That's the magic of money. Download your favorite artist's discography for personal use? If the MPAA had its way (and it occasionally has), torrenting that could bankrupt you.
The AI industry - soaking up every bit of media available online for commercial purposes, often reproducing it nearly identically - has enough money and capital to influence things its way. And only its way, in case anyone was hoping this might change anything at all for the little guy.
> Download your favorite artist's discography for personal use? If the MPAA had its way (and it occasionally has), torrenting that could bankrupt you.
I don't think that there are any clear examples of cases where ONLY downloading has resulted in huge fines. All the big bankrupting level fines have been for both downloading and sharing.
You mention that 'torrenting' could bankrupt you, and that is true, but the main reason for the huge fines are that you are taking part in distribution rather than just 'downloading for personal use'.
> I don't think that there are any clear examples of cases where ONLY downloading has resulted in huge fines.
They [1, and others] been hunting and fining downloaders for over a decade now, with the only "evidence" being IP addresses connected with the torrent [2].
>with the only "evidence" being IP addresses connected with the torrent [2].
Is that an unreasonable assumption? As much as people like to come up with excuses like "I had open wifi!" or "I was running a TOR node", judges don't seem inclined to believe them, probably for the same reason they don't seem inclined to believe excuses like "somebody took my car on a joyride and then returned it!" for parking tickets. Remember, both non-commercial copyright infringement lawsuits and parking tickets are tried in civil court, which means the standard is "preponderance of evidence", not "beyond reasonable doubt".
You are missing the point I was replying to, specifically that parent suggested people were only hunted for creating/uploading pirated content, not merely participating in the torrent.
That’s a really interesting distinction. Clearly there’s an “original crime”, the first person to rip the CD and put it online (or whatever kids do to pirate music nowadays).
But then if I download a file, create a copy, and share it with you, have I done anything wrong?
To all intents and purposes, seeding is an act of reproduction. You, while keeping your copy, create copies of (parts) of the file and share it to someone else to allow them to assemble a new, second copy.
Whether this is, or should be, a crime is a different question altogether. The main point I was making is that it’s the copying/sharing to other people which seems to be a crucial element in these prosecutions.
That’s likely intentional: the last thing the *AA folks want is a decision that creating a copy of a copyrighted work for your own personal use is not a crime. But it does seem the courts have decided: making a copy for someone else is indeed illegal.
But both are illegal? I suspect if it came out that some torrent seeder was actually part of some sort of piracy ring responsible for ripping the movies, they'd get far stiffer penalties than the few thousand $ fine that typical torrenters get. Moreover isn't AI companies also "keeping content available"?
The whole point of the thread is that AI companies are getting away with piracy but individuals aren't. But the reality is that AI companies aren't getting away with it (a judge ruled that Anthropic must face trial over their use of pirated books).
More specific to this thread is that claim that "ONLY downloading" hasn't resulted in fines for anyone. So far as I can tell, this is true. People are just quibbling over how someone who's torrenting somehow counts as "only downloading", even though their client is uploading.
Yes, but torrenting is not ONLY downloading, it's both. The articles you link are very clearly talking about 'Sharing' (from link 2: "File sharing consists of both download and upload of a file.").
Given the lack of sense in treating each peer as a lost sale for damages, I think we can safely say they're only interested in making examples out of people and would absolutely go after people for only downloading if the law permitted. Thankfully it's not, but maybe they lobby to make changes in that direction to try and curb future AI industry shenanigans.
You contradict yourself. There were numerous public cases where they chased people downloading few mp3s just for themselves, and made into example case with massive fines.
If you don't understand how torrents work on technical level I suggest at least some shallow reading. Property rights holders don't care about details, as long as you tick the box of sending a single packet to somebody, off to court with ya.
> There were numerous public cases where they chased people downloading few mp3s just for themselves
If this is true, I have been unable to find any. Can you please share? In all of the cases I was able to find, the huge fines were based on also uploading.
> If you don't understand how torrents work on technical level I suggest at least some shallow reading
This is a bit patronising, and I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. My point is that the only prosecutions I've been able to find are where they were able to prove uploading as well as downloading (and yes, the fact that someone used BitTorrent makes it a slam-dunk, because the protocol makes it impossible to download without also uploading). Are you trying to argue that someone who torrents a copyrighted work doesn't also share it?
The fight about digitized media for personal (entertainment / informational) use were the early aughts. The precedents crafted then don't immediately translate to these cases (novel transformative work from protected materials), and the new precedents have to account for the fact that universities have been training via "piracy" for ages.
(The magic of money factors in to the extent that they can afford the lawyers to remind the court that this isn't settled law yet).
The fact that this is propping up the entire AI industry adds additional weight. When legislating or deciding court cases, some won't be willing to pop the cash cow, some will be worried about falling behind countries that don't enforce copyright evenly. IP owners are trying to go after the AI industry, with only mixed to poor success.
Hard to justify that they can't afford to pay when they have multi-billion dollar valuations and are apparently paying hundreds of millions to get a single engineer.
The AI industry - soaking up every bit of media available online for commercial purposes, often reproducing it nearly identically - has enough money and capital to influence things its way. And only its way, in case anyone was hoping this might change anything at all for the little guy.