> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.
But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future.
That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract with taxi medallion holders. It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation. In the same way, it was faster for Anthropic to load up their models with un-DRM'd PDFs and ePUBs from wherever instead of licensing them publisher by publisher.
> It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation
And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel. Now you don't even have to use Uber in many of these places because taxis had to compete - they otherwise never would have stopped pulling the "credit card reader is broken" scam, taking long routes on purpose, and started using tech that made them more accountable to these things as well as harder for them to racially profile passengers. (They would infamously pretend not to see you if they didn't want to give you service back when you had to hail them with an IRL gesture instead of an app..)
i dont know that its such a great thing in the end. Uber/Lyft is 50-100% more expensive now than taxis were before. Theyre entrenched in different ways.
Idk how it is in the US but in eastern Europe that's only true if surge is on and even so considering how shitty the quality of service was before Uber it's fine.
And it’s still shitty. Uber/Bolt is like on par with 90s taxis. At least here there was a short attempt to make things better in early 2010s with nicer cars and trying to force drivers to be nicer. But then it was „disrupted“.
I far, far, far prefer Uber (or Lyft, in the US) wherever I am, over whatever local taxi service there is. Yes, the quality of cars varies a lot. Yes, you never know if you're going to get a quiet driver or a way-too-talkative one.
But I know what I'm going to pay up-front, can always pay with a credit card (which happens automatically without annoying post-trip payment), the ride is fully tracked, and I can report issues with the driver that I have an expectation will actually be acted upon. And when I'm in another country where there are known to be taxis that scam foreigners, Uber is a godsend.
Yes, pre-Uber taxis were expensive and crappy, and even if Uber is expensive now, it's not crappy; it's actually worth the price. And I'm not convinced Uber is even that expensive. We always forget to account for inflation... sure, we might today say, "that ride in a taxi used to cost $14, but in an Uber it costs $18". But that ride in a taxi was 15 years ago.
If you think that Uber deal was not thought out well it didn't get a chance when the drivers became AI autonomous and hacked the old drivers out of car. Then as they threw out the driver police hit there lights and let the AI go with a warning for throwing trash out but us passengers got raped by a feeldown seizure of mess to ride with the crazy driver not paid to controlled substances felony party too other passengers. So in response to nontraffic citation and no evidance because self incriminating with forced treatment to more meds but not allowed? What a choice red pill or six blue pills all illegal to have.
The disruption worked in most cities I use uber in. It’s far more trustworthy to use uber.
Uber did a great job convincing lay people that taxis were ripoffs and they were a good deal. For some time that was probably true.
Now, I see people at the airport walk over to the pickup lot, joining a crowd of others furiously messing with their phones while scanning the area for presumably their driver.
All the while the taxis waiting immediately outside the exit door were $2 more expensive, last time I checked.
Uber didn't have to convince anyone, taxis were ripoffs. It didn't even have to always do with money. Taxis asked people where they were going and drove off if it wasn't far enough was a significant issues. Taxis not picking up black people. Many taxis in my town were dirty and and the drivers were jerks or creepy or both. With protections built into law and no competition the industry didn't have to even try to cater to the customer.
The taxi industry sealed it's own death warrant a long time ago. Ride sharing services solved a real problem at the right time. If that cost a bit more, it was well worth it. I won't take a taxi now unless I am forced to.
In NYC, Vegas, and a few other places I take taxis because they're dense and work well there.
Uber was a godsend for everyone living outside of like 4 metro areas in the US.
It helped that they started in places like San Francisco, where the taxi cartel was so absurdly terrible that you'd win fans just by showing up.
I lived in SF when Uber started. We used to call Veteran's Cab because they were the only company that wouldn't ditch on the way to pick you up, but it was completely normal to wait more than an hour for a cab in the dark hinterlands of 24th and Dolores or the industrial wasteland of 2nd and Folsom. An hour during which you had to be ready to jump as soon as the car arrived. Everybody had at least one black-car driver's cell number for downtown use because if they happened to be free, you could at least get picked up.
Uber would have had a religious following of fanpersons even if all they'd done was an estimated pickup time that was accurate to within 20 minutes.
Where I am, the taxi from the airport is about $5 more expensive during off peak, but it can be $20 cheaper during peak hours. I always take the taxi since it's right there, but I usually check the price on Lyft or Uber just to compare.
I know how much my ride will be and I know it doesn't vary based on what happens along the way. L
That's funny - ride fares change, and only in an Uber have I been kicked out of the car "because the app crashed" in the middle of an abandoned road, or had a very intoxicated person pick me up, or try to drive recklessly in hazardous conditions.
I happily pay a premium for none of these things again.
Depending on the country, they are paid more fairly as well, are insured etc.
The Taxi mafia had to go but Uber and co. are still questionable benefactors.
Not at any airport I've been to recently. I've never seen lines of taxis waiting at any airport in the last few years. There are empty taxi slots. People hail the taxi using an app and then wait for it to show up. Just like Lyft/Uber.
I mean, that seems pretty unfair, no, giving one set of transportation companies an arbitrary advantage over another? This sort of thing is exactly why Uber started in the first place: because taxis had unfair monopolistic advantages for no particular reason, and gave customers a poor experience, because they knew they didn't have to do better to keep their jobs.
I have no idea what I'm going to get with those taxis waiting immediately outside the exit door. Even in my home country, at the airport next to my city, I have no idea. I know exactly what I'm getting with an Uber/Lyft, every time. That's valuable to me.
I was just in another country a couple months ago, and when trying to leave the airport, I was confused where I'd need to go in order to get an Uber. I foolishly gave up and went for one of those "conveniently-waiting" taxis, where I was quoted a price up-front, in my home currency, that I later (after doing the currency conversion on the Uber price) realized was a ripoff. The driver also aggressively tried to get me to instead rent his "friend's car" rather than take me to the rental car place like I asked. And honestly I consider that lucky: he didn't try to kidnap me or threaten me in any way, but I was tense during the whole ride, wondering if something bad was going to happen.
