Comment by ben_w
18 hours ago
> 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.”
> Each training would be a separate infringement.
False. Training was found to be a legitimate use. The liability was specifically, solely, for copyright infringement specifically due to getting the works in the first place, not training on those works.
> And it could be argued that each use by a user of the model could be considered a separate infringement.
No, it could not.
If this standard was applied to copyright infringement on BitTorrent, someone who helped share one file to 100 other users would get hit with 100 copyright infringement instances, not one.
> 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.
That's already accounted for when I said this was in the normal range for liability per copyright violation.
> 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.”
Depends on the details; however, as previously noted, the judge *explicitly noted* that training was not itself an offence, only the piracy to get the training data was. Any revenue derived from the offence had to be shown to be in the period between the offence and when they bought the same works, because they were found to be allowed to use those works in this manner.
Ok. For the people in the back:
If doing the bad thing is just a fine for one person and a life altering consequence for someone else, it is not a fair and equally distributed form of justice and is a gameable function needing to be fixed.
The caps don't help, and I don't care, unfortunately.
I don't even know what point you're trying to make. That it's fine they paid a billion dollars? So if they do it again, it's another billion? Oh well, guess I'm just not allowed to pirate things until I'm super wealthy. Or is it maybe the justice is being played out like it's supposed to? Oh, well, guess I better hope the system of governance that's being actively manipulated by the people that are breaking the same rules I am bound to suddenly and miraculously changes.
Like, I don't even detect a mote of "what they did is not ok."
Maybe you do think that and it's closer to you just trying to be careful about the letter of the law and you would also see to the justice system being fixed. I'd like that.
But you spending any time in your life to make this argument at all in their case is just goofy.
1 reply →
Exactly, and that mentality is hitting the first responders point again harder. I'll say it again.
$3000 because I stole a book and did something bad ruins my life, and could put me in a room where my personal freedoms are infringed. It is designed to disincentivize me from doing the bad thing.
What you (first responder) are defending is that if you just steal enough of them all at once, and then make enough money from it, you are able to pay the fee and not have your freedoms taken away to do it again, and profit again. This means objectively, there is no disincentive, so that "rule" does completely different things for completely different contexts, and the point is muddied by pretending that "well I paid the fee!" Is the point.
The point is to tell the thing doing the bad thing not to do the bad thing.
This is why I get so frustrated. People are so flipping blinding by dollars and whatabouts that it's just.. like I said, I have to believe for many people it's an inherent unacknowledged miss on what the point of a justice system and a law is, or it's a veiled defense for themselves knowing that, maybe, they would do the same if they could. I have met those people, and I do not want them in positions of power, or leadership.
> $3000 because I stole a book and did something bad ruins my life, and could put me in a room where my personal freedoms are infringed. It is designed to disincentivize me from doing the bad thing.
Repeat after me: One point five billion is more than three thousand.
> you are able to pay the fee and not have your freedoms taken away to do it again
You too are able to pay as many fees as you want. Three thousand varies from life-changing to a slap on the wrist, even for non-unicorn-corps.
That this is a bad thing, that personal judgements should scale with personal means rather than be statutory, is a broad problem with the politics of lawmakers and the legal system: it also applies to speeding and littering.
> The point is to tell the thing doing the bad thing not to do the bad thing.
Then you will be pleased to read what the judge wrote:
Specifically in that last paragraph:
Because guess what Anthropic decided, internally, all by itself? That's right, to not break the law.
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It is not just a civil offence. It is potentially an organized crime.
The actual case was literally pursued as a civil offence. "Potentially" is not a useful adjective.
The TLDR I've been given is that it's civil when the prosecution is a non-government entity (private person or company), and when the penalty is an injunction or a fine, and when the standard is "preponderance of the evidence".
Conversely, it's criminal when the prosecution is a government/when the sought penalty is imprisonment, and when the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt".