I see a silver lining here: If Meta and/or Google's lawyers can successfully demonstrate in court that piracy does not cause harm, it would nullify copyright infringement laws, making piracy legal for everyone.
You know, I actually don't think so. Gabe Newell famously said piracy is a distribution problem, so a court would likely have to acknowledge inadequate distribution methods hampering AI development. This gives great precedence for consumer piracy, especially for old media that isn't sold anymore. It may not be a criminal offence if best efforts aren't being made by the original copyright holders to distribute.
Meta isn't arguing that, though. They are arguing their use is one of the loopholes in copyright law where they aren't liable for the damages. Even them succeeding would only demonstrate that LLM training is transformative, and would not impact the common uses of piracy for average folk.
I would also be stunned if they make that argument. There is almost undeniably some number of dollars Google/Meta would have paid for the data. It may be less than publishers would want, but I don't anyone would actually believe Google/Meta saying "if the data wasn't free, we just wouldn't have done AI".
Yup. As a full on IP abolitionist, I'm super excited by this. Information wants to be free. LLM providers training on things that folks don't want them to is a feature, not a bug. The tears of those mad about this are delicious and will ultimately be drowned out in the rain. Luddites and Copyright Trolls should be annihilated from the body politic with extreme prejudice.