That sort of thing isn't an anomaly; it happens all the time to tourists in many countries.
There are many schemes nowadays on Uber cars. I know some stories in developing countries where people are robbed and even killed because they foolishly think that by getting a Uber this means a safe ride. In some countries a regular taxi is actually better regulated and safer than Uber.
In my home country (New York) the taxi mafia was harsh and cruel, but they always did a good job.
> unfair monopolistic advantages for no particular reason
Is that true?
In the US, as well.
I won't recount what recently happened to a friend in Milwaukee. It was an unpopular story (because the ripoff was Uber-based, and not the traditional taxi).
There's bad actors in every industry. I have found that industries that get "entrenched," tend to breed the most bad actors.
If anything turns into a "pseudo-monopoly," expect the grifters to start popping up. They'll figure out how to game the system.
In India, most taxis I ran across at the airport were 50% more expensive - after haggling!
Did you remember to factor in well over 30% inflation in America in the past 5 years plus Uber Lyft initially losing money on rides to capture market share before they eventually had to actually breakeven?
> plus Uber Lyft initially losing money on rides to capture market share before they eventually had to actually breakeven?
That's typically considered to be somewhere between assholish and straight up illegal in most civilized economies.
What law is it breaking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#Legal_aspect...
In all those countries what’s illegal is abuse of a monopoly, which is not what’s being discussed here. The parent cited Uber and Lyft when they first started. Nothing is illegal about startups undercutting established competitors.
No you’re missing the point.
They acquired market power by killing them through predatory pricing, leaving incumbents unprofitable and forcing them to exit - while creating a steep barrier to entry for any new comers and strategically manipulating existing riders by offering high take rates initially and subsidising rides to create artificial demand and inflate market share - then once they kicked out the incumbents, they exercised their market power to raise prices and their % of the take rate of each transaction; leaving consumers and riders worse off.
We can talk all day about the nice UX blah blah. But the reality is, financially, they could not have succeeded without a very dubious and unethical approach.
I get why we look on Uber with disdain today. They're the big rich behemoths who treat drivers poorly, previously had a CEO who was a raging asshole, and have now raised their prices (gasp!) to a level that they need to be for a sustainable business.
But I remember when I started using Uber back in 2012. It was amazing compared to every single other option out there. Yes, they entered the market in questionably-legal or often probably outright illegal ways. But illegal is not the same thing as immoral. And I don't think it's unethical to force out competition when that competition is a lazy, shitty, legally-enforced monopoly that treats its customers poorly.
Yes ... THAT was when governments should have stepped in and prevented uber from undercutting taxi drivers with investor money.
As pointed out here, many governments have laws stating that they will step in ... and they didn't.
Do you feel like the taxi medallion system was a better regulatory mechanism than what is currently in place?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_medallion
> But illegal is not the same thing as immoral.
Creating the gig economy doesn't get any moral points from me.
Okay but is that illegal?
I can only speak in EU terms in any more detail here, but the EU laws are based on "dominant market position". Monopoly is one route to that but it's not the only route and there is no minimum market share required, as e.g. Qualcomm found out (https://www.cliffordchance.com/insights/resources/blogs/talk...)
Which EU country reacted against Uber's predatory pricing when it was actually happening? Ie. which EU government refused investor money flowing into their economy? The only examples I can find are a few cities, and some of those are in the US. No EU state did, unless I'm missing something.
Sure now that it costs them money, they're reacting, making things worse for literally everyone: the taxi drivers, who've been victimized by the governments not reacting when they should. The customers, who are now paying more. The Uber drivers, who are certainly not the ones getting the money.
A great lawyer will tell you laws don't matter if they're not applied, and then tell you how laws are applied and what you can and can't get away with (this is a necessity since most laws aren't very clear at all, especially where it comes to actual real-world cases or penalties). The EU are absolute masters of that. The famous GPDR, for example, isn't protecting anyone's data in any way it matters since governments have the power to grant themselves exceptions to them. Which lead to all the things the GPDR tried to avoid: insurance getting private medical data (who are mostly part of governments in the EU), private medical data being used by the police or in court, just to give some examples.
Hell, it's now been confirmed every 2 years or so since 2015 that essentially all European countries think all of the FANGs are abusing their market position. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, ... they've given them billions of dollars in fines. Tell me, what has been fixed? US advertising companies are deeper entrenched than ever before (even outside of the internet, ie. ClearChannel). Law is supposed to fix the problems. Well, obviously the problem of US companies' dominance is not solved, in fact it's gotten a lot worse.
And this is nothing new. Take what EU countries signed in the Budapest memorandum. You will find that it states that if Russia ("any of the ... blabla", which includes Russia) takes Crimea a bunch of EU countries (France, UK) would, first, declare war on the country that did it (Russia) and initiate actual hostile action against that country (ie. not just support to Ukraine). That meant they agreed to have UK and French (and ...) soldiers attack Russia. That was the security guarantee Ukraine had, and that was an international treaty, which in the EU (look it up) has the power of law.
As everyone and their grandmother's cat knows, they didn't actually follow through. They "gave support". That's just one, at the moment important, example.
And of course, the effect is the same: it became worse and worse. Russia's actions became worse and worse and worse. Now the EU countries have given the same guarantees for countries like Poland, Latvia and even Estonia, either directly or through NATO. Will Russia attack? Why not? It's not like these countries will (or let's be real: can) actually fight under any circumstance.
