Comment by AbhiDunna

Everyone is arguing about whether piracy is good or bad, but that’s not what this case is about. It’s about whether the rules apply equally. A student who torrents a textbook risks a lawsuit. Meta, reportedly, torrented hundreds of thousands of books, had an employee delete his copy “due to all this litigation,” and is now arguing over which server logs it has to hand over. They could have licensed these books. The likely reason they didn’t is that the cost of getting caught is lower than the licensing fee. A court has already called the training fair use, but how the books were acquired is a separate question, and that’s where this should be decided. If an individual did this at scale, no one would call it a gray area.