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A lot of people would be very pleased if this leads to Zuckerberg getting even the statutory minimum damages ($750?) on each infringement. The previous infring
by ben_w 6mo ago
A lot of people would be very pleased if this leads to Zuckerberg getting even the statutory minimum damages ($750?) on each infringement.
The previous infringement case with Anthropic said that while training an AI was transformative and not itself an infringement, pirating works for that purpose still was definitely infringement all by itself. The settlement was $1.5bn, so close to $3k for each of the 500k they pirated, so if Zuckerberg pirated "millions" (plural) it is quite plausible his settlement could be $6bn.
- gloxkiqcza 6mo agoFor context, his net worth is ~$220 billion.
- azinman2 6mo agoAnd meta's worth is much more than that. He's not personally paying.
- ben_w 6mo agoA 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 you tried to sell too much of a big company all in one go, it usually depresses the price a lot, and the other way around (trying to buy a whole company) tends to raise the price a lot; both effects are because most people have different ideas about how much any given company is really worth despite that rough guide, and trade their shares at different prices while you're doing it. You may note this is a circular argument, this is indeed part of the problem. IIRC, Facebook's cash is more like $81-82 billion.
- financetechbro 6mo agoZuck can just take out loans against his equity. He doesn’t need to sell any of it to benefit from Metas “worth”
- litoE 6mo agoPlus, the money he borrows is not taxable. If he sold stock he would have to pay taxes before he could spend the income. Sure, he now owes money to someone, but he can refinance those loans again and again, and live tax-free the rest of his life while we, poor working stiffs, pay the taxes that built the airport where he parks the private jet he bought with the money he borrowed.
- naniwaduni 6mo agoPeople 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 100k, the regulatory requirement for portfolio margin. Yes, there are specialized products catered to billionaires. But those aren't getting them better rates than someone with a $200k portfolio (Zuck is not conventionally a less risky borrower than the Options Clearing Corporation!). They exist to work around the fact that some borrowers can't just casually liquidate their stock on the open market, let alone at face value. By all accounts these products are more expensive than retail. Mostly this is an expensive (but maybe still less expensive than taxes, depending on the rate environment—it's more of a no-brainer in ZIRPland) way to diversify out of a single-stock portfolio without selling by adding leverage. At Zuck's age, it's still very unlikely to make sense to borrow instead of sell to spend. He's been known to pay real taxes in the past, they just look small relative to his imputed wealth growth because rich people don't spend a lot relative to their wealth growth because they, quite by definition, have a lot of wealth.
- 6mo ago
- grebc 6mo agoNothing will happen to him/Meta while DJT is president. He bought the best protection around for breaking the law.
- GolfPopper 6mo ago[flagged]
- stackghost 6mo ago[flagged]
- dehrmann 6mo agoI'm not sure what Trump's levers are with this since it's a civil matter. There's no DOJ--it's publishers and an individual vs. Meta.
- kevin_thibedeau 6mo agoHe likes sham investigations of attorneys general.
- bamboozled 6mo agoThere will be not a single consequence for any of this.
- nielsbot 6mo agoIn a just system there would be jail time (if found guilty). Barring that a modest fine. Say, $1T.
- qingcharles 6mo agoWhat's frustrating is all those kids who got criminal charges for running MP3 sites back in the day [1], and this guy rips off every piece of media in existence and will walk away literally because he's too rich to be charged. [1] See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace#Legal_proceedings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace#Legal_pro...
- NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo agoWhat's frustrating is that I don't even consider infringement to be a crime. Why are you all so upset about this, rather than his real crimes?
- bix6 6mo agoWhat are his real crimes?
- stubish 6mo agoLets define more things society doesn't want to happen as not-crimes so we can do more of them.
- qingcharles 6mo agoWhy not both?
- ethbr1 6mo agoYou get Al Capone on the charge you can make stick.
- timcobb 6mo agoRight but Al Capone did jail time, here Zuck gets to break and enter into people's homes, take their stuff, then haggle for it after-the-fact, all the while keeping the civilization-domination apparatus that he built using the stuff he stole? That is super not fair. Ordinary people could certainly not get away with that.
- LastTrain 6mo agoThat’ll keep him from even thinking of doing something like that again! /s
- utopiah 6mo agoHere I am, finally cheering for IP lawyers. /$
- timcobb 6mo agoOkay but... I am very unimpressed by this. How is it that he then gets to still be an AI monopolist/hegemonist? How's that fair? He basically force-acquired all this stuff without asking, now he's haggling for it later. Where are the criminal charges? Where is the deprivement of, if not freedom, then equity assets.
- goofy_lemur 6mo agoI would be very pleased if Zuckerberg got away with it. I don't copyright or infringe, but honestly, he was the one guy of the big guys who released everything as open source. If he did the right thing, then we should all support his choice to use it under fair use. Freedom means that the state shouldn't punish a public benefactor. It makes me furious to see programmers fighting against an open source hero. If it was closed source for Meta profit, I understand. But they gave it away free, so it infuriates me that people support damages for a public benefactor. Churches and schools get free money from the government. We need a rule that open AI (not the company, I mean the actuality), can torrent whatever they want because it's for the public good. Otherwise the rich companies win and can pay their sources and the small guys are screwed. If Meta has to pay for their training data, they will need to profit from it and won't be able to offer it free. Nobody in their right mind would ever support the publishers here.