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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

#351

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

charcircuit wrote: post #309
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RMS Referring to this? (Wikipedia's disambiguation page doesn't seem to have a more likely article.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Copyright_red...

Yes, quoting the following section: Stallman places great importance on the words and labels people use to talk about the world, including the relationship between software and freedom. He asks people to say free software and GNU/Linux, and to avoid the terms intellectual property and piracy (in relation to copying not approved by the publisher). One of his criteria for giving an interview to a journalist is that the…

That seems rather agreeable, though. Stallman is essentially saying that words are meaningful and speakers/writers should be thoughtful about the meaning of the words they use. In that context, refusing to use terms like "intellectual property" and "piracy" because of their meaning and the effect their use has on culture, and especially insisting that journalists who interview you use the same language, seems to be a means of controlling the interpreted meaning of one's expressions.

(As an aside, it seems pointless to decry it as a "talking point". The reason it was brought up is presumably because the author agrees with it and thinks it's relevant. It's also entirely possible that the author, like me, made this argument without being aware that it was popularized by Richard Stallman. If it makes sense then you can hear the argument without hearing the person and still find it agreeable.)

"Piracy" is used to refer to copyright violation to make it sound scary and dangerous to people who don't know better or otherwise don't think about it too hard. Just imagine if they called it "banditry" instead; now tell me that pirates are not bandits with boats. They may as well have called it banditry and it's worth correcting that. (I also think it's worth ridiculing but that doesn't appear to be Stallman's primary point.) It's not banditry (how ridiculous would it be to call it that?), it's copyright infringement.

Edit:

Reading my comment again in the context of other things you wrote, I suspect the argument will not pass muster because you do not seem to see piracy's change in meaning as manufactured by PR work purchased by media industry leaders. I'm not really trying to convince you that it's true but it may be worth considering that it is the fundamental disagreement you seem to have with others on Stallman's point; again, not saying you're wrong, just that's where the disagreement is.

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

#352

Post by seadan83 »

redcobra762 wrote: post #289
DrillShopper wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole point of copyright is to ensure you're paid for your work. No. The point of copyright is that the author gets to decide under what terms their works are copied. That's the essence of copyright. In many cases, authors will happily sell you a copy of their work, but they're under no obligation to do so. They can claim a copyright and then never release their work to the general public. That's perfectly with…

We're operating under a model where the owner of the copyright has already sold their work. And while it's within their rights to stipulate conditions of the sale, they did not do that, and fair use of the work as governed under the laws the book was sold under encompasses its conversion into an LLM model. If the author didn't want their work to be included in an LLM, they should not have sold it, just like if an aut…

Yeah, this is part of the ruling. The judge decided that the usage was sufficiently transformative and thus fair use. The issue is the authors were selling their works and the company went to a black market instead.

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

#353

Post by pyrale »

codedokode wrote: post #282
jasonlotito wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding: > pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use. "Pirating" is a fuzzy word and has no real meaning. Specifically, I think this is the cruz: > without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies Essentially: downloading is fine, sharing/uploading up is not. Which makes sense. The assertion here is that Anthropic (from this line) did not distribute the…

Downloading and using pirated software in a company is fine then as long as it is not shared outside? If what you describe is legal it makes no sense to pay for software.

sci-hub suddenly becomes legal if all researchers adhere to one big company, apparently.

After all, illegally downloading research papers in order to write new ones is highly transformative.

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

#354

Post by Aurornis »

bgwalter wrote: post #119

Here is how individuals are treated for massive copyright infringement: https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-de...

> Here is how individuals are treated for massive copyright infringement:

When I clicked the link, I got an article about a business that was selling millions of dollars of pirated software.

This guy made millions of dollars in profit by selling pirated software. This wasn't a case of transformative works, nor of an individual doing something for themselves. He was plainly stealing and reselling something.

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

#355

Post by CaptainFever »

xdennis wrote: post #291
adolph wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That a service incorporating the authors' works exists is not at issue. The plaintiffs' claims are, as summarized by Alsup: First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic from this use (Opp. 16). Second, to that last point, Authors further argue that the training was intended to memorize…

> That a service incorporating the authors' works exists is not at issue. It's not an issue because it's not currently illegal because nobody could have foreseen this years ago. But it is profiting off of the unpaid work of millions. And there's very little chance of change because it's so hard to pass new protection laws when you're not Disney.

Let's not expand copyright law.

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

#356

Post by tzs »

kube-system wrote: post #299
arandomhuman wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but he coincidentally passed away after he was accused of it.

No, the CFAA was the law that had him facing 35 years in prison and $1m+ fines. It wasn't a copyright case.

He wasn't facing anywhere near that. When the DOJ charges someone with a set of charges they like to say in the press release that the person is facing N years, where they get N by simply adding up the maximums for each charge that it is possible for a hypothetical defendant that has all the possible sentence enhancing factors to get. They also ignore that some charges group for sentencing--your sentence for the group is the maximum sentence for the individual charges in the group.

Here's an article explaining in more detail [1].

Most experts say that if Swartz had gone to trial and the prosecution had proved everything they alleged and the judge had decided to make an example of Swartz and sentence harshly it would have been around 7 years.

Swartz's own attorney said that if they had gone to trail and lost he thought it was unlikely that Swartz would get any jail time.

Swartz also had at least two plea bargain offers available. One was for a guilty plea and 4 months. The other was for a guilty plea and the prosecutors would ask for 6 months but Swartz could ask the judge for less or for probation instead and the judge would pick.

[1] https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...

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

#357

Post by kube-system »

platunit10 wrote: post #284

Every time an article like this surfaces, it always seems like the majority of tech folks believe that training AI on copyrighted material is NOT fair use, but the legal industry disagrees. Which of the following are true? (a) the legal industry is susceptible to influence and corruption (b) engineers don't understand how to legally interpret legal text (c) AI tech is new, and judges aren't technically qualified to d…

I know for sure (b) is true. Way too many people on technical forums read legal texts as if the process to interpret laws is akin to a compiler generating a binary.

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

#358

Post by fakeBeerDrinker »

hellohihello135 wrote: post #229

It’s easy to point fingers at others. Meanwhile the top comment in this thread links to stolen content from Business Insider.

How is it stolen from Business Insider? When I visit businessinsider.com/anthropic-cut-pirated-millions-used-books-train-claude-copyright-2025-6 I get the same story. My browser caches the story, and I save it for archival purposes. How is this theft?

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

#359

Post by kube-system »

NoOn3 wrote: post #236
jimbob21 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it does, at least for this case. The judge just said so.

People have rights, machines don't. Otherwise, maybe give machines the right to vote, for example?...

This case is more like:

If a human uses a voting machine, they still have a right to vote.

Machines don't have rights. The human using the machine does.

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

#360

Post by kube-system »

kristofferR wrote: post #166
trinsic2 wrote: post #152

I'm not seeing how this is fair use in either case. Someone correct me if I am wrong but aren't these works being digitized and transformed in a way to make a profit off of the information that is included in these works? It would be one thing for an individual to make person use of one or more books, but you got to have some special blindness not to see that a for-profit company's use of this information to improve…

What do you think fair use is? The whole point of the fair use clauses is that if you transform copyrighted works enough you don't have to pay the original copyright holder.

Fair use is not, at its core, about transformation. It's about many types of uses that do not interfere with the reasons for the rights we ascribe to authors. Fair use doesn't require transformation.
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