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Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

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Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#111

Post by Der_Einzige »

pyman wrote: post #18
ramon156 wrote: post #10

Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

The problem with this thinking is that hundreds of thousands of teachers who spent years writing great, useful books and sharing knowledge and wisdom probably won't sue a billion dollar company for stealing their work. What they'll likely do is stop writing altogether. I'm against Anthropic stealing teacher's work and discouraging them from ever writing again. Some teachers are already saying this (though probably no…

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Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#112

Post by mensetmanusman »

flaptrap wrote: post #99
suyjuris wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The judge appears to disagree with you on this. They found that training and selling an LLM are fair use, based on the fact that it is exceedingly transformative, and that the copyright holders are not entitled to any profits thereof due to copyright. (They also did get paid — Anthropic acquired millions of books legally, including all of the authors in this complaint. This would not retroactively absolve them of leg…

The fallacy in the 'fair use' logic is that a person acquires a book and learns from it, but a machine incorporates the text. Copyright does not allow one to create a derivative work without permission. Only when the result of the transformation resembles the original work could it be said that it is subject to copyright. Do not regard either of those legal issues are set in concrete yet.

Both a human and a machine learn from it. You can design an LLM that doesn’t spit back the entire text after annealing. It just learns the essence like a human.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#113

Post by mrcwinn »

originalvichy wrote: post #5
pyman wrote: post #2

Anthropic's cofounder, Ben Mann, downloaded million copies of books from Library Genesis in 2021, fully aware that the material was pirated. Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.

At least most pirates just consume for personal use. Profiting from piracy is a whole other level beyond just pirating a book.

> At least most pirates just consume for personal use.

Easy for the pirate to say. Artists might argue their intent was to trade compensation for one's personal enjoyment of the work.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#114

Post by Der_Einzige »

pyman wrote: post #2

Anthropic's cofounder, Ben Mann, downloaded million copies of books from Library Genesis in 2021, fully aware that the material was pirated. Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.

Information wants to be free.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#117

Post by badmintonbaseba »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #112
flaptrap wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fallacy in the 'fair use' logic is that a person acquires a book and learns from it, but a machine incorporates the text. Copyright does not allow one to create a derivative work without permission. Only when the result of the transformation resembles the original work could it be said that it is subject to copyright. Do not regard either of those legal issues are set in concrete yet.

Both a human and a machine learn from it. You can design an LLM that doesn’t spit back the entire text after annealing. It just learns the essence like a human.

Morally maybe, but AFAIK machines "learning" and creating creative works on their own is not recognized legally, at least certainly not the same way as for people.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#118

Post by edgineer »

pyman wrote: post #74
maeln wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wanted to be legit with 0 chance of going to court, you would contact publisher and ask to pay a license to get access to their catalog for training, and negotiate from that point. This is what every company using media are doing (think Spotify, Netflix, but also journal, ad agency, ...). I don't know why people in HN are giving a pass to AI company for this kind of behavior.

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The paradigm is that teachers will teach life skills like public speaking and entrepreneurship. Book smarts that can be more effectively taught by AI will be, once schools catch up.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#120

Post by ohashi »

maeln wrote: post #55
ramon156 wrote: post #10

Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

If you wanted to be legit with 0 chance of going to court, you would contact publisher and ask to pay a license to get access to their catalog for training, and negotiate from that point. This is what every company using media are doing (think Spotify, Netflix, but also journal, ad agency, ...). I don't know why people in HN are giving a pass to AI company for this kind of behavior.

Because they are mostly software developers who think it's different because it impacts them.
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