A couple EU countries bans on Uber seem to date back from 2015-2019, which is slow, but still fairly early as to worldwide adoption per https://dig.watch/trends/uber
Example ban in Finland: https://www.uber.com/fi-/blog/uberpop-tauolle/
After few years of operation, government realised it was serious and pressured Uber to stop taxi operations « Uber pop », until disruption in legislation got through.
I used Uber from first year it was here. As the service got popular with young adults and the people took notice and public debate began, the police was instructed to fine Ubers. Then the drivers asked us passengers to sit up front and pretend we were friends. (Not sure if the app had instructions related to this or not.) Once the legislation change was clear, they closed operation officially for the brief period, as stated in the article.
I just thought it was exciting at the time..
Page not found ...
And Uber is available in Finland: https://www.uber.com/global/en/r/finland/cities/
For what it is worth what Wikipedia says about the document you mention is not what this comment mentions. Personally I found that comment spreading disinformation.
No country gave guarantees only assurances and it is even highlighted that the US senate would have never voted for it favourably, and thus it never was a treaty.
On the other hand breaking this assurances will guarantee no other country will ever give up their nuclear arsenal, of course a non consolation price for Ukraine. Guarantees in nato which is indeed a treaty and ratified, covering Poland and Latvia and Estonia would be stronger but of course, I would not put all my eggs on it.
> Which EU country reacted against Uber's predatory pricing when it was actually happening?
Bulgaria kicked out Uber for not obeying taxi regulations.
Sounds unrelated? Well it used to be a socialist dictatorship and laws are still written in a ham-fisted-yet-vague* way so that (1) you can't realistically obey them and (2) they can be used against anyone state authorities (or their friends) don't like.
So what's the actual reason? Uber was on its way to price taxi companies out of the market by offering better service at a price of €0.25/km.
* If you're from a developed country and this sounds like what your government is currently doing, you should start panicking.
I can't find news on that, and Uber is available in Bulgaria:
https://www.uber.com/bg/en/
I believe the equivalent for international trade is called "dumping" and is somewhat regulated, although that doesn't apply to Uber.
How much of this is inflation?
Gas is priced lower when counting for inflation, isn’t it?
But drivers got to eat
Why don't they just order it on food delivery. I heard that it massively cut margins on the greedy restaurants, so can't be inflation there...
who cares about the drivers....
Especially because in 10 years from now they will progressively get replaced by AI like Waymo, so no point into making sure they are happy in the long-term
Gas is such a small part of the cost
As far as I was aware taxis were an imagined thing we saw in movies. I understand you could call a number and ask for a ride to the airport though they were never useful.
They're always more common in metro areas of the US. You must be from a relatively rural area and don't get out of it much.
That said, uh, the use of getting a taxi to drive you to or from the airport was just not having to park at the airport which generally costs a lot of money, and in certain areas is a little sketchy on whether or not your car will get cracked open while you're away.
That's a little reductive. I grew up in San Diego and went to school in LA and had the same experience with taxis - never took them. But now I use ubers in those cities whenever I'm there.
The US has tons of cities like this that I imagine would have issues with taxis - all parts of the bay area peninsula / east bay, cities in Texas, Denver, etc. Most cities are not like the NYC/Boston and even in places in Chicago, unless you lived downtown likely didn't see taxis driving around.
What?
Taxis weren’t actually available in most US cities before ride share. Only the large dense cities really had them. This argument that things were better before is only relevant for a small handful of metros. The ride shares are better in spite of their flaws.
I strongly prefer to take traditional taxis, but I also comparison shop and Lyft is almost always 20-40% cheaper than a cab ride.
That's probably due to general inflation...
So are most things from 20 years ago. Inflation is acting as the majority of those increases I’d wager.
Where I live Ubers are WAY cheaper than taxis, even if you go back years and years.
“Entrenched” because that’s how consumers prefer to spend their money?
Here in Australia theres a never ending steam of complaints about taxis managing to bill passengers extraordinary amounts. From taking a route that deliberately includes a highway leg thats expensive to correct (screws tourists), to demanding higher fares, to card skimming, to outright just not displaying the taxi licences so you cant complain and have no idea which driver was being creepy.
Uber at least has fixed rates from what was displayed and there are logs of which driver was doing dodgy stuff.
> And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel
And instead Uber offloaded everything onto gig workers and society. And still lost 20 billion dollars in the process (price dumping isn't cheap).
“Society” should have things like universal healthcare like every other industrial country in the world. The US is the only country with an ass backwards system where you are dependent on your employer for health benefits.
It’s by design.. America is all about using you up as an asset then discarding you when you are no longer productive and generate economic benefits.
I always laugh when Americans poke fun at Europeans… we have it much better over here. I assure you of that.
But that's the thing, isn't it? Universal healthcare isn't magic. It's paid for by taxes. Yet Uber claimed its drivers where independent contractors that had to pay for anything: taxes, medical, insurance, car depreciation etc. etc.
And that’s fine. Uber drivers should pay taxes and Uber itself pays taxes - or at least should.
And the drivers have the free will to choose to drive for Uber.
> Uber drivers should pay taxes and Uber itself pays taxes - or at least should.
Yup. The drivers should have to pay everything because despite working for Uber they are "free contractors"
> And the drivers have the free will to choose to drive for Uber
Ah yes, I forgot that's exactly how price dumping works: there are multiple companies to chose from and all of them offer competitive wages.
I mean, it's not ancient history. For half of Uber's existence the ongoing story was: drivers have to drive almost 24 hours a day to make living wage with Uber randomly stealing their wages.
This only somewhat changed once governments stepped in and forced Uber to change some of its practices.
There are multiple jobs to choose from. California’s attempt to regulate contractors was a disaster. Jason Snell, the former editor of Macworld, left to go independent and makes a living based on a combination of podcasting, writing books and freelance writing and he said how much harder the rules made it for him to do freelance writing because of the requirenments around hiring contractors.
Trust me, Snell is far from a fire breathing libertarian conservative.
It’s not the responsibility of a corporation to decide what a “living wage” is. Should Uber pay more to a single mother with three kids than a single father with no kids? Again it’s society’s responsibility to provide for a safety net and to tax corporations to fund it.
On the federal level, that’s what the earned income tax credit was suppose to do and until 2016, it had wide bi-partisan support and was championed by both Republican and Democratic Presidents.
> California’s attempt to regulate contractors was a disaster.
You have to decide whether you want the society to provide safety nets through healthcare, strong labor protections etc. or not.
> Again it’s society’s responsibility to provide for a safety net and to tax corporations to fund it.
Indeed. That's why governments and regulators eventually stepped in.
You can't in good conscience or good faith argue that Uber didn't offload anything onto society and people working for it just because "it's not the job of a company" etc. Uber literally engaged in multiple illegal and borderline illegal practices across the globe, including the US.
And yes, it's the literal job of a taxi company to make sure its drivers work a healthy amount of hours. In Uber's case it meant that it had to pay drivers enough money to cover the costs Uber offloaded onto them, and enough money left over so that they didn't have to drive 18-20 hours a day to make ends meet.
And yeah, not everyone can become Jason Snell
> You have to decide whether you want the society to provide safety nets through healthcare, strong labor protections etc. or not.
My argument is simply that the only “labor protections” the government should enforce on private enterprise is that a company can’t actively harm employees - OSHA protections, discrimination etc.
> And yes, it's the literal job of a taxi company to make sure its drivers work a healthy amount of hours. In Uber's case it meant that it had to pay drivers enough money to cover the costs Uber offloaded onto them, and enough money left over so that they didn't have to drive 18-20 hours a day to make ends meet.
It’s up to individuals to decide whether the tradeoffs are worth it. It’s not the responsibility of private industry to calculate what a “living wage” is for an individual. Uber never put a gun to anyone’s head to force them to drive for Uber. If anything the government should enforce how long someone can drive because it puts others in danger. But does the government stop people from working two jobs that might add up to 20 hours? What should happen when the driver drives for Uber, Lyft and DoorDash?
The illegal practices at least in New York were around taxi medallion monopoly where taxi drivers were getting in hundreds of thousands in debt to own them for the right to drive.
As far as not everyone being Jason Snell, there were other freelance writers and contractors like truck drivers who had to leave California to save their business
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/i-had-leave-california-save-...
It even affected 1099 (as opposed to W2) tech workers who were contractors.
If that is the world you want, then boy are you going to love living in Somalia. You could even move today!
Now you are going to come up with an intelligent counter argument to my saying that the government should enforce laws where the employer can’t actively harm employees, where the government should respect the fact that adults have agency to make their own choices and the United States should offer universal healthcare like every other industrialized first world and second world country equates to living in Somalia…
> Uber never put a gun to anyone’s head to force them to drive for Uber.
Oh no. Uber only spent 20 billion dollars on price dumping, driving competing companies out of business, and was the poster child for gig economy.
> If anything the government should enforce how long someone can drive because it puts others in danger.
Once again, the wages Uber was paying were below substinence if you were to drive just within the safe margin of hours. Oh, I forgot, it's ridiculously easy to become a writer and sustain living from a podcast. Those ~400 000 people could've easily found a different job.
---
However, the actual insane thing is this worldview that companies are not responsible for anything, and can do whatever they want; that people have to be punished for working because it's easy to not just switch jobs but to go and start supporting yourself with books and podcasts; and that there should be some magical government that provides some safety net, but still actively punishes people if they end up at a wrong job.
> Oh, I forgot, it's ridiculously easy to become a writer and sustain living from a podcast. Those ~400 000 people could've easily found a different job.
So the only choices anyone has in the US is to become a writer or an Uber driver? Does Uber have some type of monopoly on employment?
> However, the actual insane thing is this worldview that companies are not responsible for anything, and can do whatever they want;
I said that companies shouldn’t be able to do things that harm their employees - I never said that OSHA and safety standards shouldn’t exist. They also shouldn’t be able to do anything that hurts others. I even said that they should pay taxes to fund a safety net and to provide universal health care like every other civilized company.
> but to go and start supporting yourself with books and podcasts
No I said that the government shouldn’t get involved with creating an environment where adults can’t get into voluntarily contracts where they get to decide how much their labor is worth.
Even a cursory reading of whey I wrote would tell you I used Snell as an example of all of the contractors that wanted to do freelance who were harmed by a law meant to protect them but only created a nanny state that took away agency from adults who freely made a choice.
> and that there should be some magical government that provides some safety net
You mean the same type of safety net that every other industrialized company provides?
My employer is a lot more dependable than the US government.
If you trust the overlord you didn't choose more than the one you did, then you might want to rethink your career.
What’s more likely - your company is going to get rid of you in the next five years or the government is going to take away your citizenship?
Did you try to get insurance on the open market before 2012 with a pre-existing condition? Every other industrial country in the world has health insurance not tied to your employer. Even smaller countries like Costa Rica and Panama have better more affordable insurance. Yes I’ve done my research on caja, Costa Rica’s national health care system. We will be staying there a couple of months in the winter starting next year and it’s our Plan B to retire there.
I got my job because I had a life threatening illness at the time. My employer saved me when no one else would. After spending all that money saving my life, it'd be a shame if they got rid of me before I had the chance to fully repay their kindness. There are a lot of other good countries where you can go for care. For example, if you have an impressive looking GitHub then Audrey Tang will give you a gold card. That's privileged elite immigrant status and you don't even need a college degree. You get your gold card. You go to Taiwan. The place where some of the greatest people in the world (e.g. Jensen Huang) are from. You're under no obligation to get a job. You get free health care. The ER waits are ~15 mins. If your heart bleeds red instead then the Chinese also say on RedNote that if you're a sick American, then just come on down to China and they'll treat you and take care of you, no matter how bad it is, or how long it's going to take.
