this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Jammie Rasset got tagged for $1.9M for sharing 24 songs, so if we extend the per instance to this case I'm pretty sure Meta owes more money than has existed in human history...
Let's do some math. Some searching suggests the average size of an e-book is about 3 MB. 82 TB means they pirated about 27 million e-books. At the rate of Russet's fine, that would come to damages of $2.2 trillion. So not more money than has ever is about 4x Meta's entire market cap.
I hope the book publishers sue Meta and end up owning Facebook and Instagram. Not that I expect one evil megacorp to inevitably fix all the ills of another. But it would be hard to make Facebook any worse than it currently is.
3Mb is mostly the cover art.
The text is usually only 100-150kb. So if they only got text, it could be 20x higher.
$44T, now we are talking about real money.
I mean, 4x the market cap of Meta, 80x, it makes little difference. The key is the book publishers should end up owning Meta. Again, I wouldn't expect them to necessarily turn Facebook into some revitalized utopia. But I think at least a bunch of stodgy old book publishers wouldn't be so overtly cartoonishly fascist at the very least.
This needs a theydidthemath comm to post to. 🙂
I’m not sure how I feel just remaking all the things on the new thing. Nothing stopping you from doing it of course. And I can block it easily enough. I guess do what makes you happy.
Internet culture is a leaky thing. A major chunk of meme and comic formats where born in 4chan and they've been adopted virtually everywhere on the web despite coming from a place that takes a certain level of self hate to stomach for any length of time. Lemmy is functionally a clone of reddit right down to the logo similarity. Trying to claim that somehow it's a different unique corner of the web and exercise in futility.
There is a book, Year Zero, that covers this idea. I didn't much care for the writing, but the plot was a fun idea. Aliens discovered Earth, and Humans had a unique talent for creating music. So the entire universe started sharing human music before they realized their mistake. Intergalactic law says they have to respect our copyright law, but they didn't know such a crazy concept existed until they owed practically the entire universe to Earth. Some alien races decided the solution was to just blow up Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(Reid_novel)
That's one of those things that fridge logic really hits hard. Because there are no fixed prices under Earth's laws. So in exchange for quintillions of dollars of Earth's music, the aliens could just sell us technology at the same or similar price.