What's frustrating is all those kids who got criminal charges for running MP3 sites back in the day [1], and this guy rips off every piece of media in existence and will walk away literally because he's too rich to be charged.
[1] See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace#Legal_pro...
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/
Cory Doctorow wrote a nice summary of the Zuckerstreisand book by Sarah Wynn-Williams.
"First, Facebook becomes too big to fail.
Then, Facebook becomes too big to jail.
Finally, Facebook becomes too big to care."
> Eventually, [Zuckerberg] manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.
That Mark never fails to deliver.
When I read that I felt bad for his then unborn child who was already being used by his father for pushing his nefarious business on to a dictator
> When Wynn-Williams give birth to her second child, she hemorrhages, almost dies, and ends up in a coma.
> Afterwards, Kaplan gives her a negative performance review because she was "unresponsive" to his emails and texts while she was dying in an ICU.
Holy shit.
Thank you, that was the quote I was thinking of, but couldn't remember.
I would replace "too big" with "too rich". Other than that, I agree.
I liked Doctorow better before he cheered for stricter copyright enforcement.
He has always been against hypocrisy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records%2C_Inc._v._Tho...
24 songs and was at one point $80k per song, almost 20 years ago. Let's let Zuck off with an even 100k per infringement.
It was his decision and he conspired with his employees to do it for profit. The statutory maximum IIRC is around $250k per work, on the criminal enforcement side. If the rights holders can show actual damages greater than that they can sue civilly for those damages plus some fixed amount per work.
Definitely what pisses me off the most. All these "pirates"? Arrested. Why isn't the copyright industry raiding the homes of these tech billionaires then? Why isn't SWAT pointing guns at their faces while the squad seizes all of their computers and equipment? Why aren't these CEOs in cuffs?
Because society is based on power structures and the people at the top of power structures generally do not arrest themselves.
I just don't see why everyone seems to not be cheering that perhaps we are not going to go back to the days where all those kids are going to be re charged. It almost feels like everyone wants to go back to labels carpet bombing students with lawsuits[0]
[0] https://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/riaa-v-thepeople.html
As someone who’s engaged in private piracy basically my entire life I’ve never even considered venturing into gray areas of licensing when procuring for my company. In fact I’ve done the opposite and rooted it out wherever I’ve found it.
It just seems obvious to me that a profit seeking venture should be held to a higher standard when it comes to infringing on the property rights of other companies and individuals, especially if they seek to enforce their own.
Those kids weren’t hypocritically enforcing their own property rights and making employees sign ndas while downloading shit from tpb.
Do you think if there was a mass movement of students moving off Spotify and downloading MP3s, they would _not_ be charged today?
The hypocrisy is what has at least me upset
> I just don't see why everyone seems to not be cheering that perhaps we are not going to go back to the days where all those kids are going to be re charged. It almost feels like everyone wants to go back to labels carpet bombing students with lawsuits
It’s currently just as bad but in a different way, imho.
The ability for labels (or whoever owns the rights) to wantonly invoke automated DMCA copyright strikes and demonetization on social media channels like YouTube is borderline criminal to me.
Their lobby did a great job getting them more than they deserved (specifically with regards to the facilitation of capricious invoking of DMCA), but the abuse of the rules limits the growth of the creator economy in very unhealthy ways.
False dichotomy. We can obviously have both. We can destroy corporations that rely on copyright to exist and then abuse that system to profit. We can also ignore college students and minor contributory copyright infringement.
The difference in scope here should be obvious.
We can similarly punish drug dealers while not punishing drug users. In fact it's already policy in large parts of the USA.
To quote another user in this thread
"Thats such a non sequitur. This isnt a weed legalisation argument, its "Do we make IP worse for everyone, because you dont like some people benefiting from fair use"."
When corporations were posed with this question numerous times in the past, their answer has always been an emphatic "Yes!".
Because the 'perhaps' there is a load-bearing word that is doing a lot of work and it's going to be come crashing down sooner or later.
Of course some kids are going to be charged for this kind of shit, it's still a rules for thee but not for me world, the 'not for me' folks are just a hell of a lot more brazen about it.
Because there is no reasonable expectation that we are not going back to those days. In fact, we are more likely to go back to those days then not.
Those students are not Zuckenberg. They will not be treated as Zuckenberg. The legal theories that apply to them dont apply to Zuckenberg and vice versa. They do not have money to mount defense and if they do, they will be in debt till the end of their lives.
didn't all of this ai stuff happen because they gave away llama? worth it imo
What's frustrating is that I don't even consider infringement to be a crime. Why are you all so upset about this, rather than his real crimes?
