"It would take a lot of effort to do it legally" is a pathetic excuse for a company of Meta's size.
They could also simply buy controlling stakes in publishers. For scale comparison, Meta is spending upwards $30B per year on AI, and the recent sale of Simon & Schuster that didn't go through was for a mere $2.2B.
Surely the author only licenses the copyright to the publisher for hardback, paperback and ebook, with an agreed-upon royalty rate?
And if someone wants the rights for some other purpose, like translation or making a film or producing merchandise, they have to go to the author and negotiate additional rights?
Meta giving a few billion to authors would probably mend a lot of hearts, though.
I totally agree. But since when has that stopped companies like Meta. These big companies are built on breaking/skirting the rules.
Defending themselves with technicalities and expensive lawyers may be financially viable.
Zero ethics but what would we expect from them?
While it's plausible someone downloaded a bunch of torrents and tossed them in the training directory...again, under who's authority? Like if this happened it would be one overzealous data scientist potentially. Hardly "them".
People lean on collective pronouns to avoid actually thinking about the mechanics of human enterprise and you get extremely absurd conclusions.
(it is not outside the bounds of thinkable that an org could in fact have a very bad culture like this, but I know people who work for Meta, who also have law degrees - they're well aware of the potential problems).
These newly unredacted documents reveal exchanges between Meta employees unearthed in the discovery process, like a Meta engineer telling a colleague that they hesitated to access LibGen data because “torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right ”. They also allege that internal discussions about using LibGen data were escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as "MZ" in the memo handed over during discovery) and that Meta's AI team was "approved to use" the pirated material.