What these kinds of platform agreements usually say is that you, the licensor, agree that you are fully representing that you can issue that license, and that any infringement is thus your fault and not the platform-licensee’s. Under the DMCA and other sources of law this is plausible.

I know the comment is brief, but it's important to understand what it means when the infringement is 'your fault'.

If it's B's fault that it caused A to infringe on the copyright license of C, then that would be handled by B indemnifying A against a charge from C. C can still sue A, C can still win a suit against A, A would then utilize the contract with B to get reimbursed from B.

If B is small and can't afford to reimburse A, that's A's problem. If B goes out of business, that's A's problem.

In my field, we require this indemnification fairly frequently as we distribute content created by others where it's impossible to fully guarantee that content leaves us with no liability, in a reasonable timeframe of distribution.

We have many processes that give us a best effort to prevent us from distributing content that we would be financially liable for. We have processes where we let things go which are gray area, but the client has posted a bond with us and signed an indemnification agreement sufficient to cover the potential fine we may face if the content was an issue. Or we reject the same content from others who don't have that signed agreement and haven't posted that same bond. Sometimes we sign an agreement without a bond because we've had decades of experience with the client and the number of violations is small enough that we would eat the cost.

Compare both to bona fide insurance markets. If I buy insurance, there is a defined maximum payment. And if I defraud the insurer, I get in trouble. And the insurer knows that they’re getting into, and they understand the risks and get compensated appropriately.

When some random consumer contract states that the consumer indemnifies the service provider, the consumer usually has no idea what this means and probably literally never sees the contract text. There is rarely a limit specified and, if there is, it’s probably basically a joke. And the benefit to the consumer rarely has anything to do with the risk (in fact, often the consumer pays and supposedly indemnifies the party they’re paying).

And then we get to representations. In a real B2B contract negotiated by lawyers both sides, the representations are generally relevant, everyone does them, and the replying party is expected to do due diligence. But in contracts like this Meta thing, to the extent that there is a representation that the publisher can issue a license:

a) That representation has nothing to do with the actual reason the publisher is entering into a relationship with Meta (the customer probably just wants to run ads or use business messaging)

b) The customer is extremely unlikely to have had a lawyer review the contract and Meta would not allow any good faith negotiation anyway.

c) Meta is not doing due diligence.

I feel like some combination of a, b and c should invalidate Meta’s right to rely on the representations and, in an ideal world, would even serve as evidence of bad faith on Meta’s part and serve to shift additional liability to Meta.

Copyright is strict liability. You do not have to have knowledge or intention to violate copyright, that only goes to the types of damages.

Unintentional copyright violation, or believing you have a license, is not a defense to infringement.

I have no idea what you mean by "under the DMCA and other sources of law it is plausible". The DMCA is irrelevant here, and you give no "other source of law".

I think it's also the case that hard money is a different kind of phenomenon from paper money reflecting an entirely different philosophy concerning property and what it is. It reflects a natural law perspective in its most earthy and primitive form, which is that gold and silver are money because ancestors from time immemorial saw it as such due to certain intrinsic characteristics. Governments certainly regulated mints, but also marketplaces could and did regulate coinage on their own which is possible because of its physical nature. If a coin is clipped or made into a false alloy, that can be detected and corrected without state institutions.

Paper money by contrast tends to reflect more modern positivist theories of property in which property rights are deemed to exist because the state speaks those rights into existence. In the middle ages and even before, states as we know them now did not exist and could not exist, so positivism would have been absurd on its face, and its most direct application in the form of artificial currency could not be made.

The EIC's first mint was operational in 1643, long before it became a quasi-state. It started to become a quasi-government more than a century later, when it started raising its first major army in the 1750s culminating in the Battle of Plassey and didn't really have the resources to fully become one until the diwani in 1765.

Many companies and artists simply allow technically infringing fan art etc. to exist without enforcement.

Edit: the documentary is "Art and Craft" [1] about Mark Landis [2]

> It appears that in donating forgeries to art museums, Landis has not actually broken any laws, even though his activities were clearly deceitful. If he had sold the work to museums or taken a tax deduction on them, he might have fallen under federal art crime statutes. But the fact that he did not gain economically from his actions (apart from a few gifts from curators), and that he addressed his donations to specialists who had the expertise to detect his forgeries but did not, protected him in the eyes of the law. No legal action has been opened against him to date (as of 2014). As one art crimes expert put it: "Basically, you have a guy going around the country on his own nickel giving free stuff to museums."

[1] https://artandcraftfilm.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Landis

No one asked, but I'll analyze the differences between these two situations. Landis didn't impersonate any living people. It wasn't done against a backdrop of living people losing their jobs. What he made was still art, in that it was both a display of technical skill and worth discussion. Slop is neither. From now on, his forgeries will be clearly labeled as forgeries any time they're displayed. That's easy to do with a physical painting, but impossible when an image has been shared across platforms.

The Ayn Rand philosophy holds that the people at the top are working hundreds or thousands of times harder than the rest of us.

The modern socialist view is completely contradictory, where most of the people at the top are supposed to be doing even less than a construction worker, but they're rich because of the return on capital or the right to extract some sort of rent.

My favorite part about LLMs is that their insufficiency as legal aids (Aides? Aids.) seems to be slowly cluing-in the general public as to how Byzantine and "inside baseball" our legal system has become. (This is a bad thing.)

Yes, I realize many (most?) legal systems are actually hybrid, but they do tend to err pretty strongly into one direction or another.