Technology

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.

Just gotta love these big tech companies and their bullshit double standards.

Do it, Judge. Protect the wealthy and say it's not piracy. Do it.

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..

But did they keep a good ratio though?

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.

“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/

https://www.libtorrent.org/

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.

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.

The Pirates of the Crown

If buying ain't owning, than downloading...

oh wait, that's our slogan

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.

What is Anna’s Archive?

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.

Damn leeches