Remember that Metallica band members played an active driving role in those lawsuits against their own underage fans. It wasn't just the RIAA / record company organizations behaving cruelly, it was Metallica themselves. Fuck Metallica.

At least it brought us some fun Flash animations as a result, in the form of Metallicops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb_jLAisPzk

Your memory may be failing you. The "maxima" you cite still exist, but they are merely statutory damages provisions. In other words, the plaintiffs can obtain such damages without proof of actual loss, i.e. strict liability. If the plaintiffs succeed in pricing actual damages beyond this level, they can obtain them.

So, does this mean that people can simply argue in court now (if they were to be prosecuted for downloading media via bittorrent) that it is fair use if they used it to train a local model on their machine?

You are off a bit on the numbers. First, though, the RIAA suits were not for downloading. The suits were for distribution.

Here is how their enforcement actions generally went.

1. They would initially send a letter asking for around $3 per song that was being shared, threatening to sue if not paid. This typically came to a total in the $2-3k range. There were a few where the initial request was for much more such as when the person was accused of an unusually high volume of intentional distribution. But for the vast majority of people who were running file sharing apps in order to get more music for themselves rather than because they wanted to distribute music it averaged in that $2-3k range.

2. If they could not come to an agreement and actually filed a lawsuit they would pick maybe 10-25 songs out of the list of songs the person was sharing (typically around a thousand) to actually sue over. The range of possible damages in such a suit is $750-30000 per work infringed, with the court (judge and jury) picking the amount [1].

NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go.

3. There would be more settlement offers before the lawsuit actually went to trial. These would almost always be in the $200-300 per song range, which since the lawsuit was only over maybe a dozen or two of the thousand+ songs the person had been sharing usually came out to the same ballpark as the settlement offers before the suit was filed.

Almost everyone settled at that point, because they realized that (1) they had no realistic chance of winning, (2) they had no realistic chance of proving they were were an "innocent infringer", (3) minimal statutory damages then of $750/song x 10-15 songs was more than the settlement offer, and (4) on top of that they would have not only their attorney fees but in copyright suits the loser often has to pay the winner's attorney fees.

4. Less than a dozen cases actually reached trial, and most of those settled during the trial for the same reasons in the above paragraph that most people settled before trial. Those were in the $3-15k range with most being around $5k.

[1] If the defendant can prove they are in "innocent infringer", meaning they didn't know they were infringing and had no reason to know that, then the low end is lowered to $200. If the plaintiff can prove that the infringement was "willful", meaning the defendant knew it was infringement and deliberately did it, the high end is raised to $150k.

Children can commit crimes too.

It's funny, because now in the age of AI, many of the people that support piracy are now trying to stop AI companies from doing the same thing.

Way to leave out context!

By no means were they suing for downloading alone. They were suing for sharing while downloading, and seeding after, and as "early seeders" they helped thousands obtain copies.

Right or wrong, it was absolutely not about just downloading. It wasn't about taking one copy.

In their eyes, it was about copyng then handing out tens of thousands of copies for free.

Again, not saying it was right. However, please don't provide an abridged account, slanted to create a conclusion in the reader.

I can't believe that no one has ever tried that one before... So do we now roll back all of the previous copyright cases where downloading music with bittorrent has been prosecuted?

When I pull the trigger and the bullet kills an another person, it is just how technology works. Why would I be responsible if I choose to use it or not?

Not exactly automatically.

Seeding is opt-out, not opt-in… but it is usually a default that has to actively manually overridden. Most users never touch those settings. The average pirate downloading a torrent is seeding whether they know it or not.

The protocol absolutely does not enforce seeding. A client can lie to the tracker, cap upload to 0k. BitTorrent has no mechanism to compel one to share. Leeching a file, downloading and sharing no forward packets is possible. While the "social contract" of seeding is entirely a norm enforced by private trackers and community shame. It is not the protocol itself.

I agree, that people used to be called "leechers". Somewhat related xkcd https://xkcd.com/553/

This. You can set upload speed to zero, and download entire dataset without uploading anything. Slower but doable.

Lawyers are paid to defend a position. They are intellectual prostitutes.

> And the activists are now against it, because the big guys are doing it.

Different activists are different. "Information wants to be free" activists are against different things from "artists trying to make an honest living" activists.

And different big guys are different. A big guy social network wants different things from a big guy book publisher.

> And the activists are now against it, because the big guys are doing it.

The activists are against it because the big guys are exploiting us small guys, again. Nobody would give a shit if Meta was just torrenting Nintendo's IP and OpenAI was torrenting Netflix IP, except the lawyers working for these companies.

Back in 2015 Twitter bragged that Periscope had been widely used the night before to pirate a pay-per-view boxing match. I thought that was odd.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/sports/periscope-a-stream...

Nothing has changed: the money flows in the same direction as before, that's the constant. The courts are just a diode in a rectifier.

I have no issue with anyone pirating. In my country — and soon in Italy as well — all storage media sales include a small levy (Artisjus) intended to compensate copyright holders for losses from piracy. One could argue it's unfair if you're not actually using the media for copying, but having been forced to pay it regardless, I have no moral qualms about pirating content I don't feel like paying for.

By the same token, AI companies are in no position to complain when their models are scraped and distilled.

Big companies are stealing to enrich themselves, while small time pirates were pirating for their own entertainment. Some of the latter went to jail. While the former rake in the dough.

It's not like there has been some change in principle and some sort of knife to sharpen. "2005 personal pirate" was about making art accessible. "2025 corpo pirate" is about killing art.

Just need to get around to understand that on many subjects big companies are not uniform block... They all have their own goals and ways of profit. Other than exploiting the consumers and state.

Activists are against AI training, not bittorrent

The activists seem to be so blinded by disdain they can't even consider the value of the precedent if it goes theough.

If Meta wins this, does it mean that pirating becomes legal again?

It's almost like things can be good or bad in different contexts

The problem is that laws don't apply to these big companies but to the small guys. It isn't as if piracy has suddenly become legal for everybody.

Oh no, its just legal for the big companies. The laws are different for everybody and that's what activists are worried about :)

I haven't changed. I was pro 20 years ago and I am pro now.

Bad news, it's already been resolved.

Wholly agreed.

The way Disney &co coopted law to pack their coffers is a travesty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

"the law" has always only been the whims of the powerful aa a threat of violence against the powerless if they don't follow

Everything bends to power, by definition. And laws can’t be impartial because they’re not based in hard science: terms like “murder”, “assault”, “theft”, etc. are ambiguous thus up to interpretation (e.g. is a scam theft? If so, what defines a scam? If “lying”, what’s the difference from “misleading”, or if there’s no difference, what defines “misleading”…)

My best idea for a solution is better education, so people don’t make bad laws then badly enforce them.

Since the creation of the USA the only real crime a person could do was being poor.

ICE played an important role in those cases with long supply chains. Seems quaint now, but I think we should acknowledge any criminal who does not participate in a child abuse ring. Those counterfeit DVDs were not illegal content, just illegal storefronts. If today’s ICE or FBI uncovered such a ring, who would they call first?

It's a win-win situation. Either pirates win or Meta loses.

If this happens then free and open content (the Wikipedia model, more or less) becomes a hugely impactful "commoditize the complement" play for the big AI and tech firms. Every good piece of open content is something that AI firms don't have to license from a proprietary supplier. And if models trained on entirely open content can write an acceptable "first draft" of something new, that's huge acceleration.

Seems like a bad bet to me. It looks like authors are going to lose this case setting the precedent that you not only don’t need to license training data, obtaining it illegally (for free) is totally okay.