It’s not Meta vs us, but opensource vs Google and Openai.

I never said it’s Meta vs us. It’s Meta vs (in this particular case) the book publishing industry. You can’t reduce the whole situation to open source vs closed source, there’s other “axes” at play here as well.

They are being sued for copyright infringement when it’s clearly highly transformative

They downloaded the entire Libgen and more. Going by the traditional explanations of piracy, that’s like stealing several hundred bookstores worth of books all at once, and then claiming it’s alright because your own writing is not plagiarised from any of the books you’ve stolen. (Piracy is not the same as actual stealing of course, but countless people have been being legally bullied and ruined with that logic.) Meta also got its data from Internet Archive; unless they only obtained their materials that are public domain or under a similar license, they’ve obtained a lot of material that IA has been sentenced for allowing unlimited access to back in 2020 (if you’ve followed the Hachette v. Internet Archive case). The brainfucking conclusion of your and Facebook’s case is that using illegal services is perfectly legal as long as you sufficiently transform the results of the illegal activity.

The rules are fine as is

Actually they’re not. Copyright law is insanely restrictive, and I don’t think you’ve dealt much with media if you think it’s fine (but I don’t wish to delve into this further as it’s beyond the scope of discussion).

Meta isn’t the one trying to change them

Of course they’re not trying to change them, that’s the point, they will get away with breaking them while being perfectly fine with other actors not being able to do so.

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If the existence of open source LLMs hinges on the benevolence of one of the few most cancerous tech companies in the world, maybe they’re not really worth it?

This isn’t about “heroes” and “villains”. Facebook has been and has stayed the “villain”, they’ve done something colossally illegal that any mere mortal would be sued to death for (by an another “villainous” instance, the media system that has made piracy a necessity in the first place), and they’re hoping to get away with it simply on technicalities and by having more money for better lawyers. Rules are rules, if you don’t like them maybe Facebook should try to change them (and not just for themselves, but for the rest of us too)?

Meta did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment and has maintained throughout the litigation that AI training on LibGen was “fair use.”

When I upload a single half century old photo to Wikipedia, I have to fill out a relatively complicated form proving that it meets “fair use” standards. Internet Archive got legally fucked for allowing people to read their book scans without restriction for a while. And now these absolute cunts have the gall to defer to “fair use”! I really wonder if the same authors and publishing houses who sued IA will do anything about this.