Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing will happen to him/Meta while DJT is president. He bought the best protection around for breaking the law.
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Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
151–160 of 484 posts
Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you steal a book and read it, should you have to pay every time you use the knowledge gained or recall parts of it from memory?
If I charged people for the privilege of listening to me recite relevant parts of the book to them for profit? Yes. Depending on the copyright.
So like a teacher?
Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
#153Looking forward to the personal liability. I've wondered what the legalese justification for letting liability evaporate as it does so often with corps. So far the reasons I'm left with are ' shrugs ' and 'the relevant provision (seemingly? apparently?) simply don't apply', neither of which are any good. I was going to make a joke about how we should attach magnets to Aaron Swartz' corpse, since that'd make for a pre…
Alternate reality Aaron Swartz escaped canonization and is now running an AI/crypto startup that pays you to upload training data with his YC alum buddies
Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zuck can just take out loans against his equity. He doesn’t need to sell any of it to benefit from Metas “worth”
Plus, the money he borrows is not taxable. If he sold stock he would have to pay taxes before he could spend the income. Sure, he now owes money to someone, but he can refinance those loans again and again, and live tax-free the rest of his life while we, poor working stiffs, pay the taxes that built the airport where he parks the private jet he bought with the money he borrowed.
People seem to get the weird idea that borrowing against their stock holdings is some special thing rich people get to do with products that the rest of us don't have access to. It's not. Margin loans are widely available to the tune of ff+1%ish or lower, and if your brokerage's publicly offered rates are probably a ripoff, they're almost certainly negotiable. The bar for access to "institutional" rates is basically 100k, the regulatory requirement for portfolio margin.
Yes, there are specialized products catered to billionaires. But those aren't getting them better rates than someone with a $200k portfolio (Zuck is not conventionally a less risky borrower than the Options Clearing Corporation!). They exist to work around the fact that some borrowers can't just casually liquidate their stock on the open market, let alone at face value. By all accounts these products are more expensive than retail.
Mostly this is an expensive (but maybe still less expensive than taxes, depending on the rate environment—it's more of a no-brainer in ZIRPland) way to diversify out of a single-stock portfolio without selling by adding leverage. At Zuck's age, it's still very unlikely to make sense to borrow instead of sell to spend. He's been known to pay real taxes in the past, they just look small relative to his imputed wealth growth because rich people don't spend a lot relative to their wealth growth because they, quite by definition, have a lot of wealth.
Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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?
Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
#156Shouldn't this stuff trigger RICO? Why do torrent site operators get led off in cuffs for running operations that usually lose money, but Zuck doesn't? RICO specifically cites "criminal infringement of a copyright" as laid out in 18 U.S. Code § 2319. If the CEO tells his employees to download hundreds of thousands of works illegally in order to carry out his money-making scheme, how is that not organized crime even i…
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Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
#157Looking forward to the personal liability. I've wondered what the legalese justification for letting liability evaporate as it does so often with corps. So far the reasons I'm left with are ' shrugs ' and 'the relevant provision (seemingly? apparently?) simply don't apply', neither of which are any good. I was going to make a joke about how we should attach magnets to Aaron Swartz' corpse, since that'd make for a pre…
Alternate reality Aaron Swartz escaped canonization and is now running an AI/crypto startup that pays you to upload training data with his YC alum buddies
Every now and then, I feel like we live in the worst possible world. Then I realise it could be much worse.
This does not comfort me.
Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
#158Just gonna say... Aaron Swartz faced years of prison time and ultimately decided to take his own life... for downloading scientific journal articles ... to share freely with the world (aka not even profiting from it). But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that…
One man illegally downloading copyrighted material is a crime. Multinational corporations illegally downloading copyrighted material is the only remaining growth area in the US economy and vital to national security.
Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
#159I should hope that if Zuckerberg isn't severely punished for this, it at least sets a legal precedent for every other person to do the same with immunity.
All the Aaron Schwartzes of the future could freely share scientific papers with the world.
Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you steal a book and read it, should you have to pay every time you use the knowledge gained or recall parts of it from memory?
No. People are not LLMs. And even if some argue that they are mechanically similar, they are legally distinct.
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