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tikimcfee • yesterday at 1:39 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

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.

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ben_w • yesterday at 1:56 PM

> $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:

  This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use was a fair use. And, it grants that the print-to-digital format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it denies summary judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as training copies.

  We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness). That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages. Nothing is foreclosed as to any other copies flowing from library copies for uses other than for training LLMs.
Specifically in that last paragraph:

  Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it
Because guess what Anthropic decided, internally, all by itself? That's right, to not break the law.
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