My uncle went to jail for picking up someone in an airport in his taxi. He didnt have the airport permit (could only drop off, not pick up). Travis Kalanick industrialized that crime on a grand scale and got billions of dollars instead of jail.
Just for copyright infringement? You might like to have a word with Aaron Swartz, except he ended his life as he was being Federally prosecuted for copyright infringement, copying scientific articles.
Remarkably similar, bulk copying of data for other use, except Swartz wanted to make it free vs Anthropic, who wants to make it available via it's "AI" repackaging. One is Federally prosecuted with possibility of decades of jail time and million-dollar fines, the other is a mere civil action.
But we almost never do. Have you seen the legal code? Every large corporation commits criminal acts many times a day. Even crimes so serious or offensive that they become politically relevant are almost always dealt with in a totally hands-off manner.
To actually get convicted of anything as a corporate officer, you have to have substantially defrauded your own shareholders, who are senior to the public's interest in justice. Most such crimes involve financial malfeasance.
1. Hit them with fines or punitive damages high enough to wipe out all their operating profit and executive pay for as many years as a person would be in prison.
2. Seize the company (retainership?), replace its executives, and make the new leaders sign off to not do that thing again. That's in addition to a huge fine.
3. Dissolve it. Liquidate its assets.
They usually just let the big companies off while throwing everything they have at many individuals who aren't corporations.
For settlement-type deals, maybe see if they'll give all authors they ripped off free access to Claude models, too. They reap the benefits of what was produced. At cost with certain amount of free credits.
For egregious cases, yes. Absolutely. That very short term pain is almost instantly offset by the societal gain brought about by companies' better adherence to the law. It's incredible just how much good it would do, and how quickly this would happen.
And please don't assume a "you wouldn't if it was your own employer" - no, I very much would, despite the struggles it would cause.
Companies cant think and act. Employees at companies commit crimes. Lets say that a boss at Microsoft commits a crime.
Entire company shutdown. All employees fired. All servers shutdown. All windows computers stop working. All companies using azure gets their stuff turned off. And so on.
Give the government partial ownership. This dilutes the other owners and ties them do the government. This gives the government more 'oversight' power over the business, just like jail. Give the government an oversite seat on the board.
There are many ways you can put a business in jail, we're just told you can't because that would inconvenience the current business models of breaking the laws/rules/obligations to 'streamline' business and 'innovate'.
You wont be put to jail if you breach copyright in almost any country, at least not just for downloading content from libgen or torrent. If you are talking about Swartz, he was going to jail for wire fraud and hacking not breaching copyright.
> Penalties to be applied in cases of criminal copyright infringement (i.e., violations of 17 U.S.C. § 506(a)), are set forth at 18 U.S.C. § 2319. Congress has increased these penalties substantially in recent years, and has broadened the scope of behaviors to which they can apply. See this Manual at 1847.
> Statutory penalties are found at 18 U.S.C. § 2319. A defendant, convicted for the first time of violating 17 U.S.C. § 506(a) by the unauthorized reproduction or distribution, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, or 1 or more copyrighted works, with a retail value of more than $2,500 can be imprisoned for up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2319(b), 3571(b)(3).
If you broaden it to include DMCA violations you could spend a lot of time in jail. It's even worse in some other countries.
Does the $2500 count if it is 25 $100 instances? Similarly does the 10 copies cover 10 items copied once or does it need to be one item copied at least 10 times?
He was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer.
Granted, the motivation was the copyright infringement, but to do what they did they needed to dress it up.
> Granted, the motivation was the copyright infringement
And this is why it is correct to say that he was persecuted for copyright infringement. Noting that he wasn't charged with anything related to copyright doesn't change the story, it only makes it less agreeable.
Gosh, now you've got me feeling old, as I remember inveterate fraudster "Kim Kimble" circa 2001, trying to convince everyone that he was a glorious visionary general of anti-Al-Queda army of hackers...
This settlement has nothing to do with any criminal liability Anrhropic might have, only tort liability (and it doesn’t involves damages, not fines.)