Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
torrentfreak.com387 points by askl 14 hours ago
387 points by askl 14 hours ago
Some of us are old enough to remember when the RIAA sued children for downloading Metallica albums on filesharing networks. They sued for $100,000 per song, an absurd amount when you consider that even stealing a physical album would amount only to around $1 per song. What was bizarre was that courts took the figure seriously, even if they typically settled cases for around $3,000, still around 30x actual damages. The legal maximum was $150,000 per infringement: when a staffer leaked an early cut of the Wolverine movie, the studio could only sue for that much.
Remember that Metallica band members played an active driving role in those lawsuits against their own underage fans. It wasn't just the RIAA / record company organizations behaving cruelly, it was Metallica themselves. Fuck Metallica.
Another person who I remember really coming out as a villain in that era was Gene Simmons from KISS: "Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars."[1]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/10/kiss-frontman-we...
Man back when ars was good. Feels like you're pouring salt into a wound posting that link.
It's even more egregious after watching interviews of a young Lars bragging about trading bootleg cassette tapes.
IIRC, Dave Grohl actually gave a lot of shit to Metallica, claiming that it would be one thing if this were some indie band selling cassettes having their music stolen, but it's another when multi-millionaires are crying that they aren't getting extra money.
Found it: https://youtu.be/Yy45qY9c49k
Killed Napster and forced them overseas to create one of the most toxic streaming platforms for music the world has ever seen. Spotify. Sean Parker used to be cool…
how they were able to recover from that is beyond me.
They didn't. I haven't bought a Metallica album since the black album. That was a decade earlier, because everything since sucked, but as I got older I thought about maybe expanding my tastes. I avoided Metallica specifically for their disrespect of their fans.
Did they not? Seems like they're still quite popular, and I knew people in HS (for reference, late 2010s to early '20s) that were big into the band.
Additionally, looking at Google Trends[0], it seems they peaked in 21st-century online popularity in 2008 and had another notable uptick in 2017.
I think a lot of us want the assholes to have suffered real consequences for their behavior, but want is different from did.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
I think they've got some ineffable qualities, and frankly there's lots of other genres where people might decide to give them a listen...
Which is really just a roundabout way of saying I think Apocalyptica did a lot to help refresh them in the modern zeitgeist (Yes I know it was older, but I remember youtube videos causing it to enter at least my and other's conscious space...)
Yeah, they're popular like Ariana Grande is after the Manchester bombing. But just about everything they released after the Black album is kind of lame. The Budapest tickets sold out pretty fast, but they're still lame regardless if people go to their concerts. Compared to Depeche Mode and other bands that only get better with age, Metallica just play the same old songs or worse. And they're not a cult band like Death or The Sisters of Mercy either.
But they kind of are (a cult band). Most people in the world know Metalica while hardly anyone ever heard any of the Sisters Of Mercy's tracks.
Normal people don't care- they just enjoy a ballad or two.
I've long since learnt to separate an artist from their art- a fair share of the musicians, actors, directors etc aren't really a decent bunch
Not really, they missed that chance when they released Load and Reload and who knows what they did after that. I got fed up with their foray into commercial music and moved on to prog metal and other more interesting stuff. If they had stopped after the black album or continued to release quality works, then things would be different, but they chose money, whining, lawyers and drunk teenagers as an audience. They became lame and popular, which excludes being a cult band. Cult bands are not very popular in fact, as you have yourself pointed out.
Most of their fans didn't know and probably still don't. In my admittedly limited exposure (N=3 or 4), folks I know that were informed on Metallica's behavior in the Napster age that have since purchased anything from Metallica is zero.
[flagged]
Why are all forums inundated with this ridiculous nonsense? They are "MAGA"? How so? Are people who follow MAGA typically anti-piracy or something? Bizarre.
It [calling anything you don't like "maga"] is political in-group signalling of a tribal ideology that also serves the dual purpose of destroying the meaning of language. Categorically inappropriate for HN - flag it and move on.
Similar to the way people use "woke".
Quite similar. I guess serving largely the same purpose that "alt-right" used to.
However it's important to note that "woke" at least has legitimate (if politically contentious) meaning outside of its broad misuse as a sort of slur. The other two terms don't have that AFAIK.
The case of "maga" specifically strikes me as a spiteful attempt to misappropriate the descriptor (vaguely similar to winnie the pooh) whereas the rise of the other two seems organic.
Or it's just going to be a generic term for play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Surely in a thread like this we can acknowledge the futility of things like Xerox trying to maintain their strict definition of the word xerox.
