> 3000$ per book, split 50/50 between the author and publisher.
> This is peanuts.
If you consider it peanuts, I would like to sell you some books.
Remember that in this case, the crime wasn't for training on the data (that part was ruled to be legal!), this was the penalty just for pirating the books.
I get so tired by this.
Yes. It's not proportional to the crime. 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.
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.
Fix your relative understanding of power and influence.
Fix your relative understanding of how much the average book makes.
It doesn't matter how much it makes. If the system finds that you've financially damaged someone, you aren't asked to just pay back the exact retail price of one unit. It can account for the overall damage to the owner, your scale, ability to pay, and the time and money wasted to get the money out of you. The penalty can be anything.
> 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.
> 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.
On that we agree.
> So if they do it again, it's another billion?
Judges don't like repeat offenders; the settlement was separate to the court case, but if it came to a court case, a judge would likely pick a bigger number. Especially as they earn a lot more now.
> 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.
While a generally useful concern, not particularly pertinent to a negotiated settlement.
> Like, I don't even detect a mote of "what they did is not ok."
One point five billion dollars is a strange idea for a lack of mote.
I mean, brother, if that's the mote in your eye, I'd hate to find out what the beam is.
> 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.
The closer I look at it, the more I think the entirety of what we call "civilisation", legal system included, is a terrifyingly bodged together nightmare of duct tape and gremlins, codified in weird rituals and a smattering of latin and robes, where we only just about manage to not burn everything down by the collective will of enough people in the system wanting to be around for the next paycheque.
However, untangling a few millennia of spaghetti code written without the benefit of any automated checks, is beyond even governments who actively campaign on that as a platform, so what good would it do me or you to whinge about one specific case where it seemed to have actually gone approximately correctly for once?
> But you spending any time in your life to make this argument at all in their case is just goofy.
Read the actual court case please, it's not too challenging and I'm not even a lawyer: https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...
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.Internet friend human thing..
I mean come on.
"They decided to not break the law by breaking the law and then getting worried so they tried to unbreak it."
... seriously?
"I decided to speed but realized that was bad and I didn't get caught yet so I slowed down. Oh look a cop, guess I dodged a bullet! I guess I can speed buy just be careful."
"I decided to steal a cookie but I was worried so I baked a new cookie and put it back. That means stealing is ok if I eventually put it back! Why even bother with asking for permission in the first place?"
I do not think you are willfully missing this, and I'm glad you also saw the note about "the extent of statutory damages".
Like, you probably like Star Trek TNG. Remember the episode, alien kills all the Uthnocks to cherish a woman in self penance, Picard looks at the alien and says, "we have no law for your crime"?
The point was to paint an exaggerated picture of what happens when to disproportionately empowered groups meet a moral system where one is clearly in the wrong but cannot be held accountable because the system of justice just hasn't written down enough words to explain that - indeed - one should not kill all the Uthnocks.
I'm angry at your argument and I'm angry at the way it is often repeated, and I do not want to make personal attacks and I apologize that my language points that way.
You are also pointing language at me that is telling me that I cannot trust your system of justice that you envision because, somewhere, there is difference in how and I see what justice is supposed to do when at different scales, and I do not know of a human way to resolve it but discuss is with the fervor that it deserves.
Edit: I won't delve deeper into this discussion because neither you nor I can change it right now. I hope you reading what I wrote changes some way you see this, and I hope that I can see something in what you're saying. This is a forum for discussing technology, business of it, and its effect locally and globally and not getting mad at each other. I did not frame my anger toward the argument and framed it at the people making the argument, and that was my mistake.
> "They decided to not break the law by breaking the law and then getting worried so they tried to unbreak it."
I did not say that. Try harder. I don't care to read the rest when you open with such an incorrect reading of my words.
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".