Ex-Amazon exec claims she was asked to break copyright law | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Amazon exec claims she was asked to break copyright law

theregister.com

30 pointsjjgreen32 comments

Good for her for standing up to her lead on this. I hope she has the documentation to back it up; sounds like she met with legal again after getting the pushback from her team lead, so hopefully that's the case.

As one person in the case said, all of the AI training companies out there, including Amazon's darling, Anthropic, are wholesale breaking copyright law.

If an individual downloaded Library Genesis to train an AI, there would be huge fines. OpenAI has admitted to training on a dataset that is scraped from LibGen.

So a massive copyright infringement suite against the big corporations is looming just beyond the horizon?

Either this causes copyright law to be re-written entirely or the complete dissolution of copyright law.

Wonder if there are any firms with enough stones to take that case lol. The amount of dirty laundry you can extract from these companies just in discovery would be huge.

There are several huge copyright lawsuits already out there against the big AI players.

> Either this causes copyright law to be re-written entirely or the complete dissolution of copyright law.

It's tempting to make the big case of the day "the most important of all time," but most likely this will just pile some fair-use carve-outs for commercial LLMs onto the Copyright Act of 1998 (which piled onto the Acts of 1976, 1909, 1870, 1831, and 1790).

I don't think that much is going to change, but I'm curious in the arguments for otherwise.

> If an individual downloaded Library Genesis to train an AI, there would be huge fines.

Let’s be honest: Individuals are downloading Library Genesis to train AI already and not facing fines. It’s unrealistic to claim that these people are being fined for downloading LibGen or other copyrighted data for training AI.

> OpenAI has admitted to training on a dataset that is scraped from LibGen.

If they admitted this in the way you claim, surely publishers are gearing up for lawsuits.

Nobody is going to ignore a massively funded company breaking a law and instead pursue tiny fines against individuals.

Several publishers have already launched high-profile lawsuits in this regard. I am surprised that you haven't heard of them.

> If an individual downloaded Library Genesis to train an AI, there would be huge fines.

There would be no fines at all.

The act of training the AI on the material may be fair use, but the unauthorized access is a different story. That's probably why the Writer's Guild lawsuit against OpenAI focuses on the downloading.

Most of the arguments I've seen around this bullshit is that the AI is just like a human so it should be able to train on anything it can see. I don't think many understand what you've touched on here, which is that all the content piracy for explicitly commercial purposes is the actual problem here, not the training of AI.

Nobody here wants to hear that their new billion dollar toys are unethical unfortunately.

I might be missing something in my own brain NLP processing - how is this viewed discriminatory?

"While managing Ghaderi, the documents allege Krishnakumar made "numerous discriminatory and harassing comments" such as "Take it easy, I have young daughters, so I know it's hard to be a woman with a newborn," or "You should spend time with your daughter," or "You should just enjoy being a new mother.""

The comments were repeatedly made and complainant was the only mother in the organization.

It’s a targeted attack meant to neg the person into thinking they are worth less.

You need a really warped view of reality to see these three phrases as "meant to neg the person into thinking they are worth less"

wokeness in a nutshell.

> I might be missing something in my own brain NLP processing - how is this viewed discriminatory?

The Register article presents those "discriminatory and harassing comments" without context, but given the context from the rest of the article, I could see them as being part of a construction that amounted to "you are a woman/mother, so you should stop raising your concerns/not pursue promotion/etc."

I was disappointed the article included these phrases without more context, because they seem understanding on the surface level. But this was the same person who pushed to delay her maternity leave, so in practice he doesn't understand. A boss sending mixed signals of "work harder" and "take it easy because you're a mother" is pretty bad. I will admit it's extrapolation of the events on my part because the article confused me as well.

those read to me as pretty veiled threats not to risk your job over this

This is text book retaliation. Amazon and defendants about to open up the check book to the tune of at least $1M.

If it goes to court (unlikely?), can easily become multimillion dollar settlement while airing out Amazon’s dirty laundry in open court.

Is it retaliation or Amazon just being Amazon, PIPing everyone when the directive from above lands? It's a two year company anyway (they don't want people to vest most of their stocks and the amount vested in the first two years is small).

> Is it retaliation

It looks like they put her on a PIP with an obviously impossible goal, so it sure does look like that.

> or Amazon just being Amazon

That's an excuse for nothing, btw. And if this is somehow "Amazon just being Amazon," then that seems ample justification for burning the whole company to the ground, to punish the shareholders and as a warning to others.

TeamBlind is full of stories of star performers getting PIPed for no reason at Amazon so I am not sure it would be viewed as retaliation given it's "normal" over there. I would be happy if somebody started a fire under their asses though. They seem to attract the worst of the worst managers that in turn destroy their next companies.

> It looks like they put her on a PIP with an obviously impossible goal, so it sure does look like that.

Isn’t that the norm for PIPs in tech companies?

It is Amazon being Amazon, leadership is raised on a culture of reprisals and pettiness.

If anyone's wondering, the article is detailed with a good bit of information. Fired after pregnancy is already a bad look, she appears to have a strong case.

> For example, the first goal required her to create a plan to reduce data storage costs across the entire AmazonBot web crawling organization by 75 percent in just eight workdays.

Yeah...

Interesting that you were downvoted, it's a rare case of people actually reading the link.

It's always amazing watching the shenanigans that Amazon gets up to and the level of reprisals leadership is trained to go through for the smallest slights. (From experience of construction jobs there, thankfully not as an Amazon employee)

Actual lawsuit: https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/04/22/ghaderi_v_amazon_et_al.pdf

Seems like she was L7, which is hardly an executive position (not even Director). There's multiple tens of thousands of people at her level in Amazon.

After more than half a decade working there I don't put much faith in the one sided stories of PIPed employees.

According to the article/filing, she wasn't given specific reasons for the demotion, treated discriminatorily, and given a PiP that was unattainably difficult.

One would assume that choosing to file litigation against Amazon would be done thoughtfully / with a plausible rate of success; they have an army of lawyers. What informs the opinion that a PIPed employee isn't worth even listening to, esp. from a lawsuit? Amazon is not exactly a shining star for work culture, and this situation doesn't sound unfathomable.

Missing from the HN title (but in the original): […] in race to AI.

Mea culpa, but El Reg headlines are usually too long for HN title limits so I'm in the habit of trying to compress them a bit ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com