Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

ben_w•about 2 hours ago

A lot of people would be very pleased if this leads to Zuckerberg getting even the statutory minimum damages ($750?) on each infringement.

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.

gloxkiqcza•about 1 hour ago

For context, his net worth is ~$220 billion.

josefritzishere•about 1 hour ago

I would rather Zuckerberg do 6 months in jail and probation than fine Meta.

jmclnx•33 minutes ago

I agree, time to start handing out real punishments, I thing 6 months is way to small.

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.

karanbhangui•27 minutes ago

This comment could get its own DSM classification for how insane it is.

I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?

rpdillon•12 minutes ago

I'm gonna have to go dig up the link, but isn't there a guy that Nintendo basically has on indentured servitude for the rest of his life?

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...

surgical_fire•2 minutes ago

I would prefer a harsher punishment, but I would begrudgingly accept throwing him in jail for decades.

I always heard that criminals should be thrown in jail, it's time we started doing it to the real criminals.

AlotOfReading•17 minutes ago

The non-strawman way to interpret the parent comment is that they want them to be treated the same as normal copyright violators. Jail is a common result of (criminal) copyright prosecution, with 44% of convicted offenders being imprisoned, averaging 25 months [0].

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...

jacques_chester•11 minutes ago

There aren't enough things an executive can go to jail for.

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!

ginko•15 minutes ago

Is this controversial? Executives should be held liable, certainly moreso than just regular people sharing files.

Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

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