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Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues

https://torrentfreak.com/uploading-pirated-books-via-bittorrent-qualifies-as-fair-use-meta/
Some of us are old enough to remember when the RIAA sued children for downloading Metallica albums on filesharing networks. They sued for $100,000 per song, an absurd amount when you consider that even stealing a physical album would amount only to around $1 per song. What was bizarre was that courts took the figure seriously, even if they typically settled cases for around $3,000, still around 30x actual damages. The legal maximum was $150,000 per infringement: when a staffer leaked an early cut of the Wolverine movie, the studio could only sue for that much.
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.
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how they were able to recover from that is beyond me.
They didn't. I haven't bought a Metallica album since the black album. That was a decade earlier, because everything since sucked, but as I got older I thought about maybe expanding my tastes. I avoided Metallica specifically for their disrespect of their fans.
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You clearly haven't watched Stranger Things
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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.

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> Anyone who uses BitTorrent to transfer files automatically uploads content to other people, as it is inherent to the protocol. In other words, the uploading wasn’t a choice, it was simply how the technology works.

What an argument to make in court. It can be proved false in minutes by the plaintiffs.

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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?
> So do we now roll back all of the previous copyright cases where downloading music with bittorrent has been prosecuted

No, because those cases were pirating-while-poor. This is pirating-while-trillion-dollar-corporation, which falls under a completely different section of the law.

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The world has become so strange. In my pirate youth, I would have never imagined the big companies to argue in courts like this, basically pro piracy. And the activists are now against it, because the big guys are doing it.
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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.
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Everyone's pointing out the obvious hypocrisy here, but I think it's more interesting if Meta succeeds in making this argument: can I just steal any book I want and share it with anyone? Does the same apply to music, movies, TV shows, and video games?
At some point, the contradiction of "law as something impartial" and "law bends to the whims of power" will need to be resolved.
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I remember in the 90s and 2000s, the FBI would go after homeless people selling bootleg VHS and DVDs on the street lol
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This is the real reason the ultra rich are buying media companies. They expect the existing copyright laws to prevail in court and to either make significant revenue licensing IP for training or to take large stakes in AI companies in return for the IP.

Only data is a moat, not algos, not compute.

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Feeling very conflicted right now.

On the other hand, it'd be absolutely hilarious if they succeeded with this argument. VPN vendors would not find that as hilarious I bet.

And on another the hypocrisy is mindboggling. I guess you can't blame the lawyers from going after every angle, but this is quite creative.

But really I do just want to find out if money continues to buy justice.

I sincerely hope Facebook loses and is found to have knowingly infringed on copyright of all the books in the lawsuit. At $150K per violation, I'd almost feel bad for the poor shareholders. Zuck would probably take full responsibility and fire tens of thousand of workers.

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Oh, how the tables have turned...
Meanwhile some kid downloads a song and gets lynched for it
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We're reaching levels of "move fast and break things" previously only thought possible under laboratory conditions.

Seriously? They couldn't be bothered setting upload speed to 0?

A related case:

"Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B US to settle author class action over AI training"

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/anthropic-ai-copyright-sett...

I wonder how many of the torrent site whales are backed by big tech or industry. Some people share like petabytes of data on multiple sites. It's an insane amount.
"i shoot them as it was fair use to taking their wallet. that's how the protocol work."

how much you have to bribe a judge to even begin to consider saying that in a defense?

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Gut reaction: Judge needs to upload Meta's lawyers to jail cells, explaining "that's simply how the technology works".
Literally admitting to theft & whining about the modus which got them caught lol
piracy is not wrong, no matter who does it.