You know you’re arguing my point for me that universal health care provided by taxpayer funds is better than depending on your employer for health care?
And becoming a permanent resident of Costa Rica is just a matter of either proving you have $1000 a month in guaranteed income as a retiree or $2500 a month in passive income or put $60K in a local bank account and they will dispense $2500 a month to you. They don’t tax foreign income.
The best thing about Costa Rica is the Sloth Sanctuary.
You and your wife should send me photos of yourselves with the sloths when you get there.
The supposed 'taxi cartel' were just (some) scummy operators ... not really a cartel. Fast forward to today => you are paying more for what is essentially very similar service (because it literally turned into a monopoly because of network effects) and the money ends up in the pocket of some corporate douche not even the people doing the actual work.
This is the business model: get more money out of customers (because no real alternative) and the drivers (because zero negotiating power). Not to mention that they actually got to that position by literally operating at a loss for over a decade (because venture money). Textbook anti-competitive practices.
However, the idea itself (that is having an app to order taxi) is spectacular. It also something a high-school kid could make in a month in his garage. The actual strength of the business model is the network effects and the anti-competitive practices, not the app or anything having to do with service quality.
Classic indications of a cartel (in the economic sense) are deliberate limitations of supply and fixing of prices through collusion. I don’t know about other cities, but NYC absolutely had a taxi cartel.
This is true ... except that it is simplistically naive way of looking at things, because this is just one form (out of many) of anti-competitive practices. It is essentially high-school level elementary basics of anti-trust. In actual reality there is quite a bit more to it than that.
For instance: Monopolies often don't actually limit supply. You only make it so customers can't choose an alternative and set prices accordingly (that is higher than they would have been if there were real alternatives). Big-tech companies do this all the time. Collusion is also not required, but only one form (today virtually unheard of or very rare) of how it may happen. For instance: big-tech companies often don't actually encroach on core parts of the business of other big-tech companies. Google, Microsoft and Apple or Uber are all totally different business with little competitive overlap. They are not doing this because of outright collusion. It's live and let live. Why compete with them when they are leaving us alone in our corner? Also: trying to compete is expensive (for them), it's risky and may hurt them in other ways. This is one of the dirty little secrets: Established companies don't (really) want to compete with other big companies. They all just want to protect what's their and keep it that way. If you don't believe me have a look at the (publicly available) emails from execs that are public record. Anti-competitive thinking through and through.
So - putting aside the other waffle and snide remarks - you’re agreeing with me that, in NYC at least, taxis were operated as a cartel?
In the classical economic sense, Lyft/Uber should be competing to drive prices down to razor thin margins for the facilitator service. Is that happening? Or are they pocketing fat margins?
And it wasn't much of a cartel in NYC before, anyways. Most subways stops in Brooklyn had a black car nearby if you knew how to look for them.
Last time I checked, neither Uber nor Lyft were profitable (at all!) before the 2023-2024 time period.
True but if they need 25-50 percent to be unprofitable.. why are we so mad at the previous cartel again? I thought this was progress?
Taxis were a cottage industry - pretty much the opposite of a cartel (so were Bed and Breakfasts, another "app-disrupted" business).
Could you tell me why you think that?
In NYC, prior to Uber entering the market, taxi medallions changed hands for up to $1mm. Prices were fixed by the TLC.
If these are no strong indications of a cartel, I don’t know what is.
What about the problem of sexual assault by drivers?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/business/uber-sexual-assa...
what about it?
The comment to which I replied said Uber was better than taxis. The article I referenced details why that might not be the case, when it comes to passenger safety.
where does compare with taxis? do taxi rides even record and keep track of things like 'making comment about appearance' . how is a comparison even possible ?
Very few cartels actually existed to justify free range regulatory erasure.
> But nobody was ever going to that
Didn't Google have a long standing project to do just that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books
From TFA
That wasn't done as a play for venture capital. The Google Books project began before eBooks existed; in the 2000s, they spent money on all kinds of projects that had no real strategy for monetization. I remember Google Books being a valuable resource as it digitized books that were out of print. Back when they actually cared about making information available widely.
Yeah. Weird that rchaud said "But nobody was ever going to that" when the article talks about someone doing it.
Disassemble*
This lawsuit also makes sure that only parties that can train an AI with good enough training material are now
- Google
- Anthropic
- Any Chinese company who do not care about copyright laws
What is the cost of buying and scanning books?
Copyright law needs to be fixed and its ridiculous hundred years tenure chopped away.
From TFA
AlsoReminds me when Facebook said to EU that they did not have the technology to merge FB and Whatsapp accounts when they bought Whatapp.
That's not really the point, though, is it? Now Anthropic can afford to buy books and get them scanned. They likely didn't have the money or time to do that before.
And even if they didn't use the illegally-obtained work to train any of the models they released, of course they used them to train unreleased prototypes and to make progress at improving their models and training methods.
By engaging in illegal activity, they advanced their business faster and more cheaply than they otherwise would have been able to. With this settlement, other new AI companies will see it on the record that they could face penalties if they do this, and will have to go the slower, more expensive route -- if they can even afford to do so.
It might not make it impossible, but it makes the moat around the current incumbents just that much wider.
> As part of the settlement, Anthropic said that it did not use any pirated works to build A.I. technologies that were publicly released.
Oh so now we're at "just trust me bro" levels of absurdity
Training a Model on 100+ years old literature only could be an interesting experience though.
It's been done.
https://github.com/haykgrigo3/TimeCapsuleLLM
’Twould wax yet more marvellous to ye beholders.
