> $3000 because I stole a book and did something bad ruins my life, and could put me in a room where my personal freedoms are infringed. It is designed to disincentivize me from doing the bad thing.
Repeat after me: One point five billion is more than three thousand.
> you are able to pay the fee and not have your freedoms taken away to do it again
You too are able to pay as many fees as you want. Three thousand varies from life-changing to a slap on the wrist, even for non-unicorn-corps.
That this is a bad thing, that personal judgements should scale with personal means rather than be statutory, is a broad problem with the politics of lawmakers and the legal system: it also applies to speeding and littering.
> The point is to tell the thing doing the bad thing not to do the bad thing.
Then you will be pleased to read what the judge wrote:
This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use was a fair use. And, it grants that the print-to-digital format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it denies summary judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as training copies.
We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness). That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages. Nothing is foreclosed as to any other copies flowing from library copies for uses other than for training LLMs.
Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it