Security through obscurity isn’t security.

There goes my excuse for not giving up and just paying for Unraid.

The last time I even remember private trackers being taken down was in the days of Oink.UK and What.CD.

Oink was shut down in 2007 and What was shut down in 2016, both mostly because they had grown so big they were hard to ignore. A lot of modern sites keep an upper limit on the accounts they allow to prevent too much growth and attracting attention.

Hell, I remember baconBits having an upper limit of less than 10,000 accounts. Once that limit was reached, you couldn’t even send out invites.

Also, public trackers that were huge like RARBG survived until finances shut them down, via COVID and the war in Ukraine, they were never taken down forcibly, and they were massive and widely used.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQBWGo7pef8

This is where I first remember hearing this tale, in this old Schoolhouse Rock parody that was in protest of the War in Iraq.

Precedent only applies equally if we are able to prove the same in court as Meta did. Are you going to need petabytes of pirated data to train your AI? Can you afford a team of top quality lawyers to fight your case and prove you were training a small locally-hosted AI at home? Do you think Meta, of all companies, really is fighting for you to be able to do the same as them? You will still get taken to court, you will still have to fight your case, “precedent” isn’t an automatic get out of jail free card. Do you have the money to fight massive copyright holders with endless money? Of course you don’t, none of us do.

Just fuckin with ya. Those are all valid gripes. I guess I got in on the scene way early through invites from friends and so I’ve hardly ever had to go through any interview process. I think the only place I “interviewed” was baconbits and it wasn’t really an interview since I mostly just shared evidence of good ratio on other trackers with long-lived accounts. I’ve had an account in good standing on Cinemageddon for… 18 years as of next month. Getting over that initial hump made it pretty easy to get in with good standing, and most decent trackers aren’t that hard to get good ratio on.

I just want to say thanks for reminding me to play The Stanley Parable to get the Go Outside achievement. I beat it by 6 years! I hadn’t played it in 11 years!

There isn’t a good winner in this, both outcomes suck, but one slightly less than the other. If Meta wins, it will not trickle down to regular people’s usage of bittorrent being considered fair use, I can guarantee you that. If the copyright holders win, the outcomes still sucks, but at least large corporations will be held to the same standards as regular people instead of having another exception carved out for corporations to be able to do what is considered a crime for regular people.

There isn’t a movement to change copyright like their used to be. There isn’t a viable North American Pirate Party. Those days are gone, and have been for a long time. I remember the movement and how big it was for a while. We never got mainstream acceptance or appeal and we all started getting old and young people stopped paying attention for the most part.

Like I said, I’d rather copyright law be changed, but that’s not what will happen here. You don’t get new laws crafted out of court case wins and losses, that’s not how this works, laws are crafted in congress.

Meta is running all this on the claim that they need this to train their AI, which is all fine and good, but them winning won’t make it so I can make the same claim if I get caught pirating. Why? Because the copyright lawyers will argue reasonably that I didn’t pirate enough data to build an AI and so I can’t be held to the same standard as Meta, who absolutely needed thousands of terabytes of data to train theirs. The scales are totally different and the scale of their operation is part of their argument, that because of the scale of their AI, that there’s no way they could conceivably train it without going broke paying copyright holders. If I am caught pirating a 1/10000th of the same data as they are, the copyright holders will claim, very easily, that I cannot possibly be building the same kind of AI that Meta is building because I would need way more data for that, and that I must be held to account because I must not be actually using it for AI. People like you and me can’t afford a team of high profile lawyers to argue our cases, and so we will lose, precedent simply won’t apply to us.

Meta winning will just make it so there’s another avenue for corporations to do whatever the fuck they want while people like you and me still have to follow draconian absurd copyright laws. Laws are made in congress, and copyright length can only be changed by bills in congress becoming law. The outcome of this court case is bad either way but it is marginally less bad for people like us to at least have corporations held to the same standard we are.

EDIT:

Final note, even if copyright law does get changed in congress, it will be because groups like OpenAI and Meta will lobby the government to change it, and they will not lobby for regular people to get the same rights because they don’t want regular people building their own AIs. Like I said, both outcomes here suck ass, but these giant corporations are not and never will be fighting for people like you and I to have reasonable fair use laws. They will lobby for them to be able to do it, once again, based on their sheer scale, so nobody else can compete or make truly open products in their own home. They want ownership over the process, they won’t send lobbyists in to help regular people, they send lobbyists in to help themselves.

This applies doubly so to Meta, if you know anything about Zuckerberg or the company, you’d know out of everyone he is ruthless and will do absolutely anything to crush nascent competition.

*laughs in private tracker

You repeating that I am cheering them on does not make it true. Get some reading comprehension. I repeat, you’re being obtuse.

Dude, I have been promoting copyright law being changed and being shortened for 25 fucking years.

