Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by SketchySeaBeast 502 days ago
I really don't think that Meta did this because the alternative would have been too onerous; they are a huge org, they could work through whatever loopholes required. They did it because it would have cost money and there will be no penalty for not paying.
1 comments
impossiblefork 501 days ago
So, if they're sued in Japan, or France, do you think that the courts will take any special measures because it's a valuable American corporation?

I suspect that if the case is reasonable they will just convict, and quickly-- appeal denied and all simply because the laws are so straightforward.

link
SketchySeaBeast 501 days ago
I must have failed to clearly express myself - I don't think Meta should be doing what they are doing, I hope they do end up being punished. But the only way that Meta is going to change its behaviour is by being held accountable in a way that's much more difficult and costly than if they'd simply followed the law in the first place.
link
impossiblefork 501 days ago
Ah, I'm not sure exactly what I believe here, but this kind of torrenting is obviously illegal-- I'm personally split on how I feel about it morally, because some of these people really are trying to preserve knowledge, and I think that's commendable, at the same time, commercial piracy is something which really does screw over authors with it being some kind of theft-of-service type thing where people exploit other people's work-- and if they felt that the work had no value they could have written another text themselves.

I only really wanted to convey that I believed that it probably isn't obviously easy for Meta to get away with anything in this, even if the US government decides to be lenient for the sake of a high market-cap US company simply because other countries are a viable place to sue as well.

I think I misinterpreted your comment as that you thought that Meta thought that costs would be low because they imagined a US court system that simply ignored the illegality because it's they who committed it, when nothing like that is actually implied in your comment.

link