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Comment by readyman | Hacker News Reader

>and thinking they can get away with it

Can they not? I think that remains to be seen.

Exactly. It's like when Uber started and flaunted the medallion taxi system of many cities. People said "These Uber people are idiots! They are going to get shut down! Don't they know the laws for taxis?" While a small number of cities did ban Uber (and even that generally only temporarily), in the end Uber basically won. I think a lot of people confuse what they want to happen versus what will happen.

In London, uber did not succeed. Uber drivers have to be licensed like minicab drivers.

Perhaps. But a reasonable license requiring you to pass a test isn't the same as a medallion in the traditional American taxi system. Medallions (often costing tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars) were a way of artificially reducing the number of taxis (and thus raising the price).

This. Medallion systems in NYC were gamed by a guy who let people literally bet on its as if it were an asset. The prices went to a million per until the bubble burst. True story

Uber is widely used in London, so they succeeded.

If they had waited decades for the regulatory landscape to even out they would have failed.

They succeeded commercially, but they didn't succeed in changing the regulatory landscape. I'm not sure what you mean by waiting for it to even out. They refused to comply, so they were banned, so they complied.

Uber is banned in multiple countries and pulled out of many more because they where told to follow the law and that makes their business unprofitable.

So? They have a market cap of $150 billion. If at the start they had decided "oh well let's not bother since what we are doing is legally ambiguous" they would have a market cap of $0.

And that's great, they are making a lot of money in markets where they are allowed to operate and comply with local laws.

I'm just interested in seeing if AI companies can do the same, if they are going to be required to pay licenses on their training data.

Americans are incredibly ignorant of how the world actually works because the American living memory only knows the peak of the empire from the inside.

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