Comment by ben_w
20 hours ago
> 3000$ per book, split 50/50 between the author and publisher.
> This is peanuts.
If you consider it peanuts, I would like to sell you some books.
Remember that in this case, the crime wasn't for training on the data (that part was ruled to be legal!), this was the penalty just for pirating the books.
I get so tired by this.
Yes. It's not proportional to the crime. You are either deliberately or accidentally, and I'm too frustrated hearing this too often not to be biased it's the former, equating what is a large sum of money relative to your wallet and bank accounts and loan access and portfolios and whatever collection of financial impositions you can make to that of a company that has one person flying around the world influencing the future of billions of people on one planet over dinner and jokes.
Yes. $3000 is peanuts. People that own islands would use that to pay someone's bonus for a year if they liked their service, as a gift. A throwaway.
Fix your relative understanding of power and influence.
Fix your relative understanding of how much the average book makes.
It doesn't matter how much it makes. If the system finds that you've financially damaged someone, you aren't asked to just pay back the exact retail price of one unit. It can account for the overall damage to the owner, your scale, ability to pay, and the time and money wasted to get the money out of you. The penalty can be anything.
> You are either deliberately or accidentally, and I'm too frustrated hearing this too often not to be biased it's the former, equating what is a large sum of money relative to your wallet and bank accounts and loan access and portfolios and whatever collection of financial impositions you can make to that of a company that has one person flying around the world influencing the future of billions of people on one planet over dinner and jokes.
I'm not, but you are. Especially as you continue:
> Yes. $3000 is peanuts. People that own islands would use that to pay someone's bonus for a year if they liked their service, as a gift. A throwaway.
The penalty (well, settlement) for the (civil offence, not crime) isn't $3000 total, it's $1.5 billion total. (Previous poster wrote ">$1bn", true but implicitly rounding down the total).
The settlement *per book* is $3000. There were a lot of books, reportedly half a million distinct works, so the total was $1.5 billion.
You're looking at $3000 as if it's the penalty for all of it, not the penalty per book.
$3000 per book is entirely on-par with the per-infringement penalties when an individual does it, too.
“$3000 per book is entirely on-par with the per-infringement penalties when an individual does it, too.”
Three things to note. 1. As you said, copyright infringement is generally treated for each instance. This one-time payment would include a single use. Each training would be a separate infringement. And it could be argued that each use by a user of the model could be considered a separate infringement. 2. Generally copyright fines are increased if the persons doing the infringing action know what they are doing. Aka, ‘willful infringement.’ It’s hard to imagine companies like OpenAI were unaware of the possibility of their actions being considered infringement. 3. Often restitution of infringement includes money made by the infringer. So not simply, “your book is worth $3000.” But rather? “Your book is worth $3000 AND this company has derived an additional $50,000 of revenue from it.”
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It is not just a civil offence. It is potentially an organized crime.
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