Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: “Torrents are ok, as long as you don’t seed” joins the ranks of “stealing is ...
“Torrents are ok, as long as you don’t seed” joins the ranks of “stealing is ok, as long as you don’t resell what you’ve stolen”, “buying drugs is ok, as long as you aren’t the one selling them”, and “premarital penetration is ok, as long as you don’t move once you’re inside (because god is obviously a reptile whose sight is only sensible to movement)”.
And don’t get me wrong, I’ve been loudly supporting piracy for years (as long as all the business models out there are unethical, and all rules are done by those who profit from somebody else’s work, it’s ok to pirate and then send money directly to the creators).
But hearing such contradictory excuses from Meta is one the most enraging things I can imagine.
We aren’t talking of a private user who wants to watch a movie that would otherwise require signing up yet another for-life streaming subscription.
We aren’t talking of someone like Aaron Swartz who made it a life mission to share knowledge to the widest available public (and btw he downloaded 1000x less stuff than what Meta is alleged to have downloaded from Z-Library, was harshly convicted to decades in jail, and took on his own life).
No, we’re talking of one of the top 5 valuable companies in the world, a business that is so disgustingly swimming in revenue money that they could have solved the problem of fairly compensating creators many times over, downloading terabytes of pirated content to feed their ML model so that they could permanently put out of business all the creators that authored the content that they illegally downloaded, and then coming up with an excuse like “well at least I didn’t share it back, it’s not a crime when you are a selfish jerk until the end”.
To me this goes beyond any imaginable threshold of sociopathy and beyond any imaginable definition of parasite and cancer.
Meta must be eradicated from this world.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-defends-its-vast-book-torrenting-were-just-a-leech-no-proof-of-seeding/
And don’t get me wrong, I’ve been loudly supporting piracy for years (as long as all the business models out there are unethical, and all rules are done by those who profit from somebody else’s work, it’s ok to pirate and then send money directly to the creators).
But hearing such contradictory excuses from Meta is one the most enraging things I can imagine.
We aren’t talking of a private user who wants to watch a movie that would otherwise require signing up yet another for-life streaming subscription.
We aren’t talking of someone like Aaron Swartz who made it a life mission to share knowledge to the widest available public (and btw he downloaded 1000x less stuff than what Meta is alleged to have downloaded from Z-Library, was harshly convicted to decades in jail, and took on his own life).
No, we’re talking of one of the top 5 valuable companies in the world, a business that is so disgustingly swimming in revenue money that they could have solved the problem of fairly compensating creators many times over, downloading terabytes of pirated content to feed their ML model so that they could permanently put out of business all the creators that authored the content that they illegally downloaded, and then coming up with an excuse like “well at least I didn’t share it back, it’s not a crime when you are a selfish jerk until the end”.
To me this goes beyond any imaginable threshold of sociopathy and beyond any imaginable definition of parasite and cancer.
Meta must be eradicated from this world.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-defends-its-vast-book-torrenting-were-just-a-leech-no-proof-of-seeding/