Comment by throwawayffffas
6 months ago
So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated. They will have ceased and desisted.
6 months ago
So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated. They will have ceased and desisted.
I'm trying to find the quote, but I'm pretty sure the judge specifically said that going and buying the book after the fact won't absolve them of liability. He said that for the books they pirated they broke the law and should stand trial for that and they cannot go back and un-break in by buying a copy now.
Found it: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/federal-judge-rules-c...
> “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft,” [Judge] Alsup wrote, “but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
Is copyright in America different to Britain? There, it is legal to download books you don't own. Only distribution is a crime, which most torrenters break by seeding.
I think it's very similar in both countries, but you have got it wrong. Downloading a book without permission is copyright infringement in both countries, regardless of whether you distribute it.
In the UK it's a criminal offense if you distribute a copyrighted work with the intent to make gain or with the expectation that the owner will make a loss.
Gain and loss are only financial in this context.
Meaning that in both countries the copyright owner can sue you for copyright infringement.
What do you mean by 'it is legal'?
Do you mean:
A) It's not a criminal offence?
B) The copyright owner cannot file a civil suit for damages?
C) Something else?
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It's not a crime in the US, either, I believe, but you can certainly be sued in civil court for it.
They also argued that they in no way could ever actually license all the materials they ingested
I love this argument so much. "But judge, there's no way I could ever afford to buy those jewels, so stealing them must be OK."
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Did they really steal if they didn't deprive anyone of their copy? I don't think copying is theft.
It's copyright infringement, which is not theft, they're legally distinct in the eyes of the law. This is partly why the "you wouldn't download a car" copyright ads were so widely mocked.
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Agreed, the judge should avoid slang or even commonly accepted synonyms in an official ruling. The charge is not for theft.
Substitute infringement for theft.
They stole from the amount they would have legally paid to buy a copy from the copyright holder.
Think about it like sneaking into a movie theater and watch a movie without paying. The theater was going to play the movie anyway and, assuming it wasn't a packed theatre, I didn't deprive anyone else of their ability to watch. It's still theft because I'm getting something that costs money for free and depriving the theater of the money that they're owed.
It's fine that you think that way. But this is a discusion of the laws of the United States of America and ruling by American courts, not a discussion of your own legal theories.
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"Tell it to the Judge..."
You may not think it is but the law does.
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> So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated.
No, that doesn't undo the infringement. At most, that would mitigate actual damages, but actual damages aren't likely to be important, given that statutory damages are an alternative and are likely to dwarf actual damages. (It may also figure into how the court assigns statutory damages within the very large range available for those, but that range does not go down to $0.)
> They will have ceased and desisted.
"Cease and desist" is just to stop incurring additional liability. (A potential plaintiff may accept that as sufficient to not sue if a request is made and the potential defendant complies, because litigation is uncertain and expensive. But "cease and desist" doesn't undo wrongs and neutralize liability when they've already been sued over.)
> So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated.
For anyone else who wants to do the same thing though this is likely all they need to do.
Cutting up and scanning books is hard work and actually doing the same thing digitally to ebooks isn't labor free either, especially when they have to be downloaded from random sites and cleaned from different formats. Torrenting a bunch of epubs and paying for individual books is probably cheaper
Generally you don't want laws to work that way. You want to set the penalties so that they discourage violating the law.
Setting the penalty to what it would have cost to obey the law in the first place does the opposite.
That's for criminal laws where prosecutorial discretion can then (in principle) be used in borderline cases to prevent unjust outcomes.
If you give people a claim for damages which is an order of magnitude larger than their actual damages, it encourages litigiousness and becomes a vector for shakedowns because the excessive cost of losing pressures innocent defendants to settle even if there was a 90% chance they would have won.
Meanwhile both parties have the incentive to settle in civil cases when it's obvious who is going to win, because a settlement to pay the damages is cheaper than the cost of going to court and then having to pay the same damages anyway. Which also provides a deterrent to doing it to begin with, because even having to pay lawyers to negotiate a settlement is a cost you don't want to pay when it's clear that what you're doing is going to have that result.
And when the result isn't clear, penalizing the defendant in a case of first impression isn't just either, because it wasn't clear and punitive measures should be reserved for instances of unambiguous wrongdoing.
Statutory damages were written into the first federal copyright law in 1790, and earlier in state law (specified in Pounds because the dollar hadn't been invented yet).
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