Yet another Hacker News

Ex-Meta Researcher Torrented Pirated Books, Deleted It 'Due to Litigation'

47 points WesleyGrant782 1 hour ago 26 comments

nbajka 1 hour ago | parent

You wouldn’t download a car.

tossandthrow 22 minutes ago | parent

This always hit me a odd.

If I could, I would.

And it would be incredibly immoral to demand excessive profits for your downloadable if distribution was free.

The music industry's monopoly is luckily being eroded these days. Now they can try to work on market terms.

Aboutplants 1 hour ago | parent

Yes… I also deleted all of those MP3s I downloaded in the 90’s and 00’s…

ashkankiani 1 hour ago | parent

Meta shares responsible for genocide and we're still too fucking scared to go after them for that properly.

jjtheblunt 57 minutes ago | parent

i think that's a modus ponens fail if i've ever seen one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_ponens

ashkankiani 54 minutes ago | parent

I'm stupid so explain it in small words for me.

t0mpr1c3 48 minutes ago | parent

non sequitur

snejj5 44 minutes ago | parent

I need this for most HN comments myself. Glad I joined this site to learn where I fall on the bell curve.

otherme123 31 minutes ago | parent

Modus ponens is a valid "If A happens, B happens in consequence. A happens. Then B also happens". A "modus ponens fail", also called "affirm the consequence" is the invalid "If A happens, B happens in consequence. B is observed. Then A happened".

Valid: if someone is hit by a train, he dies. Someone was hit by a train, then he is dead.

Invalid: if someone is hit by a train, he dies. Someone is found death, thus he must have been hit by a train.

r_lee 53 minutes ago | parent

what do you hope to achieve with this?

skygazer 32 minutes ago | parent

Well, they got me to google what at first seemed like a far fetched conspiracy theory, but actually seems to have some truth to it.

For those similarly unaware, I guess in 2017 Myanmar's military launched a campaign of mass killings, sexual violence, and destruction of Rohingya, according to the UN, and amnesty international, but a 150B USD lawsuit against meta by the survivors was thrown out because of section 230 of the CDA makes them immune, and the dismissal was upheld by the 9th circuit. The court did not determine that that meta's behavior was harmless, just that the case was barred. At issue was poor moderation, and algorithmic amplification of genocidal messaging on the platform. Apparently facebook was repeatedly warned for years that they were contributing to enthnic hatred and voilence by amplifying false narratives and took no action.

nekusar 7 minutes ago | parent

Ideally, push the Hague into an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity and genocide, for Mark Fuckerberg, and associated C levels.

Ideally, after found guilty, an execution.

That would be a good start.

red_candle_wax 6 minutes ago | parent

Maybe we can just hit his little hideaways with one of those bunker buster bombs.

f6v 4 minutes ago | parent

Well, we have this whole organization that's supposed to prevent genocides. It obviously doesn't work. Let's be real.

WarmWash 52 minutes ago | parent

So is piracy good or bad?

jonathanstrange 42 minutes ago | parent

In my experience, real pirates have a strong code of ethics. I've never seen a pirate site that didn't at least say "buy it if you like it". Leechers are a different story, but to be fair most of them just don't have the money to buy the stuff they download.

To cut a long story short, I'd personally say pirating is bad if you have the money to buy it and you don't just pirate to try first, whereas if you don't have the money it's okay (permissible) and doesn't take away any sales.

TFNA 32 minutes ago | parent

That doesn't accord with my experience. I've been involved in academic book piracy since the early millennium, and there definitely was no "buy it if you like it" ideal. Virtually no one will spend the 100-400€ that a typical scholarly book costs except libraries. And since this was a community that reads heavily outside their research as well, once works of fiction started to be more heavily hosted on these servers, it came to seem a waste to ever actually spend money on media if you could just read it all for free -- nevermind that a lot of users were in the former USSR or the Third World where media was not available for sale locally even if you wanted to spend the money.

jameshart 27 minutes ago | parent

Ah yes, I heard about this ‘pirate code’.

Only I got the impression the Code is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules

AbhiDunna 18 minutes ago | parent

It depends on what’s being pirated and why. Someone who can’t afford a 200 euro textbook, or can’t buy it where they live, is in a different position from a company that downloads 200k books to build a commercial product. Individual piracy is a gray area. Doing it at scale for profit, with a legal team on standby and then deleting the evidence “due to all this litigation”, is much harder to defend. The ethics change a lot when the person doing it could easily have paid.

f6v 7 minutes ago | parent

Look, don't die on a hill for billionaires. I think it's good if someone gets a Hollywood movie or Disney TV show for free. But it's better to support that one author who self-published a useful book.

someothherguyy 36 minutes ago | parent

meta has issues with employees using its network to pirate things, or its just a good time to try to eat with the AI scraper assumption

https://torrentfreak.com/meta-pirated-adult-film-downloads-w...

xbar 21 minutes ago | parent

You wouldn't steal a book....

cyanydeez 17 minutes ago | parent

Its not stealing if its for private equity purposes.

lioeters 8 minutes ago | parent

It's fair use if it's done by corporations on a global scale.

AbhiDunna 13 minutes ago | parent

Everyone is arguing about whether piracy is good or bad, but that’s not what this case is about. It’s about whether the rules apply equally. A student who torrents a textbook risks a lawsuit. Meta, reportedly, torrented hundreds of thousands of books, had an employee delete his copy “due to all this litigation,” and is now arguing over which server logs it has to hand over. They could have licensed these books. The likely reason they didn’t is that the cost of getting caught is lower than the licensing fee. A court has already called the training fair use, but how the books were acquired is a separate question, and that’s where this should be decided. If an individual did this at scale, no one would call it a gray area.