The ideology has an inherent toxicity to it, along with a self own, doubling down on mistakes that would harm you and the others in longer run, embracing silly ideas and a general disregard for niceties. Would have been nice if they didn’t hurt their own fans like that could be simply phrased as ‘being MAGA’
I still can't listen to a Metallica song on the radio without feeling a bit sour. I wasn't a die hard superfan or anything, but their songs were pretty good. It really didn't help that they had cultivated this tough guy image and then turned into total whiners about piracy.
I became a super fan for a brief second during the Napster days, that’s literally what got me into metal in the first place. Decades later and I’m still soured on them too. Napster days were so good for music discovery. I mean, they’re better now with all these algos, obviously, but it was weirdly fun to download a track with tons of random strings in the name and end up with some parody Weird Al track and that’s how you discovered something new.
It all went downhill after Metallica '91. Cover for Whiskey in the Jar, come on. It's okay when everyone is drunk I guess, otherwise just litsten to the Dubliners' version or Thin Lizzy's.
Not that surprising considering that James Hetfield has no qualms about his music being used for literal torture.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo
At least it brought us some fun Flash animations as a result, in the form of Metallicops.
So, does this mean that people can simply argue in court now (if they were to be prosecuted for downloading media via bittorrent) that it is fair use if they used it to train a local model on their machine?
People could always simply argue in court that their torrenting was free use.
If you're just some nobody representing yourself instead of an expensive lawyer acting on behalf of a large company, maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.
> maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.
The thing everybody ignores about this is context.
Suppose you upload a copy of a work to someone else over the internet for <specific reason>. Is it fair use? That has to depend on the reason, doesn't it? Aren't there going to be some reasons for which the answer is yes?
The "problem" here is that the reason typically belongs to the person downloading it. Suppose you're willing to upload a copy to anyone who has a bona fide legitimate fair use reason. Someone comes along, tells you that they have such a reason and you upload a copy to them. If they actually did, did you do anything wrong? What did you do that you shouldn't have done? How is this legitimate fair use copy supposed to be made if not like this?
But then suppose that they lied to you and had some different purpose that wasn't fair use. Is it you or them who has done something wrong? From your perspective the two cases are indistinguishable, so then doesn't it have to be them? On top of that, they're the one actually making the copy -- it gets written to persistent storage on their device, not yours.
It seems like the only reason people want to argue that it's the uploader and not the non-fair-use downloader who is doing something wrong is some combination of "downloading is harder to detect" and that then the downloader who actually had a fair use purpose would be able to present it and the plaintiffs don't like that because it's not compatible with their scattershot enforcement methods.
> It seems like the only reason people want to argue that it's the uploader
Well there's also the issue of enablement. If you're overly enthusiastic to turn a blind eye to illegal conduct you end up being labeled an accomplice. But of course that would seem to apply to Facebook here in equal measure.
Sadly, in many courts, when it comes to the corporate and the government, the judges rule on the axiom, "Show me your lawyer first, and I will rule, rather than show me the law, and I will rule".
It has been often said that a man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.
Judges often roll this line out, but in criminal court I've seen some defendants get epic deals by going without a lawyer [0] since absolutely nobody in the justice system wants to deal with the guy who has no idea what he's doing and is going to make the most bizarre arguments about being a sovereign citizen. So they give them a really low offer and get them on their way as quickly as possible.
[0] I don't like to say "represent yourself." I once angered a judge by pointing out that you can't "represent yourself, you are yourself."
Unless I'm mistaken, the relevant copyright laws aren't limited to enforcement when money exchanged hands.
No, but it does matter how much money the alleged infringer has.
Property law is mostly concerned with protecting the rich from the poor, so when a rich person violates the property of a poor person, the courts can't allow the inversion of purpose and will create something called a "legal fiction," which is basically the kind of bending-over-backwards that my children do to try to claim that they didn't break the rules, actually, and if you look at it in a certain way they were actually following the rules, actually.
This sort of thing used to be heavily downvoted on HN. How the site has changed in the last year.
Yes, the VC-backed startup ecosystem that was the origin of this website does rely on propagating the myth that we live in a meritocracy to ensure it has enough cheap labor to build prototypes that its anointed few can acquire at rock bottom pricing. But we've been through enough cycles of it now that we've started seeing the patterns.
> rock bottom pricing
Value is not set by what you put into it, it is set by what people are willing to pay for it.
Browsing in a thrift store can be very enlightening!
> Value is not set by what you put into it, it is set by what people are willing to pay for it.
Is a human life literally worthless, because they never pay to be born?
The map is not the territory, the price is not the value.