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The law only exists for those without enough money and influence to control the enforcers.

wat10000 1y ago
They don’t even need control. It’s a version of the old saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars then you have a problem, but if you owe a billion dollars then the bank has a problem. If your company is important enough then it’s not possible (at least not politically) to punish it significantly. See also: 2008 and “too big to fail.”
- nradov 1y ago
  Perplexity is still a small startup. If Enron and Theranos could be published then Perplexity can be punished. So far it's unclear whether they've done anything illegal.
  - wat10000 1y ago
    It’s very difficult to punish Perplexity without also hitting OpenAI, Grok, Google, Facebook, etc. It’s plenty clear to me that they’ve broken copyright law a lot. They’ve downloaded copyrighted material without permission for their own use, which we’ve been assured is Not Good for us individual people. Some of them even redistributed it by seeding torrents, which is even more Not Good.
    - nradov 1y ago
      It only seems "plenty clear" to you because you're ignorant about the basics of copyright law in the USA and Japan. Fortunately we have actual courts to decide these issues. The applicable laws (including centuries of case law in the USA) are complex and whether particular actions are legal often depends on nuances that aren't covered in news articles.
      - wat10000 1y ago
        I’m not talking about Japan. In the US, seeding a torrent containing copyrighted material without authorization from the copyright holder is unambiguously a copyright violation.
        freetime2 1y ago
        Presumably you are talking about this case, where Meta is accused of having downloaded a bunch of having torrented a bunch of copyrighted works. [1] Of relevance here is the fact that 1) Meta denies having seeded the content, and there looks to be no hard evidence that they distributed the content to other users, 2) the case is ongoing, so a decision has not yet been reached about whether they broke any laws, and 3) the fact that Meta is being sued for this shows that even corporations worth trillions of dollars are not immune to the consequences of breaking the law. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-defends-using-pirated-material-claims-its-legal-if-you-dont-seed-content https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
        wat10000 1y ago
        Of course they’re not immune to consequences. It’s just that the consequences are so relatively small that they don’t really care. Reminds me of the quote about how the law treats everyone equally: both rich and poor are forbidden to sleep under bridges, beg, and steal bread.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    > Perplexity is still a small startup. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perplexity-ai https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perplexity-ai I don’t know how to parse this. I don’t think of them as small. Though they were only founded in 2022 and may not have a huge number of employees, they have had 8 funding rounds. They’re private, so I don’t know what they have raised, but some say that the company could have a $18B valuation. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-17/ai-startup-perplexity-valued-at-18-billion-with-new-funding https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-17/ai-startu... | https://archive.is/6DZpo https://archive.is/6DZpo Is that small?

They don’t even need control. It’s a version of the old saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars then you have a problem, but if you owe a billion dollars then the bank has a problem. If your company is important enough then it’s not possible (at least not politically) to punish it significantly. See also: 2008 and “too big to fail.”

nradov 1y ago
Perplexity is still a small startup. If Enron and Theranos could be published then Perplexity can be punished. So far it's unclear whether they've done anything illegal.
- wat10000 1y ago
  It’s very difficult to punish Perplexity without also hitting OpenAI, Grok, Google, Facebook, etc. It’s plenty clear to me that they’ve broken copyright law a lot. They’ve downloaded copyrighted material without permission for their own use, which we’ve been assured is Not Good for us individual people. Some of them even redistributed it by seeding torrents, which is even more Not Good.
  - nradov 1y ago
    It only seems "plenty clear" to you because you're ignorant about the basics of copyright law in the USA and Japan. Fortunately we have actual courts to decide these issues. The applicable laws (including centuries of case law in the USA) are complex and whether particular actions are legal often depends on nuances that aren't covered in news articles.
    - wat10000 1y ago
      I’m not talking about Japan. In the US, seeding a torrent containing copyrighted material without authorization from the copyright holder is unambiguously a copyright violation.
      - freetime2 1y ago
        Presumably you are talking about this case, where Meta is accused of having downloaded a bunch of having torrented a bunch of copyrighted works. [1] Of relevance here is the fact that 1) Meta denies having seeded the content, and there looks to be no hard evidence that they distributed the content to other users, 2) the case is ongoing, so a decision has not yet been reached about whether they broke any laws, and 3) the fact that Meta is being sued for this shows that even corporations worth trillions of dollars are not immune to the consequences of breaking the law. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-defends-using-pirated-material-claims-its-legal-if-you-dont-seed-content https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
        wat10000 1y ago
        Of course they’re not immune to consequences. It’s just that the consequences are so relatively small that they don’t really care. Reminds me of the quote about how the law treats everyone equally: both rich and poor are forbidden to sleep under bridges, beg, and steal bread.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  > Perplexity is still a small startup. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perplexity-ai https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perplexity-ai I don’t know how to parse this. I don’t think of them as small. Though they were only founded in 2022 and may not have a huge number of employees, they have had 8 funding rounds. They’re private, so I don’t know what they have raised, but some say that the company could have a $18B valuation. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-17/ai-startup-perplexity-valued-at-18-billion-with-new-funding https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-17/ai-startu... | https://archive.is/6DZpo https://archive.is/6DZpo Is that small?