Crazy to think we've been helping train AI through captchas long before the "click all squares containing" ones.
"stop spam. read books." is a very ironic phrase to look back on considering the amount of spam on the internet that LLMs have enabled
Anthropic literally did exactly this to train its models according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit found that Anthropic didn't even use the pirated books to train its model. So there is that
The lawsuit didn't find anything, Anthropic claimed this as part of the settlement. Companies settle without admission of wrongdoing all the time, to the extent that it can be bargained for.
They stated it in court in their papers for summary judgment on the issue of fair use. My gosh! To pretend like you know what you're talking about but missing that detail?
The judge's ruling from earlier certainly seemed to me to suggest that the training was fair use.
Obviously, that's not part of the current settlement. I'm no expert on this, so I don't know the extent to which the earlier ruling applies.
If I'm reading this right yes the training was fair use, but I was responding (unclearly) to the claim that the pirated books weren't used to train commercially released LLMs. The judge complained that it wasn't clear what was actually used, from the June order https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/... [pdf]:
> Notably, in its motion, Anthropic argues that pirating initial copies of Authors’ books and millions of other books was justified because all those copies were at least reasonably necessary for training LLMs — and yet Anthropic has resisted putting into the record what copies or even sets of copies were in fact used for training LLMs.
> We know that Anthropic has more information about what it in fact copied for training LLMs (or not). Anthropic earlier produced a spreadsheet that showed the composition of various data mixes used for training various LLMs — yet it clawed back that spreadsheet in April. A discovery dispute regarding that spreadsheet remains pending.
Thanks for this info. I was looking for which pirated books were used for which model.
Ethically speaking, if Anthropic (a) did later purchase every book it pirated or (b) compensated every author whose book was pirated, would it absolve an illegally trained model of its "sins"?
To me, the taint still remains. Which is a shame, because it's considered the best coding model so far.
> Ethically speaking, if Anthropic (a) did later purchase every book it pirated or (b) compensated every author whose book was pirated, would it absolve an illegally trained model of its "sins"?
No, it part because it removes agency from the authors/rightsholders. Maybe they don't want to sell Anthropic their books, maybe they want royalties, etc.
Can authors even claim such rights though? I doubt think they even had such agency to begin with
If they're the rightsholders, they can do whatever they want with their IP, including changing licensing terms, adding contractual obligations forbidding certain types of use, forbidding sale, etc.
I feel like that would bounce hard off first sale doctrine. But what do I know.
You still have to adhere to license and copyright terms after first sale.
You can't sell a Bluray disk to a movie theater and give them the right to charge an audience to watch it in the theater later.
If rightsholders are worried about certain uses of their IP being found to be fair use, they might then change the terms of release contractually to stop or at least partially prevent training.
I'm "team Anthropic" if we're stack ranking the major American labs pumping out SOTA models by ethics or whatever, but there is no universe in which a company like them operating in this competitive environment didn't pirate the books.
"ethics or whatever" seem like a good tagline for people rooting for an AI-company when it's being sued by authors.
Makes sense why Effective Altruism is so popular. Commit crime, make billions, give back when dead, live guilt free?
Except for Google at least.
Anthropic started scanning books in February 2024. I don't think these lawsuits had been filed by then - as far as I can tell that was in August 2024: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/bartz-v-anthro...
Sir. These were carpoolers, just sharing a ride to their new online friends' B&B.
Lawyer: "Sir. These were carpoolers, just sharing a ride to their new online friends' B&B."
Judge: "But this app facilitated them."
Lawyer: "Well, you presume so-called genuine carpoolers are not facilitated? The manufacturers of their cell phones, the telecom operators, their employers or the bar where they met, or the bus company at whose bus stop they met, they all facilitated their carpooling behavior."
Judge: "But your company profits from this coordination!"
Lawyer: "Well we pay taxes, just like the manufacturer of the cell phone, the telecom operator, their employers, the bus company or the bar... But let's ignore that, what you -representing the government (which in turn supposedly represents the people)- are really after is money or power. As a judge you are not responsible for setting up the economy, or micromanaging the development of apps, so its not your fault that the government didn't create this application before our company did. In a sense you are lucky that we created the app given that the government did not create this application in a timely fashion!"
Judge: "How so?"
Lawyer: "If the population had created this app they would have started thinking about where the proceeds should go. They would have gotten concerned about the centralization of power (financial and intelligence). They would have searched for ways to decentralize and secure their app. They would have eventually gotten cryptographers involved. In that world, no substantial income would be generated, your fleet of taxi's would be threatened as well, and you wouldn't even have the juicy intel we occasionally share either!"
This conversation almost never takes place, since it only needs to take place once, after which a naive judge has learned how the cookie crumbles. Most judges have lost this naivety before even becoming a judge. They learn this indirectly when small "annoyances" threaten the scheme (one could say the official taxi fleet was an earlier such scheme).
Sure, but that’s mostly because the sheer convenience of the illegal way is so much higher, and carries zero startup cost.
The same could be said of grand larceny. The difference would seem to be a mix of social norms and, more notably for this conversation, very different consequences.
I think the most notable difference is that grand larceny actually deprived someone of something they would have otherwise had, while pirating something you couldn't afford to buy doesn't because there was no circumstance in which they were getting the money and piracy doesn't involve taking anything from them...
Oh I wasn’t saying the two crimes are comparable in their own terms. But specifically the statements made by the comment I responded to apply to larceny as well as to piracy.
Ah yes, the "I wouldn't have paid for it anyway, so I'm entitled to it for free" argument...
Not sure it is realistic or easier to physically steal 500k books.
I get what you are going for, but my point was that a dataset existed, and the only way it could be compiled was illegaly.
