In one of the AI lawsuits faced by Meta, the company stands accused of distributing pirated books. The authors who filed the class-action lawsuit allege that Meta shared books from the shadow library LibGen with third parties via BitTorrent. Meta, however, says that it took precautions to prevent ‘seeding’ content. In addition, the company clarifies that there is nothing ‘independently illegal’ about torrenting.
Has anyone in the US ever been busted for downloading from a direct download portal? Or usenet?
I think any progress here is mostly in principle, as I don’t think there’s a big practical risk to downloading only as it stands today, though I don’t follow things as closely as I used to and could be mistaken.
Nobody in the US has ever been busted on copyright grounds for downloading anything, regardless of source. The law does not provide for enforcement against downloading; only uploading.
No, but even a baseless civil suit costs a lot of time and money to fight.
That’s what I thought. I don’t think their defense succeeding here really gets us anything new.
It doesn’t get us anything new. It does put a big, gaping hole in the FUD that has been spread about the supposed “illegality” of downloading.