Comment by callmeal
14 hours ago
>It was not okay for them, they had to pay one billion dollars.
Essentially peanuts compared to what they would have to pay to obtain the rights of everything they pirated.
14 hours ago
>It was not okay for them, they had to pay one billion dollars.
Essentially peanuts compared to what they would have to pay to obtain the rights of everything they pirated.
No. It's actually way more than what they would have paid if they legally obtained those books. The 1.5 billion dollars amount to $3000 per book.
Legally obtaining a book for reading it yourself is different from legally obtaining a book for copying and republishing/reselling. If I buy a book for $5 at a sale I can read it myself or even sell it for $10 on craigslist, but I can't scan it and make a million copies and sell each of those.
They aren't republishing or reselling. In fact, they buy huge amounts of books and then destroy them, which is better for the rights holders than to resell them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...
10 replies →
> obtain the rights of everything they pirated
They didn't just pirate those books...
If we assume on average $20 per legally obtained book, 1.5 billion dollars are enough for 75 million books. That's approximately every non-fiction book in existence.
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