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Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 24 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Let's do some math. Some searching suggests the average size of an e-book is about 3 MB. 82 TB means they pirated about 27 million e-books. At the rate of Russet's fine, that would come to damages of $2.2 trillion. So not more money than has ever is about 4x Meta's entire market cap.

I hope the book publishers sue Meta and end up owning Facebook and Instagram. Not that I expect one evil megacorp to inevitably fix all the ills of another. But it would be hard to make Facebook any worse than it currently is.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    This needs a theydidthemath comm to post to. 🙂

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I’m not sure how I feel just remaking all the things on the new thing. Nothing stopping you from doing it of course. And I can block it easily enough. I guess do what makes you happy.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Internet culture is a leaky thing. A major chunk of meme and comic formats where born in 4chan and they've been adopted virtually everywhere on the web despite coming from a place that takes a certain level of self hate to stomach for any length of time. Lemmy is functionally a clone of reddit right down to the logo similarity. Trying to claim that somehow it's a different unique corner of the web and exercise in futility.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    3Mb is mostly the cover art.

    The text is usually only 100-150kb. So if they only got text, it could be 20x higher.

    $44T, now we are talking about real money.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I mean, 4x the market cap of Meta, 80x, it makes little difference. The key is the book publishers should end up owning Meta. Again, I wouldn't expect them to necessarily turn Facebook into some revitalized utopia. But I think at least a bunch of stodgy old book publishers wouldn't be so overtly cartoonishly fascist at the very least.

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