News Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations

[dalauder]

Ads in front of eyeballs, either TV, internet, or print, are FAR more effective than people think.

They aren't there to make you buy something, but rather to inform you about a product, and to give you a warm fuzzy about the company.
So that the next time you are looking to buy <something> you might think a little better of Company X vs Company Y.

I'm aware of that, yes. I meant the clickbait. It seems like a disproportionate amount of banner ads and end-of-article ads are clickbait. When there's no ad for a Honda on that page, just more ads for clickbait, it seems like someone's just skewing ad data and getting paid.

At the end of the day, Meta is an ad company. I'm just not clear on how it's making so many trillion-dollar companies. That number SEEMS too high. Then again, I think Superbowl ads cost too much. So I'm probably wrong on ad-spend effectiveness.

 

[bit_user]

Making a career as an author is looking more dicey each year.

I think it's like making a living as a musician. Only probably the top 0.1% do well enough for it to be their only income stream. AI might be eating into that, but there will always be superstar authors and musicians. Though, perhaps AI is damaging the talent pipeline for people to ever reach this level.

Mainly, what AI is killing off are the workaday copy writers and producers of background music, etc. Ways people could earn an income in the industry without having a big name.

 

[P.Amini]

Everyone says that, but they're mostly wrong.

The parts in your current PC....how did you know about them, and the company you bought them from?

"inform"

Different sources/reviews, in fact I am a long time Tom's Hardware reader when there were very few computer and tech related websites (except digit-life.com to name one which no longer exists). I don't see any ads now as I use more than 9 different chrome extensions to block/hide different kinds of ads, popups and elements.

 

[dalauder]

Everyone says that, but they're mostly wrong.

The parts in your current PC....how did you know about them, and the company you bought them from?

"inform"

From Tom's Hardware build forums mostly. That, and the old Jonny Guru site and Power Supply Eggspert list.

That's how I was willing to take a gamble on an FSP power supply when Corsairs were $200 during COVID.

 

[USAFRet]

I'm aware of that, yes. I meant the clickbait. It seems like a disproportionate amount of banner ads and end-of-article ads are clickbait. When there's no ad for a Honda on that page, just more ads for clickbait, it seems like someone's just skewing ad data and getting paid.

At the end of the day, Meta is an ad company. I'm just not clear on how it's making so many trillion-dollar companies. That number SEEMS too high. Then again, I think Superbowl ads cost too much. So I'm probably wrong on ad-spend effectiveness.

If buying ad space were not cost effective, companies would not do it.

A couple decades ago, I was in IT for a major marketing research company.
Clients such as Visa, Toyota, Black & Decker.

We, the IT dept, had exactly the same questions you pose.

Sales dept showed us a graph of ad spending vs sales.
It was almost 1:1.
More ads == more sales. Put your product in front of eyeballs.

 

[USAFRet]

From Tom's Hardware build forums mostly. That, and the old Jonny Guru site and Power Supply Eggspert list.

That's how I was willing to take a gamble on an FSP power supply when Corsairs were $200 during COVID.

And....a LOT of that comes out of the advertising budget of Company X.
They supply product to various forums, for free.
Good tests = good reviews. But you would not know about GPU Y without that ad dept money.

 

[P.Amini]

If buying ad space were not cost effective, companies would not do it.

A couple decades ago, I was in IT for a major marketing research company.
Clients such as Visa, Toyota, Black & Decker.

We, the IT dept, had exactly the same questions you pose.

Sales dept showed us a graph of ad spending vs sales.
It was almost 1:1.
More ads == more sales. Put your product in front of eyeballs.

That is what I said, advertising is a science, a very very big, advanced and profitable nowadays. And I found the name, Thomas J. Barratt.

 

[usertests]

Based

 

[Sangheili112]

Making a career as an author is looking more dicey each year.

It already is when it comes to publishers like
These 2 which Penguin Random House (PRH) and Simon & Schuster (S&S). The court ruled that the merger would have reduced competition in the publishing market for top-selling books.

It would have been a monopoly because they would have owned more thrn 50% of all books. And they do try to acquire all rights if you try yo to publish through them.

It's same as news, music industry, movie industry.

Like I wish I could build a ai to record and track those companies

People think meta is s giant is not looking at the other 2 giants in publishing either, there all giants fighting each other.

I work in a processing area for libraries pretty much all of our books comes from just penguin random house

You can publish your own books but it will be harder to get out there otherwise you go through a publisher instead which is a 10% -30% royalty to the author.

Ya you might notice this with steam and epic and music industry. It's littraly same in all the industries

 

[Mr Majestyk]

Another scumbag billionaire tech bro doing what he likes with impunity. Say it ain't so.

