How Meta AI Staff Deemed More Than 7M Books to Have No "Economic Value"
vanityfair.comBy their fruits you shall know them ...
Yann LeCun endlessly talks about what's good, what's bad, about how he is this and that, bla bla bla bla bla.
Then gives stuff like this a green light. He does get a fat paycheck out of it, though.
Trashy.
Meta has the money to burn, 1. it’s easier to fight all this in court after having done it rather than to ask for permission from all the publishers beforehand. 2. sadly oftentimes the fines are minuscule when big tech does wrong. 3. CEOs in big tech don’t have or listen to morality, they have “sold their soul” so to say a long time ago
Simple: they didn't want to pay for it, and it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission.
did they even ask forgiveness?
They will eventually, if LLMs are still a big market in a few years.
It’s interesting the stuff that Meta gets away with under Zuckerberg’s direction, where other CEOs would be under intense scrutiny or already behind bars.
Piracy is very good and morally right except when it’s someone I don’t like doing it.
There is a huge gap between someone pirating a book and one of the richest corporations on the planet pirating seven million books to train their for-profit stuff on.
I, for one, don't accept copyright as correct law. Under that principle, there is no difference.
Then why bother with this:
https://github.com/pitaj/rebooto/blob/16aa17b00b2b11c7de2fb5...
To be clear, I think copyright should not exist, as I don't think it follows from the basic principles on which our governance is founded. Regardless of my view on the matter, the state will still enforce copyright. Under the written law, this allows people to treat my work as if copyright did not exist (to a reasonable approximation).
Maybe a different, even more permissible license (public domain like) would be more fitting, but I am a practical person and understand that a more common and well understood license is better for this purpose.
Which state are you referring to?
If you think copyright shouldn't exist, you're free to ignore any rights afforded you for your work, "the state" is not going to enforce anything unless you bring a case to a court.
I understand the MIT licence as convention, and it makes sense. It's just you're opining on a public forum about copyright being somehow antithetical to "basic principles on which our governance is founded" whilst attaching copyright notices to your work.
Much of common law is specifically about property, upon which a good portion of modern day governance is founded. So your objection to copyright seems somewhat misinformed.
What is it about copyright that you think is a negative in today's society?
> If you think copyright shouldn't exist, you're free to ignore any rights afforded you for your work, "the state" is not going to enforce anything unless you bring a case to a court.
That doesn't give other people who would like to use my work any useful guarantee, though. Without a license, they would be taking a lot of risk, even if they knew my views on copyright.
> Much of common law is specifically about property, upon which a good portion of modern day governance is founded. So your objection to copyright seems somewhat misinformed.
Physical property has exclusive use. Multiple people cannot use 100% of something at the same time. "Intellectual property" has no such trait. Multiple identical copies of the same work can be used by multiple people at the same time.
Ownership defines who has exclusive use of a thing. Copyright actually defies common law by requiring state power to enforce monopolies on certain information, even on property owned by parties with no association to the originator of a work.
> What is it about copyright that you think is a negative in today's society?
Copyright is sold as "promoting the arts" but in net slows innovation and decreases artistic freedom. Especially in its current form with extremely long lifetimes, it primarily enables rent-seeking by publishers at the expense of the public. There are other ways for artists to make money, and many artists already make most of their money by performing live shows, working on commission, selling early access subscriptions, etc.
I'm continuing because this is interesting, not try to prove some point that undermines your perspective.
> Copyright actually defies common law by requiring state power to enforce monopolies on certain information
All laws ultimately require state power. You're deferring to state power by using the MIT licence, which recognises and legitimises copyright law that you take issue with.
> Copyright is sold as "promoting the arts" but in net slows innovation and decreases artistic freedom.
This is a big claim that requires big evidence. Robust copyright law has existed for about half a century, during which time innovation and artistic freedom seem to have flourished. In fact copyright appears to have directly contributed to the creation of the corpus Meta AI is exploiting; it exists because of copyright, not in spite of it.
> [Copyright] primarily enables rent-seeking by publishers at the expense of the public
I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Copyright bestows the right of individuals to benefit from the value they create. Without talking about IP law more broadly in a capitalist system (which seems to be your gripe), I think this is a good thing.
I've benefitted greatly from the content of books, as have we all. If authors had to rely on live shows (for a book?), take commissions and sell subscriptions I think we'd all be worse off, because these provide little to no economic security for authors.
The difference is in the real consequences of the action. Which exist regardless of the abstract notions that precede it and which exist regardless of whether anyone accepts those notions.
There is when some people get punished for it and others do not.
I agree, but I don’t see how facebook getting punished gets us any closer to a good situation.
Because it sets an example:
Pay the appropriate fee to the creators for their hard work, and ask permission before taking something that isn’t yours.
They didn’t even attempt to deal in good faith.
Would you apply the same logic to immigration and marijuana possession?
Yes, unequal enforcement of the law is inherently unjust and ripe for abuse. That doesn't mean the law shouldn't be changed, but a legal system that arbitrarily picks and chooses when it enforces the law is corrupt and has a built in method to persecute and target select people and groups. It undermines the very principle of Rule of Law and allows unjust laws to remain on the books ready to be selectively enforced.
Well, if they have no value, no one is forcing them to use them.