251–260 of 981 posts
So according to some AI, the damages awarded per infringed work is ~$750 minimum in the US. 80TB of books, each let's say 10MB on average, would be 8 million works. So Meta should pay 6 billion USD for their copyright infringement?
Can you calculate how many years that would be for Mark and his people?
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The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb and Uber for violating the law was that initially they were subsidized with VC money and so were able to undercut traditional hotels and taxis on price. In the world of tradable goods, pricing below cost with the intent of putting competition out of business so you can raise prices later is known as "dumping" and is itself illegal.
The reason is that everyone who was supposed to do something about it was "subsidized with VC money".
Libgen is a civilizational project that should be endorsed, not prosecuted. I hope one day people will look at it and think how stupid we were today to shun the largest collection of literary works in human history.
I think you’re overstating its importance. The internet already makes it possible to order almost any book in existence and have it arrive at your doorstep within a week or so, or often on your ebook reader instantly. And your local library probably participates in an interlibrary loan system that lets you request any book held by any library in the country for free . LibGen gives you access to a much smaller body of…
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Exactly. Everyone should have the right to have access to this.
Are you sure that everything should be in the public domain? Say you spend a year writing a book, shouldn't you be able to sell it?
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I think it’s fine to criticize the hypocrisy of viciously defending the copyrights you own, while gleefully running roughshod over the ones you don’t. But it’s also possible that copyright as a concept, or in its current implementation, is bad and unjust. I’m sure some copyright holders would like nothing more than to see an argument that elevates copyright violation to the level of murder, morally or legally. But I…
the reform needs to happen at the layer where whether a copyright is valid or not is decided upon, not before (at the point of "should copyright exist") and not after (enforcement). a world without copyright means those with the largest advertising budgets will reap nearly all the rewards from new IP created by small artists. BigCorp Inc. can just sit around and wait for talented musicians to post something interesti…
If copyright disappeared altogether, most smaller artists would be just fine because they have loyal fans and adjacent monetization strategies.
See: Grateful Dead. They did just fine despite encouraging infringement of IP.
IMO copyright mostly serves to protect the very biggest artists and companies, not the small ones.
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Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the extent that the political will to enforce them exists. Throw enough lawyers and lobbying money at the problem and the laws can simply be re-written to be friendlier to your business model.
The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb and Uber for violating the law was that initially they were subsidized with VC money and so were able to undercut traditional hotels and taxis on price. In the world of tradable goods, pricing below cost with the intent of putting competition out of business so you can raise prices later is known as "dumping" and is itself illegal.
Or is it just "illegal" for an overseas competitor to a domestic industry, in trade disputes?
What is the fine? How many days in jail does the company spend? What portion is its stock diluted by?
We remember the tale of Jeff Bezouis the Wise, who tragically lost his company when he decided he didn't want to buy diapers.com at the offered price, and instead wanted to dump 200 million dollars into selling diapers well below cost until their site folded.
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" If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life." This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
Wilhoit’s law: > There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
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the english empire once tried to mantain a monopoly over steam loom machines the americans cheated their way to competition, heck, even before that, the english empire got jumpstarted by stealing gold from the spanish (who were themselves exploiting it away from aztec and other mexican natives) I'm saying it's business as usual, but also, culture doesn't work like tangible physical widgets so we must stop letting a f…
Why do I get sued when I share some BitTorrents but $bigcorp can just do it with 1000 scale without problems? The issue here is not copyright/patents/etc - the issue is that the law is applied selectively — the issue is that Aaron Schwartz is dead for sharing knowledge with the public and Zuccborg is a billionaire building his torment nexus
Considering prices for single work, this must be multi-billion dollar compensation. Take for example 675k paid for 31 songs. So 20k a song. If we estimate book to be say 10MB that would 8 million works. So I think reasonable compensation is something along 163 billion. Not even 10 years of net income. Which I think is entirely fair punishment.
Meta argues that it's fair use, and that they just downloaded, and never seeded, all the torrents.