Is there any other possible outcome than a fine? That too one which will not really affect Meta's overall earnings

Ideally we have a conversation about how we as society have ended up in a situations where we have a two tier justice system.

At a minimum the starting point of discussion here should be that if life ruining $80,000 per item is an acceptable fine for individuals then why is it not the same for corporations. Which would probably get you a number in the trillions at which point we could have a discussion about reforming this entire system.

But yes realistically slap on wrist is what is going to happen here.

> Is there any other possible outcome than a fine?

Yes, of course.

It's quite possible that judges realize that if they restrict training data to licensed materials, LLMs will become stupid and China will overtake the US to become the leader in AI, and because that can't happen, they'll make up some reason to make training on unlicensed data legal. It's definitely fair use!

I'm not even joking. Last time the US Supreme Court basically said "Android is too important, we have to declare its use of Java API fair use."

> Last time the US Supreme Court basically said "Android is too important, we have to declare its use of Java API fair use."

Yes, I remember that case. I do think a hefty fine can be sufficient here though. Meta has been paying out court ordered fines for years, none of which dent their growth much. And current models are trained on those models + datasets are scrubbed more vigorously now so future rehashes of this shouldn't be an issue. Also, most data online has already been hoovered up, according to Ilya the former Chief Scientist of OpenAI, so this will likely not pop back up again.

But good point, courts are often more practical given the law than we perceive them to be.

The reality of the situation is that the economic value and utility of AI is going to cause the laws to be restructured around them.