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.