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Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

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Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#401

Post by 2ndorderthought »

Cider9986 wrote: post #244
2ndorderthought wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because meta will delay any case for several years. Then the lawyers will settle for 1/100th to 1/1000th of what they stole quietly. Meta will rebrand and change its name again just like it did after its last major scandal. No accountability for rich people has funny patterns like this.

They might not need to change their name. I don't think that copyright infringement is seen as bad by Americans compared to the privacy stuff that Facebook is known for—not that most Americans care about privacy, I guess I don't really know why Facebook rebranded. Personally, I would be happy if AI companies are what finally take down intellectual monopoly (intellectual property). I know being anti-intellectual-monop…

You are entitled into your world view. What I personally would prefer to see would be laws that strengthened individual copyright and weakened the predatory behavior of big players who copyright and patent every single thing.

I see the ability for trillion dollar companies to wash their hands of any wrong doing for stealing all the intellectual property of the world as incredibly dangerous for innovation in the US.

So for me I would rather see reform then an abandonment. There wouldn't be much of anything to pirate if there was no incentive or protection to create in the first place.

In my mind the biggest threat the average person faces would be billionaires who can operate with impunity. Rather then a fine for pirating a book or a movie. It would be nice if the fines were proportionate to the value of the item... I digress

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#402

Post by litoE »

bombcar wrote: post #388
naniwaduni wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’ve never seen it explained as to how it’s different in kind from a home equity loan - you still need income from something to pay the loan back (and if you say you pay it from the loan proceeds you’re just donating to a bank with extra steps).

It's very simple: if the terms are satisfactory and against an agreed upon collateral (e.g. shares) banks will give you a loan that does not require periodic payments. The interest on the loan does accumulate of course, and is just added to the principal that the borrower owes. The bank is happy as long as the value of the collateral is higher than the current outstanding loan. If the loan is in danger of going "under water" the bank can either liquidate the collateral to pay itself, or the borrower can renegotiate the loan and deposit additional shares.

It's similar to a reverse mortgage. Say Fred and Wilma own a house worth $4MM with no mortgage on it. With a reverse mortgage a bank will lend them $2MM. Fred and Wilma make no payments and continue to live in their house, spending the $2MM while the interest on that loan just increases the amount they owe the bank. After both Fred and Wilma have passed away the house is sold and the proceeds are used to pay back the outstanding loan. If there's still money left over, it goes to their heirs. If the sale comes up short, the bank loses money, which is why these reverse mortgages are typically less than 50% of the value of the house and they typically have higher interest rates than conventional mortgages. From Fred and Wilma's point of view, they can use the value of their house now, while continuing to live in it. They essentially spend their children's inheritance.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#404

Post by ethbr1 »

timcobb wrote: post #393
ethbr1 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#405

Post by [deleted] »

triceratops wrote: post #392
qarl wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just happy you agree with me.

I don't agree with most of what you've said on this discussion. I couldn't have been clearer about that in my other replies. The only part I did agree on was a hypothetical that hasn't happened.

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#406

Post by qarl »

triceratops wrote: post #392
qarl wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just happy you agree with me.

I don't agree with most of what you've said on this discussion. I couldn't have been clearer about that in my other replies. The only part I did agree on was a hypothetical that hasn't happened.

[dead]

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#407

Post by lenerdenator »

ginko wrote: post #101
lenerdenator wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#408

Post by nojvek »

Telaneo wrote: post #139
motbus3 wrote: post #98

I know personally a case of a engineer who was told to do something despite all the legal problems because the company had lawyers for a reason

I'd love for that to come out during discovery when the lawsuit hits, but it probably never will. Blowing the whistle is also not a great option in this economy, although I wish more people did.

If it wasn’t written down and there’s no recordings of it, hard to prove.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#409

Post by butlike »

Nevermark wrote: post #331
ben_w wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company being "worth" some amount doesn't mean it has that much money and real property; it means there exist people willing to buy shares, on the margin, at a price which works out like that. One of the common (very rough) approximations is that a business is worth as much as the profit it's expected to make over the next 20 years. But one of the reasons (there are many) that this is only a rough guide, is that if…

Yes it is a different kind of worth, but it is not worth less because of it. This common argument to not take market cap valuations seriously doesn't hold. True, Meta as an entire entity is not liquid. A forced sale in entirety would produce a massive reduction in compensation. But that is a highly unlikely and contingent reduction. It is also true that if you have Meta's equivalent in cash, the value of the cash is…

Would it be accurate to say market cap valuations are intrinsically valuable because they drive people to buy shares by projecting success?

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#410

Post by k33n »

Larrikin wrote: post #394
k33n wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m simply a regular guy who got exactly what I wanted when Trump was elected. Of course I’m speaking in good faith. That’s why misguided, bad faith participants flag my reasonable remarks or send insults instead of staying on topic. It’s just emotional meltdowns.

Many people also got exactly what they wanted when slavery was legal or when your elected officials had sex with children. There has been justification for both with "reasonable" remarks about eugenics and girls maturing faster. I think you know what you want and just don't care about other people if it helps you specifically.

Which of my elected officials “had sex” with children? In my Republican-led state of Florida, we give the death penalty to people who do that. Why don’t they do that in California?

As for human trafficking in general, Trump has objectively enabled ICE, the FBI and others to aggressively target that sort of behavior.

As for slavery, the US is one of the countries that fought a war to end that thousands of years old practice.

Anyway, I like Trump, and by all accounts, that goes against the grain. You’re going expressly WITH the grain. That doesn’t indicate that had you been born in the 1600’s you’d have spoken out about slavery. You’re a with the grain guy. And with the grain guys will go along with whatever the moral consensus of the times are.

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