Court documents show Meta torrented terabytes of pirated books to train AI models, and employees wouldn't stop emailing each other about it: 'Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right'

Corporate America maybe. Meta is an international company and there are also a lot of international publishing companies.

I could definitely see this leading to a lawsuit in other parts of the world. This is unquestionably a violation of the Berne Convention.

https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/

The exception is when corporations mess with other corporations have the means to sue them into the ground.

81.7 terabytes of books
('more than', but we'll use this figure)

➗ divided by ➗

1 mebibyte per work
(the samples of digital novels i used here to estimate size per work were around 500kb each; i took that and doubled it)

✖️ multiplied by ✖️

$250,000 maximum fine (per infringement)

🟰 equals 🟰

$19.48 trillion maximum fine.

If they get sued and it gets to the discovery phase, they might have to actually provide all training data used, and I'm almost certain there is a lot more stolen content in there. But sadly, it will probably not come to that, because they have money.

It's a win-win either way.

Although I'm almost rooting for Meta just so that copyright is weakened at all. The damage copyright has done to culture and science might even exceed Meta's damage to society.

Nintendo is going to have to send out more than just Luigi. There's a lot of plumbing to be done!

Believe it or not, straight to jail

Me too but with movies and TV shows