Do you even know who Rufus Pollock is or anything about his research into copyright lengths? Because I was around when that shit was published. I hosted DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album on Grey Tuesday as a fuck you to the Beatles copyright holders since the Grey Album should have been considered fair use as it was released for free with no profit at all. I was part of the Kopimi collective.

Not wanting corporations to get a pass while we all get fucked is not the same thing. You’re not being mean, you’re being obtuse.

What kind of “better law” do you think will come out of this? That regular people like us will be able to share freely?

You think that the law being applied on poor people but not on the wealthy is a healthy way to get a better law?

Get the fuck real and nobody is asking for the copyright cabal to win as much as we are saying “look, if this is the how the law is going to be applied, apply it evenly, don’t just fuck over poor people but give the wealthy a pass.”

And poor people who don’t have the weight and money of Meta aren’t going to be able to prove that they need the same amount of data to train an LLM so they probably will still have the law held against them. Get fucking real man.

What country do you think you live in? One where laws are applied evenly or rationally? Or one where fascists have taken over the god damned government? Because guess what it’s the latter and the laws are effectively meaningless for the wealthy but still held against the poor. Sure, if that’s what you want, go for it, but it damn sure won’t suddenly get us better laws or let regular people torrent without worry. Congress has been deadlocked for decades and does nothing but hurt common people and give corporations a ticket to do whatever and you think better laws will come out of this? Seriously, once again, get fucking real.

Literally the first thing I said was in regards to more sensible copyright making this all a moot point but you do you.

The only reason Meta needs to get it is because it’s entirely hypocritical to all the dirt poor people who couldn’t afford these kind of lawyers. It doesn’t make the current legal status right or correct. It’s just a slap in the face to someone like Swartz who died over far less.

I would rather copyright be amended but sadly that’s less likely to happen here.

I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. Musk never wanted to do anything about the bots, he just wanted to make sure they were parroting his chosen propaganda. He really should lose his shirt over the fact that he purposefully devalued Twitter before purchase by screaming about the bot problem he never intended to fix, but claimed he did.

1. Shorter and more reasonable copyright lengths would make this a moot point because then there would sufficient literature in the public domain to pull from.

2. These kind of charges are what put the Pirate Bay admins in prison and caused Aaron Swartz to kill himself because of a threat of lifetime in prison. The claim that they did this either with the goal of profit or actually successful profit and that this was a serious crime. Neither TPB or Swartz at that point in time had ever moved as much data as Meta has for these claims, nor did they ever have the profit or possibility of profit Meta aims to make from their AI offerings.

3. Now Meta is claiming they’ve profited so hard you can’t possibly hold them accountable.

It will be the biggest “fuck you” in history to anyone ever hit with civil charges for piracy in the early 2000s, let alone the TPB admins and Swartz, if they let this go. Which means they probably will because in America, apparently if you crime hard enough and big enough they stop putting you in prison and start patting you on the back and calling it good business sense.

Arthur knows wazzup.

Master Chef*

Oh I guess those guys from the Pirate Bay are in the clear and we can undo their prison sentences then!

1. Copyright should be a much shorter, more reasonable length, and then this whole issue would be a moot point because there would more than enough in the public domain for the corporations to train their AI while also not restricting access to individuals and open source projects to do the same.

2. The real issue at hand is that corporations like Facebook have literally billions at their disposal to fight this in court. The Pirate Bay admins did not, despite being charged with profiting wildly off their media sharing site. Facebook has arguably made so much more off of their AI offerings than the admins of the tiny Pirate Bay team could have dreamed of. For fucks sake Peter Sunde’s username was “brokep” which I always assumed stood for “Broke Peter” as in “Peter has no money.”

3. We have yet to see if the courts in the USA will make this a hypocritical outcome where small players like the Pirate Bay who legitimately did not make that much money went to prison, Aaron Schwartz was threatened with life in prison and committed suicide, but somehow it will be okay for giant corporations to do because they made so much money doing it. It’s definitely possible, America feels like a country where as long as you do the crime big enough, it stops being treated as a crime and instead people pat you on the back and reward for criming so hard you broke the justice system and instead it just gets labeled “good business sense.”

Well for one she’s a physicist, not a biologist or psychologist, and you can find plenty of threads online where people are pointing out that she is cherry picking her data, and seems to pretend that numerous other studies on the subject simply don’t exist.

Also, the person I originally responded to claimed:

She does it for the field is theoretical physics, the field she knows.

Well, shocker, she totally does it for other shit she has no relevant background in, like transgender studies, and feels like she has all the knowledge at her fingertips while conveniently ignoring other research.

I don’t need to watch it to understand that conflating academia with communism is fuck-stupid and that privatizing science is a fuck-stupid solution to academia’s very real problems.

Also other folks here are pointing out she rejects science she doesn’t like when it comes to transgender science, for example.

As I said elsewhere, she’s bringing real “you’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole” energy.

Oh so she’s a TERF, too? That tracks…