 

[derekullo]

If buying ad space were not cost effective, companies would not do it.

A couple decades ago, I was in IT for a major marketing research company.
Clients such as Visa, Toyota, Black & Decker.

We, the IT dept, had exactly the same questions you pose.

Sales dept showed us a graph of ad spending vs sales.
It was almost 1:1.
More ads == more sales. Put your product in front of eyeballs.

If $10 million in ads gets you $10 million in sales ... you are back to square one lol.

 

[USAFRet]

If $10 million in ads gets you $10 million in sales ... you are back to square one lol.

If it were not profitable, they would not do it.

Also, lack of any ads and visibility gives your competitor an advantage in eyeballs.

 

[Pierce2623]

lol, because you think "Open"AI and Google didn't do the same ??
Like AI knows what happened in any book just by learning their crappy wikipedia page ?

What are you talking about? Who said ythey don’t think OpenAI and Google do the same stuff? Of course they do and it’s illegal for them too. All these AI companies are criminals stealing copyrighted material.

 

[Pierce2623]

If $10 million in ads gets you $10 million in sales ... you are back to square one lol.

I don’t think he meant 1 to 1 monetarily . I pretty clear he just meant there’s a direct correlation between advertising and sales

 

[sukebe]

... and they didn't even seed.

 

[sukebe]

I guess it's going to put hentai manga writers out of business.

 

[Findecanor]

I am for the "Corporate Death Penalty" in this case, and for any other company that does the same.

Meta/Facebook has also been guilty of many other misdoings: getting users addicted to their platform, spying on users, looking the other way when there have been outright scams on their platform, and when there has been widespread political manipulation, ... that had resulted in riots and killings around the world. It would be long overdue.

 

[Pierce2623]

... and they didn't even seed.

Actually they did and even tried to cover their tracks there….lol. They were full on participants in the Torrent ecosystem to feed that AI copyrighted material. That’s just purely scummy behavior.

 

[TheOtherOne]

It's not stealing when rich and/or powerful do it. Then it becomes "Risk of national security", or "For world peace" or any of those bogus BS claims for wrong doings.

 

[Armbrust11]

I am angry and mad. Even if they pay full prices it is unfair and inappropriate use of what they consume, let alone pirating it. I am really angry and mad about this.

As far as I am aware, books do not have an Eula. So technically there's nothing preventing the use of a paid for book in ai training. But ianal

Personally I think ai has a huge potential to benefit all of society, but like most technology it also has a proportional amount of danger.

 

[garrett040]

This is why i have no issues with piracy or torrenting my self.

 

[USAFRet]

This is why i have no issues with piracy or torrenting my self.

2 wrongs don't make a right.

 

[DS426]

Next-level scumbags, and not just Meta but Open AI, Microsoft, and Google as well. Facebook's biggest atrocity IMO is how much permanent damage has been done to children and is still ongoing. It's taking literally Congressional hearings to even press these disgusting social media companies to 1) admit fault (mostly no admission, of course) and 2) make positive changes to their platforms.

Now that these big lawsuits are picking up steam against the AI "revolution," DeepSeek being the disruptor of massive proportions (even if that's also overblown and reported incorrectly on, e.g. the actual cost), and so on, this takes us that much closer to this bubble popping. The funny thing is that Uncle Sam is too broke to provide a safety net for all these mega corps, so somebody is going to be getting creative on figuring out a soft landing. Stockholders will feel the burn but that's the risk of trading on the stock market... if you think AI is a super safe bet, you have another thing coming. Yeah, it's here to stay as it's tech valleys' highest deity at this time; they'll fight tooth and nail and clearly cheat in any way that moves their sacrosanct cause forward.

Digressing back to some lighter talk, that Zucky is a real gym bro now, huh!? Lmao.

 

[das_stig]

Supreme Court order and get ISPs to ban Meta from the internet, like they did with normal people, if they have the guts not too be bought off !

 

[sonichedgehog360]

Of course they did. And of course they will get away with it.

No, they won't. Sooner or later, they will have to pay the piper and this revelation is undoubtedly going to accelerate it. As more and more legal cases move forward, the prevailing sentiment is this: AI is pattern-matching, very advanced, yes, but pattern-matching just the same. Therefore, when data as input is fed into it, the result or output is considered remixing of all of that inputted data. And if said inputted data constitutes protected IP and the holders of said IP have not given the rights to use it and/or they have not been properly compensated, just as with any unauthorized remixing of IP, the IP rights holders must be fully compensated for losses and damages. Therefore, Meta is on the cusp of owing billions of dollars to many angry IP owners. The fireworks are about to blow up on these hair-brained AI obsessed companies who are acting illegally--now in broad daylight given that the source of their data (stolen IP) is known.