>and the DOJ has done nothing against the AI companies and their IP violating antics.

For good reason. Courts have so far ruled AI training is fair use, and it doesn't look likely to be overturned by the supreme court. Theres also the matter of some labs pirating books to get training data, which is illegal (they lost in civil court), but it's unclear whether that can be criminally prosecuted.

Courts have also ruled that sharing in P2P network is enough to get hit with 150k in statutory damages per shared work.

AI companies did quite a bit of uploading while e.g. getting Anna's archive over BitTorrent.

It's transformative. Not aimed at exact reproduction, so not in the scope of copyright law.

They participated in uploading the files as part of the downloading the torrent from other peers. Their use of the BitTorrent protocol to acquire these files would not have been transformative.

> They participated in uploading the files as part of the downloading the torrent from other peers.

Not necessarily. You can literally turn uploads off and leech torrents.

> They participated in uploading the files as part of the downloading the torrent from other peers.

Did they?

Are you sure?

Meta argued in court that yes, they did upload when torrenting

> Meta’s reasoning is straightforward. Anyone who uses BitTorrent to transfer files automatically uploads content to other people, as it is inherent to the protocol. In other words, the uploading wasn’t a choice, it was simply how the technology works.

https://torrentfreak.com/uploading-pirated-books-via-bittorr...

I wonder which murderer will use that argument: "it wasn't my choice to shoot the person, it's just intrinsic to the technology that when pulling the trigger, the pistol fires"

SUPER interesting!

Especially since it ISN’T an inherent part of a the protocol - just the default of most clients.

Wonder if TF skipping pointing that out was intentional!

No, only in some instances maybe, they were mostly leechers.

I think you misread. There is nothing transformative about bittorrent automatically sharing parts of a file you're downloading with your peers.

The supreme irony that they're now trying to peg distillation as illegal.

Hacking other companies is illegal as far as I understand.

1. OP specifically mentioned "IP violating antics", not hacking

2. All the hacking legislation (and criminal law in general) require proving intent, which so far as we can tell didn't exist in those cases. At best you can try some "reckless" or "negligent" angle, but that would a novel legal argument and would be risky to prosecute

> All the hacking legislation (and criminal law in general) require proving intent

No, they don't, see laws that make negligent behavior illegal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

But officer, I didn't mean for my autonomous bank vault busting robot to autonomously bust any bank vaults!

More like:

  Your Honour, it is indeed correct that during testing of our new missile to see if it could correctly function in the military role of seeking out and then breaking through a blast door, the targeting system locked onto the nearby bank vault. We only found out where this particular missile went after the bank contacted us for help in investigating who might have been responsible for the new hole where their door used to be, and if any of our other equipment might help stop such weapons in the future.

  We did not expect the test missile to be so effective.

  We have contacted independent researchers to help us investigate what went wrong here.

  We also agree that we made a lot of mistakes, and that we should have had better tests in place even at the time.

  However, we also assert that even if we had had all of those tests in place, the specific actions taken by our "autonomously seek-and-destroy-blast-door" munition would likely have circumvented all the things we could have, and should have, already had in place.

Okay, and? If anything, the Swartz case was even more direct fair use. There's very little to use JSTOR for which isn't some form of teaching, scholarship, or research!

Clearly the fact that the end-use is (possibly) fair use isn't the only thing that matters.

It wouldn't be ruled fair use in a sane society without bribery and lobbying with competent technologically savvy law interpreters.