This comment could get its own DSM classification for how insane it is.
I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?
This comment could get its own DSM classification for how insane it is.
I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?
I'm gonna have to go dig up the link, but isn't there a guy that Nintendo basically has on indentured servitude for the rest of his life?
Ah, found it:
>In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison having served 14 months of a 40-month sentence. Good behaviour reduced time behind bars, but now his options are limited. For a while he was crashing on a friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions, which he needs to ease chronic pain, were costing hundreds of dollars every week, and he didn’t have a job. And soon, he would need to start sending cheques to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m (£11.5m), and he’s probably going to spend the rest of his life paying it back.
I'm not even a tiny bit supportive, but there is precedent.
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/feb/01/the-man-who-ow...
American executives have been pushing to criminalise copyright infringement for decades, and America has worked hard to pressure countries all round the world to do this as part of trade deals. There is, for example, a Brit serving an eleven year sentence right now *.
Why should Zuckerberg be exempt?
* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65697595
Facebook isn't one of the companies that's been pushing for that.
How is that relevant?
"American executives have been pushing to criminalise copyright infringement...Why should Zuckerberg be exempt?" Implicit relevence in the comment to which I'm replying.
I think we're misunderstanding one another.
Zuckerberg saying anything about copyright infringement is irrelevant to the actions Meta has taken in consuming and promoting the practice, and he should face criminal liability.
I hear you, though I was replying only to the comment I replied to, so the misunderstanding is more of targe. I don't really care either way, was more being pedantic regarding the comment's internal premise and conclusion.
Is this controversial? Executives should be held liable, certainly moreso than just regular people sharing files.
For better or for worse, the idea behind incorporation is that you, as an owner of part or all of the company, are separated from it financially and legally in most circumstances.
Zuckerberg may be CEO, majority shareholder, and on the board of Meta, but he didn't break copyright law, Meta did. So if there were to be a consequence, Meta would pay out the fine. Not sure how you jail a company.
Now, in a company with a real corporate governance structure, the board would look at the loss incurred by said fine, look at Zuckerberg, and immediately fire him for causing the loss. However, like I said before, Zuck's in charge of Meta, so that's not going to happen, and the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares, which are the main repository of his wealth. So if he thinks he can make himself richer violating copyright law in the future, he will likely direct Meta to do so.
TL;DR, in the famous words of Bender from Futurama, "Hooray, the system fails again!"
> Zuckerberg may be CEO, majority shareholder, and on the board of Meta, but he didn't break copyright law, Meta did.
I'm still stuck on how Z telling Meta (or the relevant people at Meta, whatever) to go out there and do illegal shit doesn't make a court say that he's functionally done said illegal shit, or at least encouraged the company to do, and that he should thus be liable for that. It's not like there's much plausible deniability here. It'd be one thing if the lower ranks thought it'd be fine and did it of their own accord. It's quite another for Z to tell people to go nuts doing illegal shit.
The DMCA makes facilitation of copyright infringement illegal. Telling people to do copyright infringement is surely facilitation of copyright infringement. Surely then, Z having broken the DMCA is a fairly open and shut case, modulo calculating the damages. But apparently not?
So, I'm not a lawyer.
I don't even play one on TV.
I wonder if, somehow, you could use or extend RICO statutes to cover this sort of thing.
> Not sure how you jail a company.
You jail the CEO and the others will stand up and take note.
"But they'll complain" who gives a fuck.
In this case, they'll be right. That, again, is the purpose of incorporation. It's also the same concept that keeps someone from emptying out all of your personal bank accounts if your small business gets sued.
What you'd need is something that either removes that protection past a certain amount of value, or, to tell entities like Meta - which are basically sole proprietorships with window dressing - that they're not entitled to the protection of incorporation if they don't enact a real corporate governance model.
> It's also the same concept that keeps someone from emptying out all of your personal bank accounts if your small business gets sued.
Unless you have an SBA loan. Then the suing party can't get blood from a stone, but the federal government sure can.
> Not sure how you jail a company.
> the fine is unlikely to be enough to drastically impact the company's profitability enough to sink his shares
You lack imagination :-) but you've identified both the problem and the solution.
I’ve sometimes pondered this about the legal personhood of a company - it has most of the rights as a human being but can’t suffer any of the major consequences, such as jail.
It could be possible to construct a legalistic jail for a company whereby if it has committed the type of crime that a human could be jailed for, then it could be frozen for the duration, say ten years, and all its assets, shareholder funds, contracts, everything were frozen and impounded.
Of course this seems completely ludicrous because it’s so “out there” but it’s worth having the thought experiment. Things like “corporate manslaughter” really have few consequences for the corporation itself - if it was actually jailed for twenty years and shareholders and officers left frozen out and on pause, then it might be the kind of punishment that really counted for something.
Well I guess the idea of incorporation is wrong then. Execs and major shareholder should absolutely be held personally held liable.
> Execs and major shareholder should absolutely be held personally held liable.
In a way, they are. Those two groups are often the same due to incentives packages. The money lost to the fine is money not put in the earnings-per-share or R&D or whatever. That's the opportunity cost of paying the fine.
The problem from the "discourage bad corporate behavior" standpoint is that you can generate enough money from breaking the law to cover the fine and make more money than you would have had you not broken the law. Or maybe it's not a fine. Maybe it's a judgment from a civil case. Same issue.
You need to greatly increase the financial consequences to both clean out all gains the shareholders could have made from the illicit behavior and make it harder for the company to be competitive in the marketplace going forward.
The penalty needs to be more than financial to really deter the crime.
I would prefer a harsher punishment, but I would begrudgingly accept throwing him in jail for decades.
I always heard that criminals should be thrown in jail, it's time we started doing it to the real criminals.
The non-strawman way to interpret the parent comment is that they want them to be treated the same as normal copyright violators. Jail is a common result of (criminal) copyright prosecution, with 44% of convicted offenders being imprisoned, averaging 25 months [0].
Now, I personally find the idea of imprisoning people for copyright offenses horrific, but I don't think it's remotely insane that someone else might come to that conclusion, given that we broadly accept it as a society.
[0] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
From [0]: "In fiscal year 2017, there were 80 copyright/trademark infringement offenders who accounted for 0.1% of all offenders sentenced under the guidelines." This is such a low number that I assume most prosecuted cases are settled without ever making it to sentencing, or alternatively copyright infringement is just hardly ever prosecuted criminally at all.
I don't understand how the fact that 80 people were prosecuted for copyright violation in one year is an argument that one person shouldn't be prosecuted for copyright violation.
I don't think anyone in this thread made that particular argument.
Decades? Maybe not. A few years at minimum? Hell yeah!
There aren't enough things an executive can go to jail for.
Fines don't do anything to deter bad behavior. Either:
* The company pays
* They pay and the company mysteriously increases next year's comp / grants a "loan" / etc
* D&O insurer pays
In all three cases the money comes out of the shareholders' hides. It provides zero personal deterrence. The payoff matrix, as seen by a sociopath, makes it rational to always defect against the common good.
The only punishment that can really focus attention is physical imprisonment in a facility they can't choose.
SOX did this for financial reporting and gee shucks it turned out executives can follow the law after all!
> I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?
They stole the life's work of millions of people.
In less civilized times, they likely would have been drawn and quartered by strong horses, and had their limbs drug to the 4 corners of the continent as a warning to anyone else that would consider doing it again.