Legal gray area. They could have waited years and years and tried to get laws passed to allow their business to function with a clean slate of legality, but bureaucrats would have never allowed it.
So is the point to try it if you've got Napster level success but not Megaupload level success?
And since there is no way to know which level of success you are going to achieve beforehand, the note of caution still makes sense I guess?
Sean Parker is doing great. It worked out for him.
So the point stands. If you get serious traction, the worst that can happen is your current company goes under, years down the line, after you have cashed out and you then fail upwards into being a successful tech celebrity.
This is all a much better outcome than nobody caring about your product, as you "followed the rules", hampered yourself, and ended up with zero users.
Of course if you really piss off the wrong people, you'll get smeared and maybe even framed for more things than you actually did before being arrested.
You really should be preparing for the future and operating above board, even from day one.
You're posting on a forum run by a group that asks applicants when they've skirted the law to get something done. Your use of the modifier "clearly" here is pointless. Remember; you've literally lived through companies funneling in investment dollars into things like Project Greyball, which was entirely intended to gaslight law enforcement/regulators.
Or who have regularly tried to financial engineer or corporately structure their way out of culpability long enough to successfully execute on pump-n-dumps. Or who birthed the entire sector of "totally not a bank/financial institution" that is the cryptocurrency space.
And simultaneously, (2) if you can actually demonstrate such an interest (in particular: a profitable business that cannot exist when copyright law is fully enforced), the courts and publishers won't actually shut you down, but will settle for a cut of the new revenue you created.
I was raised to play by the rules and do everything by the book, but sometimes I wonder if that's just something that people who have no intention of playing by the rules say to screw over us gullible people.
While many rich people do commit tax fraud, it's worth nothing it's usually not as straightforward as "largely don't pay their taxes". It's not like they get a bill from the IRS and just refuse to pay it. Instead, they use a combination of legally gray tactics to reduce their tax obligations. eg. for peter thiel, he put a bunch of paypal stock in a roth IRA pre-IPO, allowing him to avoid taxes on much of his exit. Was this legal? Was the valuation he used when he put the stock in the roth IRA correct or artificially low? You could argue either way, so you could plausibly do it while keeping a clean conscience. The same applies to AI startups. They argue what they're doing is covered under fair use, and there's plausible legal arguments/precedent supporting that. It's not like they're doing something obviously illegal like duplicating DVDs and selling them at a shady street stall.
Also it's unclear what "prominent ex-President" you're referring to, but the wikipedia article for donald trump only says his foundation was charged, not him personally.
>...and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
would be don't worry about tax at the start and hire accountants to sort it later