I'm a copyright abolitionist. I don't care at all that they're training AIs on copyrighted works. I care a lot that they're not getting relentlessly hunted down by the copyright industry for it like all the "pirates" that came before them. The copyright industry has actually ruined lives by litigating their "infringement" nonsense. It's only fair that they go after this guy as well.
His constant violation of people's privacy is also horrendous and worthy of condemnation, but that's not directly related to the copyright infringement matter. It's a separate issue.
Yes, wanting the law to be applied fairly isn't incompatible with also seeking to change it.
If this was guaranteed to result in either Facebook being completely destroyed, or copyright abolished, I’d be ride-or-die for either outcome.
But we all know it’ll be a slap on the wrist for Meta and nothing will change.
"X shouldn't be illegal at all" and "I want this person or company I hate to be ruined for having done X" aren't mutually reasonable positions. Even less so when the person or company you hate has committed real crimes. Grow up.
They are perfectly reasonable positions. "X shouldn't be illegal" implies that it is, in fact, currently illegal. Therefore Facebook and its executives and especially its CEO should absolutely suffer the full consequences of violating those laws, just like all of those people the copyright industry ruthlessly prosecuted.
Anything less than this means it's rules for thee and not for me. Laws cease to have meaning when people realize and internalize the idea that they are just tools of the elite to keep the poors in line instead of proper instruments of justice that apply to everyone equally. That's an extremely dangerous thing for the public to realize and internalize, for obvious reasons.
>They are perfectly reasonable positions. "X shouldn't be illegal" implies that it is, in fact, currently illegal.
"We were just following the rules" got people justifiably hanged not so many years ago. There must be principle behind what it is you would enforce, or you're not one of the good guys. If you give a shit about "currently illegal", I won't spend any more time listening to or worrying about what you think should be legal.
You get Al Capone on the charge you can make stick.
Right but Al Capone did jail time, here Zuck gets to break and enter into people's homes, take their stuff, then haggle for it after-the-fact, all the while keeping the civilization-domination apparatus that he built using the stuff he stole? That is super not fair. Ordinary people could certainly not get away with that.
The US justice system doesn't start from fair. It starts from what you can prove to the letter of the law.
And when you're targeting someone / something with unlimited lawyers, you'd better have ironclad evidence that exactly that happened in exactly the way the claim is written.
Okay, sure, but I'm talking about being satisfied. I understand reality and that I may not get the satisfaction I would like. And specifically the example of Al Capone who was, yeah, got for tax evasion, but at least was treated ultimately like the criminal he was.
I mean, he was sentenced to 11 years and served 7 1/2.
But untreated (at the time, no penicillin) syphilis turned him into a mental pre-teen after his release, so I guess the universe serves some justice where the laws of the land do not.
I'm kinda being upset because on top of his ridiculously amoral and sometimes illegal behavior there are people which lives were ruined because they shared few mp3 files. Now this person once again — have absolutely no responsibility for his actions even for something so idiotic like copyright infringement when others were severely punished.
Lets define more things society doesn't want to happen as not-crimes so we can do more of them.
Principles and law (that determines 'crime', a legal word) are not the same thing.
Why not both?
What are his real crimes?
Because the rich can do it and we can’t.
I do it literally all the time.
You pirate other people’s works for profit all the time?
Since when has Meta profited off of this shit? I don't know why their stock price hasn't cratered yet, but it's not because they're raking in the big cash training LLMs on 40 yr old cookbooks.
The Metaverse wasn’t a great success either, but do you think the motive wasn’t profit? Do you think Meta is a public benefit corporation?
We could have a conversation about that. Or rather, I could have a conversation about it with someone intelligent, who can actually appreciate nuance and detail. You've got some sort of mental caricature of mustache-twirling billionaires, where everything is "profit".
It's pretty clear that Meta wasn't about profit, given that no amount of "sunk cost" could explain what happened. That had more to do with self-aggrandizement and his belief that he was some sort of digital messiah that would get to usher humanity into another world.
Surely the board and shareholders were lead to believe it was for a profit motive. Nobody puts billions of dollars of stock positions into a worse version of Second Life because they think it’s a world changer. They do it to make more money than putting their investments elsewhere. The company said repeatedly that the Metaverse was where trade and business would increasingly happen in the future.
A bad bet doesn’t mean the motive wasn’t to win the bet.
It's the increase in emotionality, principles loosely held, it allows a particular goal they get tossed, Tbc this extends far beyond the current topic and commenters.
I a just world he should end forever in jail for the things he has done