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Discussion (21 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
> Authors have sued AI companies for copyright infringement before - and lost.
So, basically nothing will come out of this
The previous infringement case with Anthropic said that while training an AI was transformative and not itself an infringement, pirating works for that purpose still was definitely infringement all by itself. The settlement was $1.5bn, so close to $3k for each of the 500k they pirated, so if Zuckerberg pirated "millions" (plural) it is quite plausible his settlement could be $6bn.
If this was you or me, we would be in prison for decades and have a fine in the millions. Time for these people to feel consequences.
As someone said, they will probably settle for around 6 billion, that is the same as say a $100 fine for us.
I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?
Ah, found it:
>In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison having served 14 months of a 40-month sentence. Good behaviour reduced time behind bars, but now his options are limited. For a while he was crashing on a friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions, which he needs to ease chronic pain, were costing hundreds of dollars every week, and he didn’t have a job. And soon, he would need to start sending cheques to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m (£11.5m), and he’s probably going to spend the rest of his life paying it back.
I'm not even a tiny bit supportive, but there is precedent.
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/feb/01/the-man-who-ow...
I always heard that criminals should be thrown in jail, it's time we started doing it to the real criminals.
Now, I personally find the idea of imprisoning people for copyright offenses horrific, but I don't think it's remotely insane that someone else might come to that conclusion, given that we broadly accept it as a society.
[0] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
Fines don't do anything to deter bad behavior. Either:
* The company pays
* They pay and the company mysteriously increases next year's comp / grants a "loan" / etc
* D&O insurer pays
In all three cases the money comes out of the shareholders' hides. It provides zero personal deterrence. The payoff matrix, as seen by a sociopath, makes it rational to always defect against the common good.
The only punishment that can really focus attention is physical imprisonment in a facility they can't choose.
SOX did this for financial reporting and gee shucks it turned out executives can follow the law after all!
I know there's a complaint that AI can verbatim repeat that work. But so can human savants. No one is suing human savants for reading their books.
Producing copyrighted material, of course. Training on copyrighted material... I just don't see it.
EDIT: Making a perfectly valid point, but it's unpopular, so down I go.
Suppose they did, and some guy was filling stadiums regularly to hear him recite an entire audio book. That would probably get the attention of someone's lawyers.
If it's illegal for AIs it should be illegal for humans, too. Is that really what you're arguing? It should be illegal for savants to read books?
Read a book, that's fine. Write a book, that's fine. Read a book and then write a book that is 99.9% the same as the book that you read and sell it for profit without a license from the original author, that's infringement.