5 ms·
What'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
by qingcharles 6mo ago
What'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.
- ethbr1 6mo agoThe 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.
- timcobb 6mo agoOkay, 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.
- ethbr1 6mo agoI 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.
- hsuduebc2 6mo agoI'm kinda being upset because on top of his ridiculously amoral and sometimes illegal behavior there are people which lives were ruined because they shared few mp3 files. Now this person once again — have absolutely no responsibility for his actions even for something so idiotic like copyright infringement when others were severely punished.
- j-bos 6mo agoIt's the increase in emotionality, principles loosely held, it allows a particular goal they get tossed, Tbc this extends far beyond the current topic and commenters.
- archagon 6mo agoBecause the rich can do it and we can’t.
- protocolture 6mo agoI do it literally all the time.
- cestith 6mo agoYou pirate other people’s works for profit all the time?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo agoSince when has Meta profited off of this shit? I don't know why their stock price hasn't cratered yet, but it's not because they're raking in the big cash training LLMs on 40 yr old cookbooks.
- cestith 6mo agoThe Metaverse wasn’t a great success either, but do you think the motive wasn’t profit? Do you think Meta is a public benefit corporation?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo agoWe could have a conversation about that. Or rather, I could have a conversation about it with someone intelligent, who can actually appreciate nuance and detail. You've got some sort of mental caricature of mustache-twirling billionaires, where everything is "profit". It's pretty clear that Meta wasn't about profit, given that no amount of "sunk cost" could explain what happened. That had more to do with self-aggrandizement and his belief that he was some sort of digital messiah that would get to usher humanity into another world.
- 6mo ago
- verisimi 6mo agoPrinciples and law (that determines 'crime', a legal word) are not the same thing.
- matheusmoreira 6mo agoI'm a copyright abolitionist. I don't care at all that they're training AIs on copyrighted works. I care a lot that they're not getting relentlessly hunted down by the copyright industry for it like all the "pirates" that came before them. The copyright industry has actually ruined lives by litigating their "infringement" nonsense. It's only fair that they go after this guy as well. His constant violation of people's privacy is also horrendous and worthy of condemnation, but that's not directly related to the copyright infringement matter. It's a separate issue.
- bombcar 6mo agoIf this was guaranteed to result in either Facebook being completely destroyed, or copyright abolished, I’d be ride-or-die for either outcome. But we all know it’ll be a slap on the wrist for Meta and nothing will change.
- thrance 6mo agoYes, wanting the law to be applied fairly isn't incompatible with also seeking to change it.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo ago"X shouldn't be illegal at all" and "I want this person or company I hate to be ruined for having done X" aren't mutually reasonable positions. Even less so when the person or company you hate has committed real crimes. Grow up.
- matheusmoreira 6mo agoThey are perfectly reasonable positions. "X shouldn't be illegal" implies that it is, in fact, currently illegal. Therefore Facebook and its executives and especially its CEO should absolutely suffer the full consequences of violating those laws, just like all of those people the copyright industry ruthlessly prosecuted. Anything less than this means it's rules for thee and not for me. Laws cease to have meaning when people realize and internalize the idea that they are just tools of the elite to keep the poors in line instead of proper instruments of justice that apply to everyone equally. That's an extremely dangerous thing for the public to realize and internalize, for obvious reasons.
- shrubby 6mo agohttps://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/ Cory Doctorow wrote a nice summary of the Zuckerstreisand book by Sarah Wynn-Williams. "First, Facebook becomes too big to fail. Then, Facebook becomes too big to jail. Finally, Facebook becomes too big to care."
- qingcharles 6mo agoThank you, that was the quote I was thinking of, but couldn't remember.
- matheusmoreira 6mo ago> When Wynn-Williams give birth to her second child, she hemorrhages, almost dies, and ends up in a coma. > Afterwards, Kaplan gives her a negative performance review because she was "unresponsive" to his emails and texts while she was dying in an ICU. Holy shit.
- AgentME 6mo agoI liked Doctorow better before he cheered for stricter copyright enforcement.
- fsflover 6mo agoHe has always been against hypocrisy.
- gherkinnn 6mo ago> Eventually, [Zuckerberg] manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down. That Mark never fails to deliver.
- malshe 6mo agoWhen I read that I felt bad for his then unborn child who was already being used by his father for pushing his nefarious business on to a dictator
- nadermx 6mo agoI just don't see why everyone seems to not be cheering that perhaps we are not going to go back to the days where all those kids are going to be re charged. It almost feels like everyone wants to go back to labels carpet bombing students with lawsuits[0] [0] https://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/riaa-v-thepeople.html https://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/riaa-v-thepeople.html
- themafia 6mo agoFalse dichotomy. We can obviously have both. We can destroy corporations that rely on copyright to exist and then abuse that system to profit. We can also ignore college students and minor contributory copyright infringement. The difference in scope here should be obvious. We can similarly punish drug dealers while not punishing drug users. In fact it's already policy in large parts of the USA.
- nadermx 6mo agoTo quote another user in this thread "Thats such a non sequitur. This isnt a weed legalisation argument, its "Do we make IP worse for everyone, because you dont like some people benefiting from fair use"."
- armada651 6mo agoWhen corporations were posed with this question numerous times in the past, their answer has always been an emphatic "Yes!".
- Teever 6mo agoBecause the 'perhaps' there is a load-bearing word that is doing a lot of work and it's going to be come crashing down sooner or later. Of course some kids are going to be charged for this kind of shit, it's still a rules for thee but not for me world, the 'not for me' folks are just a hell of a lot more brazen about it.
- davkan 6mo agoAs someone who’s engaged in private piracy basically my entire life I’ve never even considered venturing into gray areas of licensing when procuring for my company. In fact I’ve done the opposite and rooted it out wherever I’ve found it. It just seems obvious to me that a profit seeking venture should be held to a higher standard when it comes to infringing on the property rights of other companies and individuals, especially if they seek to enforce their own. Those kids weren’t hypocritically enforcing their own property rights and making employees sign ndas while downloading shit from tpb.
- matheusmoreira 6mo agoDefinitely what pisses me off the most. All these "pirates"? Arrested. Why isn't the copyright industry raiding the homes of these tech billionaires then? Why isn't SWAT pointing guns at their faces while the squad seizes all of their computers and equipment? Why aren't these CEOs in cuffs?
- chadgpt2 6mo agoBecause society is based on power structures and the people at the top of power structures generally do not arrest themselves.
- falsemyrmidon 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records%2C_Inc._v._Thomas-Rasset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records%2C_Inc._v._Tho... 24 songs and was at one point $80k per song, almost 20 years ago. Let's let Zuck off with an even 100k per infringement.
- cestith 6mo agoIt was his decision and he conspired with his employees to do it for profit. The statutory maximum IIRC is around $250k per work, on the criminal enforcement side. If the rights holders can show actual damages greater than that they can sue civilly for those damages plus some fixed amount per work.
- _s_a_m_ 6mo agoI a just world he should end forever in jail for the things he has done
- borgai 6mo agodidn't all of this ai stuff happen because they gave away llama? worth it imo