Meta Says it Made Sure Not to Seed Any Pirated Books
In an AI lawsuit targeting Meta, authors claim the company used BitTorrent to share books from shadow library LibGen with third parties.
Seeding is something to help your fellow pirates. You donate your bandwidth to help them get their files. It's totally in character for meta to just leech everything, take stuff, not give back anything and then to run to the bank laughing
Meta, even if you aren't seeding it still counts, because if you had the books already you wouldn't need to grab them from elsewhere, and you refusing to seed makes you a fucking leech.
'We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.'
So where's the RIAA/MPAA/etc now that it's a Big Company doing this? They were the ones screaming murder about torrenting in years past. So go on. Go after these guys who are doing piracy on a literally industrial scale.
Damn leechers. And doubly so. First they steal the books, and then they don't even give back to the pirates. And it's not like Anna's Archive or Libgen weren't struggling already. So Meta is just harming everyone involved.
For the record, the reason this matters is because distributing a copyrighted work confers a much higher penalty than simply copying it for yourself. If Meta seeded those books they could be on the hook for a staggeringly large amount of damages. It's on the order of hundreds or even thousands per download. And that's across all the thousands of different books Meta grabbed.
The statutory penalty in the US is on the order of $100,000 per infringement. "Statutory" means that the number is written into the law, and the aggrieved party doesn't have to establish or prove actual losses.
But doesn't that apply only to individuals? Or am I mistaken?
"Corporations are people, my friend."
No, it applies to "anyone," its just that corporations can drag lawsuits on for years, so they get to make sweet heart deals for their crimes that the test of us dont.
What a relief. I was really concerned that they may have given somebody else a copy of the books they found useful enough to download themselves. /s
Fucking bottom-feeders.
The real crime should be not seeding after downloading, have some common courtesy
The class action against META gonna be huge.
So you broke the law AND made sure to be a dick