> But nobody was ever going to that
If this is a choice between risking to pay 1.5 billion or just paying 15 mil safely, they might.
Option 1: $183B valuation, $1.5B settlement.
Option 2: near-$0 valuation, $15M purchasing cost.
To an investor, that just looks like a pretty good deal, I reckon. It's just the cost of doing business - which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these.
In most places, a legal settlement is considered a tax deductible loss. At a certain scale it will likely cost the company nothing, but these kinds of cases often trigger speculators grabbing discount stock from panicking amateurs. lol We still have no idea what they sell, so avoided exposure to their antics... =3
But that isn't how tax deductions work. Since taxes are always a fraction of income, a deduction can never save you more money than you already paid out to get the deduction in the first place. If you have a 10% tax rate, your options are:
A) Make 100M, pay 10M in taxes
or
B) Make 100M, pay 10M in lawsuit settlements, pay 9M in taxes
You come out ahead every time by not paying the settlement in the first place.
You may be confused, but a business loss deduction usually reduces a taxable income. In general, most systems only require the cost/loss was incurred during gaining or producing income from a business or property.
For a significant sum, we should assume their team consulted a specialist firm on the subject at their location. People don't often YOLO this stuff at that scale, and businesses don't always settle every time they get shaken down for cash... some go to war, as it can be cheaper to sandbag/delay till opponents go bankrupt.
Have a great day. =3
> You may be confused, but a business loss deduction usually reduces a taxable income.
Yes, I know, which is why in option B the taxes required was $9M instead of $10M. The 10k payment reduced taxable income from $100M to $90M. Business taxes are notoriously complex, but I am aware of no IRS rules that would allow a 10M legal settlement to reduce the taxes owed by >= $10M. If you believe I remain confused, please by all means provide an example scenario and/or citations to the relevant tax statutes.
> which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these.
What's actually wrong with this?
They paid $1.5B for a bunch of pirated books. Seems like a fair price to me, but what do I know.
The settlement should reflect society's belief of the cost or deterrent, I'm not sure which (maybe both).
This might be controversial, but I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willing to pay the cost. Imagine if you couldn't speed in a car. Imagine if you couldn't choose to be jailed for nonviolent protest.
This isn't some case where they destroyed a billion dollars worth of pristine wilderness and got off with a slap on the wrist.
> I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willing to pay the cost
so you don't think super rich people should be bound by laws at all?
Unless you made the cost proportional to (maybe expontial to) somebody's wealth, you would be creating a completely lawless class who would wreak havoc on society.
The law was not broken by "super rich people".
It was broken by a company of people who were not very rich at all and have managed to produce billions in value (not dollars, value) by breaking said laws.
They're not trafficking humans or doing predatory lending, they're building AI.
This is why our judicial system literally handles things on a case by case basis.
I just want to make sure I understand this correctly.
Your argument is that this is all fine because it wasn't done by people who were super rich but instead done by people who became super rich and were funded by the super rich?
I just want to check that I have that right. You are arguing that if I'm a successful enough bank robber that this is fine because I pay some fine that is a small portion of what I heisted? I mean I wouldn't have been trafficking humans or doing predatory lending. I was just stealing from the banks and everyone hates the banks.
But if I'm only a slightly successful bank robber stealing only a few million and deciding that's enough, then straight to jail do not pass go, do not collect $200?
It's unclear to me because in either case I create value for the economy as long as I spend that money. Or is the key part what I do what that money? Like you're saying I get a pass if I use that stolen money to invent LLMs?
You're asking me if straight up stealing money from a bank is comparable to stealing books in 2025 to train an AI which will generate untold value for people?
Look, I don't care if you pirate books. But we'd agree that it would be different if you downloaded millions of books and sold them, right?
Now they weren't selling and if it is transformative is still in question. But let's not worry about that. Let's say that you just made billions off of having illegally downloaded all those books.
I hope we can agree that this is a very different thing than a student pirating their school books. The big reason why this leaves a bunch of people with a bad taste in their mouth (even those who believe it is a transformative use) is because the result was dependent on access to those works. Billions were made and nothing was shared with those who built the foundation.
In fact, let's look at this from a very different lens. Do you not think it is a bit upsetting that there are trillion dollar companies that are highly dependent on open source software where there's a single developer who is making no money off of their work? Their work has clear monetary value, but they allowed it to be used for free. Is someone who makes millions, billions, or trillions off of that work obligated to give some back? Not legally, morally. What is fair? Would you give back? Why or why not? Are you grateful? Is it just their loss? What are your thoughts about this?
Yeah in that way the stealing of books is clearly the bigger crime
> It was broken by a company of people who were not very rich at all
I think the company's bank account would beg to differ on that.
> managed to produce billions in value (not dollars, value) by breaking said laws.
Ah, so breaking the law is ok if enough "value" is created? Whatever that means?
> They're not trafficking humans or doing predatory lending, they're building AI.
They're not trafficking humans or doing predatory lending, they're infringing on the copyright of book authors.
Not sure why you ended that sentence with "building AI", as that's not comparing apples to apples.
But sure, ok, so it's ok to break the law if you, random person on the internet, think their end goals are worthwhile? So the ends justify the means, huh?
> This is why our judicial system literally handles things on a case by case basis.
Yes, and Anthropic was afraid enough of an unfavorable verdict in this particular case that they paid a billion and a half to make it go away.
Hate to break it to you, but that's currently the world we live in. And yes, it sucks.
I'm not sure how you're breaking that to me - it's the entire context of this discussion
The “cost” should not be associated with money
Well that's what he's arguing, against another post which somehow claims that that's ok.
Yes, let billionaires feast on the poor.
GP is entrained in the pure-self interest is the only matric needed in society.
I agree to some extent, but there is a slippery slope to “no rules apply to the rich”.
