alt Hacker News“$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.”
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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.
> 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.