd guess all that money would then go to military funding, with Anna's Archive, again getting nothing out of it?
It would go to... Uh...
HEY SOMEONE PUT A DEAD CAT ON THE TABLE!
Just gotta love these big tech companies and their bullshit double standards.
If someone was to acquire a few hundred gigs of books and feed them to something like paperless-ngx, would it work as a sort of google of books? Are there any software projects better suited for doing thisand understand synonyms and perhaps some context? I guess AI search but guided for the intermediate user.
Google is so bad lately. Basically every result is official sponsored corporate biased BS. It would be nice to be able to instantly query a bunch of ebooks.
GPT, Meta, Deepseek and Google have probably all been trained on the data.
The problem is, training on the data, and actually training for knowledge of the data are VERY different things.
Yes. This exactly.
Given the extent it should be considered criminal so $250k per offense and the higher ups who authorized the torrenting should get conspiracy charges at a minimum.
But this is America so they'll probably pay a small amount, for Meta, and a light slap on the wrist with a finger wagging.
But this is America
Maybe they hosted their servers in Eritrea, Turkmenistan or San Marino. No copyright laws there
you are being optimistic, it's likely going to be considered "fair use" and then be business as usual. Meta themselves have claimed that they aren't filing to dismiss because they believe they are on the legal side, due to the fact they aren't distributing the pirated content, only using it for training which is currently a massive grey area that hasen't been ruled as non-fair use
Each time someone uses their LLM it should be considered a violation.
People are using these things millions of times a day in aggregate. That adds up fast. $250k multiplied by millions suddenly isn't so cheap.
$250k * [every book in existence] is literally nothing?
Remember, "offense" doesn't mean "per torrent," it means "per copyrighted work infringed."
Average ebook size: 2.5 MB or so.
Meta downloaded 81 TB, or 81,000,000 MB.
81,000,000 / 2.5 = Approx 30 million books.
30,000,000 books * $250,000 per offence = $7.5 trillion
(are you sure you're from programming.dev?)
What is Anna’s Archive?
It’s a popular search engine that works with shadow libraries like Sci-Hub or Library Genesis. Shadow libraries are hosts to copies of works of literature and science. Their legal status is murky at best but it’s incredibly impractical to persecute those accessing them.
So it’s like thepiratebay or 1337x.to but for books?
Also I think you mean prosecuting, not persecuting.
it’s incredibly impractical to persecute those accessing them.
Always was. If you're serious, persecute those hosting it.
Damn leeches
Meta has open sourced every single one of their llms. They essentially gave birth to the whole open llm scene.
If they start losing all these lawsuits, the whole scene dies and all those nifty models and their fine-tunes get removed from huggingface, to be repackaged and sold to us with a subscription fee. All the other domestic open source players will close down.
The copyright crew aren't the good guys here, even if it's spearheaded by Sarah Silverman and Meta has traditionally played the part of the villain.
Meta stole from everyone, including those that struggle to make ends meet, so it doesn’t matter that they gave you back some of it. Any moral qualms should evaporate when you consider that they did it to create shareholder value and the rest is philanthropy (aka pretend tax). As a socialist I believe that man is owed for his work and you can’t take from him even though technology makes it so easy.
As a socialist I believe intellectual property is a falsehood and technological advancement should be for the public good. Open source LLMs are for the public good.
Given the options between having open source LLMs and the US Govt banning non-corpo non-proprietary LLMs and giving a free pass to people like Musk and Altman and Zucc to monopolize, I happily pick the former.
You're delusional if you think they will pay anyone, the only way zucc will pay is with a guillotine.
Corpos will make inter-platform deals that'll simply make all online data licensable for the right price and enrich each other so you can't avoid it while still actually being a career creative, but price out academic researchers and the public sector so that all fruits of it stay behind closed R&D doors and be free of ethics etc.
Continuing in your role as a useful idiot, you'll also most likely also foot the bill for it via subsidies from your taxes to "develop the AI sector" in some anti-China dick measuring contest by the US.
You will then be sold this data back via proprietary chat bots via a monthly subscription and you better pay up because once it gets really good, it will become mandatory to use for just about any job, leaving you with no choice.
Or you can support FOSS LLMs.
Don't give me that slop. No one except the biggest names are getting a dime out it once OpenAI buys up all the data and kills off their competition. It's also highly transformative, which used to be perfectly legal.
Copyright laws have been turned into a joke, only protecting big money and their interests.
If the existence of open source LLMs hinges on the benevolence of one of the few most cancerous tech companies in the world, maybe they're not really worth it?
This isn't about "heroes" and "villains". Facebook has been and has stayed the "villain", they've done something colossally illegal that any mere mortal would be sued to death for (by an another "villainous" instance, the media system that has made piracy a necessity in the first place), and they're hoping to get away with it simply on technicalities and by having more money for better lawyers. Rules are rules, if you don't like them maybe Facebook should try to change them (and not just for themselves, but for the rest of us too)?
The existence hinges on the rewriting and strengthening of copyright laws by data brokers and other cancerous tech companies. It's not Meta vs us, but opensource vs Google and Openai.
They are being sued for copyright infringement when it's clearly highly transformative. The rules are fine as is, Meta isn't the one trying to change them. I shouldn't go against my own interests and support frivolous lawsuits that will negatively impact me just because Meta is a boogeyman.
Where is the source content then
Annas archive. Keep up. Pffff.
Nope. Get fucked
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