I do agree that in the case of victimless crimes, having some ability to recompensate for damages instead of outright ban the thing, means that we can enact many massively net-positive scenarios.
Of course, most crimes aren’t victimless and that’s where the negative reactions are coming from (eg company pollutes the commons to extract a profit).
> What's actually wrong with this?
It's because they did not choose to pay for the books; they were forced to pay and they would not have done so if the lawsuit had not fallen this way.
If you are not sure why this is different from "they paid for pirated books (as if it were a transaction)", then this may reflect a lack of awareness of how fair exchange and trust both function in a society.
Settling is not forced
Not sure what point that's trying to make. Settling is a) a tacit admission that you feel you might lose, b) thinking legal costs will be to expensive to win, c) thinking the bad publicity of the trial dragging on isn't worth your time, d) just no wanting to spend the cycles dealing with it.
Settling isn't "forced", but it's a choice that tells you that the company believes settling is a better deal for them than letting the trial go forward. That's something.
You think they would have done it if they didn't get taken to court?
Should I be allowed to walk into the Louvre, steal the Mona Lisa, then pay $10.000 once caught? Should I be allowed to do this if I am employed by Stealing The Mona Lisa, LLC?
> They paid $1.5B for a bunch of pirated books.
They didn't pay, they settled. And considering flesh-and-blood people get sued for tens of thousands per download when there isn't a profit motive, that's a bargain.
> The settlement should reflect society's belief of the cost or deterrent.
No, it reflects the maximum amount the lawyers believe they can get out of them.
> This might be controversial, but I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willing to pay the cost.
So how much should a politician need to pay to legally murder their opponent? Are you okay with your ex killing you for a $5000 fine?
> Imagine if you couldn't speed in a car.
Speed enough and you lose your license, no need to imagine.
Why does this company get away with it, but do warez groups get raided by SWAT teams, labeled a "criminal enterprise" or "crime gang", and sentenced to decades in jail? Why does the law not apply when you are rich?
Totally agreeing with you. One of the cause can be that if you are rich laws don’t apply to you (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc), and the other thing is that US judges in general will not block your business if it allows to create jobs or to generate revenue and activity from foreign clients (buying pushes USD price upward and strengthens political, financial, technological and intelligence).
And to top it off, the money they pay is VC money that is created from nothing in ”valuations”. So in the end nobody paid anything for this crime.
Well, presumably this will mean ever so slightly lower returns in the future for their investors, so it's not like it was free. But ultimately I'm sure this settlement was money well spent for Anthropic, and if they could go back and do it all over again, they would have done the exact same thing.
> The settlement should reflect society's belief of the cost or deterrent
Settlements have nothing to do with either of those things. Settlement has to do with what the plaintiff believes is good enough for the cost that will avoid the uncertainty of trial. This is a civil case, "society" doesn't really come into play here. (And you can't "settle" a criminal case; closest analogue would be a plea deal.)
If the trial went forward to a guilty verdict, then the fines would represent society's belief of cost or deterrent. But we didn't get to see that happen.
It's not about money. It's about time.
> But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest.
Anthropic did. That was the part of their operation that they didn't get in trouble for, but the news spun it as "Anthropic destroyed millions of books to make AI".
What you describe is in fact what Waymo has had, of chosen to, deal with. They didn't go for an end run around regulations related to vehicles on public roads. They committed to driverless vehicles and worked with local governments to roll it out as quickly as regulators were willing to allow.
Uber could have made the same decision and worked with regulators to be allowed into markets one at a time. It was an intentional choice to lean on the fact that Uber drivers blended into traffic and could hide in plain sight until Uber had enough market share and customer base to give them leverage.
That doesn't really feel like the same thing to me.
With Uber you had a company that wanted to enter an existing market but couldn't due to legally-granted monopolies on taxi service. And given that existing market, you can be sure that the incumbents would lobby to keep Uber locked out.
With Waymo you have a new technology that has a computer driving the car autonomously. There isn't really any directly-incumbent party with a vested (conflict of) interest to argue against it. Waymo is a kind of taxi, though, so presumably existing taxi operators -- and the likes of Uber and Lyft -- could argue against it in order to protect their advantages. But ironically Uber and Lyft "softened" those regulatory bars already, so it might not have been worth it to try.
At any rate, the regulatory and safety concerns are also very different between the two.
I think I am also just a little more sympathetic to early Uber, given how terrible and cartel-like taxi service was in the past. But I would not at all be sympathetic toward Waymo putting driverless cars on the streets without regulatory approval and oversight, especially if people got injured or killed.
My understanding is that regulations for Waymo were much more strict because they billed themselves from the beginning as fully self-driving and wanted to operate on public streets.
My assumption is that they could have found ways to work around that by technically having someone in the drivers west, for example, but maybe I'm wrong there!
I think the difference between Waymo and Uber is risk level. Maybe Waymo would like to skirt regulations but they won't be allowed to by citizens and officials alike.
Waymo could likely have done something similar to Tesla. Pay a licensed driver to sit behind the wheel and claim the car only has driver assist. That likely would have worked long enough to gain traction and leverage to pressure a green light for full driverless mode.
Exactly. Well said.
actually NL is training a GPT on only materials they bought fairly.
it wont be a chatgpt or coding model ofc, thats not what they go for, but it'll be interesting to see its quality as its all fairly and honestly done. transparently.
Google did.
What's wild is that $1.5B sounds huge… until you compare it to the potential upside of owning the dominant AI model trained on everything
Anthropic also did specifically this, spent millions on it
Anthropic bought books, cut the spine off and scanned them with sheet fed scanners.
Not to mention that Uber doing well is exactly what would give them leverage to even have a discussion with Taxi medallion owners.
Otherwise, of course they would tell them to just pound sand.