Cutter wrote on Feb 8, 2025, 22:16:
Ever borrow a book from a library? Ever loan someone a book? By that rationale you're a thief as well. Human advancement comes with shared, free knowledge.

That's just saying anything digitally created should be free. That the hundreds of hours someone spends writing a book, making music, creating art or a computer program/game is somehow less valuable than the hours someone spends painting a house or mowing a lawn.

And as others have said, the library has to buy the book, and at least for digital books, they pay a fairly high premium, usually 3-5x more than the digital cost of the book if you were to buy it, because they are basically renting it out and the author and publisher needs to recoup some cost (and not all books are automatically just available at libraries, publishers and authors can limit how their books are sold so they don't go to libraries or online lending sites).

Then they wait their turn like everyone else or purchase their own copies of said books and build their own personal library, just like everyone else.

The library doesn't have infinite copies of the book to be checked out by everyone at the same time.

Cutter wrote on Feb 8, 2025, 22:16:
Ever borrow a book from a library? Ever loan someone a book? By that rationale you're a thief as well. Human advancement comes with shared, free knowledge.

Brother Cutter isn't wrong! You can go learn some new shit at the library for free... and while this is kinda the same and I believe information should be available to all mankind for the small price of learning to read, I have to ask... What would META do if you sailed the seven seas and plundered their shit? I imagine they would demand their pound of flesh! I imagine they would demand satisfaction. I imagine they would demand the government intervene; and maybe even suggest that the military solve this problem for them.

These are E-Books with EULA's correct? Not the low-tech inferior bullshit paperback physical book's that we all legally shared in the past, which can be purchased at garage sales across the country for nearly free. No, Sir, these are the books that; when checked out of the library three or five times, have to be repurchased for hundreds of dollars unlike a physical book, because the payment required for knowledge is perpetual.

This comment was edited on Feb 9, 2025, 18:28.

Cutter wrote on Feb 8, 2025, 22:16:
Ever borrow a book from a library? Ever loan someone a book? By that rationale you're a thief as well. Human advancement comes with shared, free knowledge.

The flaw in your argument is that the library paid for that book or you did before you lent it to someone else.

Not sure how that glaring flaw was missed.

Ever borrow a book from a library? Ever loan someone a book? By that rationale you're a thief as well. Human advancement comes with shared, free knowledge.

And then those thieves whine, bitch and moan when a Chinese firm steals from them the same way they stole from everyone...

xD

ohhhh so META is going to pay 250k per violation, right? Piracy is not a victimless crime! Don't copy that floppy!

GinRummy wrote on Feb 8, 2025, 12:54:
Not only is that headline not a complete sentence,

That's Blue truncating it (to avoid screwing up his formatting, maybe?), as the full thing on PCG reads: "Court documents show not only did Meta torrent terabytes of pirated books to train AI models, employees wouldn't stop emailing each other about it: 'Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right'"

AI = theft

for written documents it is impossible to prove

for images you can often see watermarks

And they'll likely face zero consequences, especially with this administration. If this had been a person, who'd torrented millions of movies, they'd probably be facing some kind of ridiculous fine like 500 billion dollars. But somehow corporations are "people" until it comes to facing the law.

Google: It was okay. It was for the greater good.
Stupid masses: ...the greater good!

Not only is that headline not a complete sentence,

Bill Borre wrote on Feb 8, 2025, 11:28:
lol. I wonder what their source is. Russian servers?

That's...not how torrents work. A torrent provides data from multiple sources simultaneously. Some probably were from Russia but the whole of the information was not, and is not, stored on a single system.

lol. I wonder what their source is. Russian servers?