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Ex-Amazon Exec Claims She Was Asked To Ignore Copyright Law in Race To AI - Slas...

 1 week ago
source link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/04/23/2034256/ex-amazon-exec-claims-she-was-asked-to-ignore-copyright-law-in-race-to-ai?sbsrc=yro
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Ex-Amazon Exec Claims She Was Asked To Ignore Copyright Law in Race To AI

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A lawsuit is alleging Amazon was so desperate to keep up with the competition in generative AI it was willing to breach its own copyright rules. From a report: The allegation emerges from a complaint accusing the tech and retail mega-corp of demoting, and then dismissing, a former high-flying AI scientist after it discovered she was pregnant. The lawsuit was filed last week in a Los Angeles state court by Dr Viviane Ghaderi, an AI researcher who says she worked successfully in Amazon's Alexa and LLM teams, and achieved a string of promotions, but claims she was later suddenly demoted and fired following her return to work after giving birth. She is alleging discrimination, retaliation, harassment and wrongful termination, among other claims.

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    She claims she was pressured to ignore the rules set out by Amazon's legal team.

    Those rules may or may not have had anything to do with violating copyright law. Much like Apple's legal team has very strict rules against using GPLv3 even though there would be no problem with them doing so. It would however limit Apple's ability to counter-sue and sue, which Apple's legal team/management seems to care strongly about.

    • Re:

      Reading the story, copyright seems like an irrelevant hail mary in the absolute barrage of hail mary accusations. Her lawyers seem to be throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the case to try to make it stick, or more likely get a good settlement by making it hard to defend against so many different accusations.

      Overall though, this story is so stereotypical it hurts. High level female manager gets on a promotion track. Does well. Gets into position where she's basically required to pull the work tempo

      • What's not said in the news:
        - Men have a much wider bell curve dispersion for tolerating extremely long hour workweeks than do women
        - To get to the top of the corporate executive ladder, law partner, medical doctor partner, etc. people have to work extremely long hours often 100 or more per week and be on call 24x7
        - Women leave those high paid positions because they want to work less hours than the men

        And the most important one: The highest paid women executives, lawyers, doctors are much much more likely t

  • I once was asked to use data scraped from a competitor ecommerce site without asking. And at another company to use MS-Access as the app's database but claim it was MS-Sql-Server to a potential client. (We were working on the conversion, but it wasn't ready yet.)

    And another time the software wasn't finished yet, so they sent a coder to the client's site under the guise of "monitoring the roll-out", when in fact the coder was finishing it then and there.

    I took these as a sign it was time to leave those companies, but during the dot-com slump that often took a while.

    Someone justified it by saying, "if one doesn't lie, they will lose to those who do".

  • From the summary, it seems that Amazon's copyright rules prevent employees copying DNA from a mother and father to a child.

    You have to read the article to find she accuses Amazon" of singling her out because she complained when Amazon allegedly breached its own rules against copyright infringement when it came to AI research."
  • sounds like she is less than open and honest herself. She took a new role prior to telling her new boss she would be taking maternity leave, while that may be legal it is ethically wrong as she just fucked over her new boss and then is shocked he isn't happy about it.

    • Re:

      That's not quite accurate. From the article:

      "On her first meeting with Marcu, she disclosed she was pregnant, information she had already shared with her previous manager. Marcu, taken aback, responded by informing Ghaderi that she would be 'temporarily' transferred to report to a different employee, Mahesh Krishnakumar."

      So in the first place, it seems that she told her new boss about her pregnancy at her earliest opportunity. In the second place, even if that wasn't the case, she had told her former boss

      • Re:

        her first meeting with Marcu to me sounds like AFTER she changed positions not before. why take up a new role when you know you are about to go on leave and fuck them over.

      • Re:

        What I don't get is:

        A. Who the fuck cares? You know that getting pregnant is a part of life. It's part of the work-life balance. Her manager should have been "wow, congrats! How can I make it easy for you?"

        Most most importantly:

        B. Why on earth are they allowing such an incredibly talented woman to go work for the competition over something as simple as a little bit or maternity leave? This is just plain stupid.

          • Re:

            Now put yourself in the shoes of his lawyer, who will patiently explain that if knowing she was pregnant would have any effect whatsoever on his hiring decision, he has broken the law. And, in fact, every employment lawyer and HR professional will advise that it's far, far better for both sides if the hiring manager doesn't know, since that greatly reduces the chance of both intentional and unintentional - and illegal - bias.

            What she did is not only legal, it is explicitly protected and actively encouraged

        • Re:

          There isn't a single employment lawyer or HR professional who would not tell you to not do so.

          The only reason to tell them before you've been hired is so they can act on that knowledge.

          Acting on that knowledge - in any way - is illegal.

          If they did change her position in any even vaguely negative way, she's going to hand them their ass in court.

  • In times of global war, it's the right strategy: Nobody is going to give them as much as a slap on the fingers for being another horse in the race.


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