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.