The pirate sites? There is no pirate site hosting files here, BitTorrent is peer to peer.

If it’s fine for a large corp. like Meta to pirate books then it’s fine for everyone else. If it’s a crime for ordinary consumers then it’s a crime for Meta too.

Especially as Meta aren’t doing this for charity. They train LLMs for their own gain.

The argument is that distribution is the infringement. This is basically the only thing torrenters get charged with.

It’s crazy, yet so predictable, that while the system tries to bankrupt individuals for torrenting a single book or movie in this case the excuse “it was just to train an LLM” will fly. Imagine a private individual would argue that in court.

One should also keep in mind the countless people who got much of their education from pirated books.

The judge is claiming that because the use is of the books are “so transformative,” the usage of these books to train an llm is fair use.

I’m not familiar with the facts of the case and IANAL, and its late, but how did the plaintiffs determine their books were being used for training of the llm? Was the model spitting out language that was similar or verbatim to their works?

Same. If I invented a novel new way of encoding video and used it to pack a bunch of movies into a single file, I would fully expect to be sued if I tried distributing that file, and equally so if I let people use a web site that let them extract individual videos from that file. Why should text be treated differently?