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?

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yorwba 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People could always simply argue in court that their torrenting was free use.

If you're just some nobody representing yourself instead of an expensive lawyer acting on behalf of a large company, maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.

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dotancohen 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It has been often said that a man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.

	▲	gzread 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And a lawyer.

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_heimdall 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unless I'm mistaken, the relevant copyright laws aren't limited to enforcement when money exchanged hands.

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moron4hire 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No, but it does matter how much money the alleged infringer has.

Property law is mostly concerned with protecting the rich from the poor, so when a rich person violates the property of a poor person, the courts can't allow the inversion of purpose and will create something called a "legal fiction," which is basically the kind of bending-over-backwards that my children do to try to claim that they didn't break the rules, actually, and if you look at it in a certain way they were actually following the rules, actually.

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gzread 18 minutes ago | parent [-]

This sort of thing used to be heavily downvoted on HN. How the site has changed in the last year.

	▲	moron4hire 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, the VC-backed startup ecosystem that was the origin of this website does rely on propagating the myth that we live in a meritocracy to ensure it has enough cheap labor to build prototypes that its anointed few can acquire at rock bottom pricing. But we've been through enough cycles of it now that we've started seeing the patterns.

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thisislife2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sadly, in many courts, when it comes to the corporate and the government, the judges rule on the axiom, "Show me your lawyer first, and I will rule, rather than show me the law, and I will rule".

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chongli an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.

Many judges take a dim view of expensive lawyers trying to pull the wool over their eyes with sophisticated but fallacious arguments. You have to deal with a lot of BS to be a long-standing judge, so it seems like resistance to BS may be selected for among judges.

	▲	kube-system an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sorting BS from non-BS is pretty much the daily job description for a judge.

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bsenftner 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course not. It is just yet another example of a 7-8 figure expensive attorney and their billions dollar corporation wasting everyone' time, tax payers dollars, and demonstrating that the law applies to us and not them. I expect them to just stop showing up in court in time. What can the court do when these people own the people that write the laws?

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Ekaros 4 hours ago | parent [-]

There really should be some type of panel for frivolous legal arguments. If they are used by corporation all of the lawyers, leadership and shareholders involved are thrown into jail. Could even get jury on this and have them give majority opinion.

	▲	post-it 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That seems like a bad idea to me.