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Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

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Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#21

Post by ilamont »

If you have the time, read the judge's response to the motion:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

The big deal for publishers and authors is the payout per eligible title is $3k. For a traditional publishing contract involving one author, the amount will be split down the middle.

The other thing which caught my eye is the judge slashed the class counsel's fee by half, from 12.5% ($187.5m) to 6.8% ($101m). The class counsel's unreimbursed litigation expenses were $2.6m.

The three class representatives get just $15k each.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#22

Post by Aurornis »

renlo wrote: post #12
Varelion wrote: post #8

I sincerely don't understand what the point of these laws are, when the cost of flagrant violations is no more than a slap on the wrist -- these really meager sums that serve as nothing more than something to point at and say "Look, we did something!" Cover-your-ass strategy, and nothing more. Who, besides the ones at fault, are ever happy with these mean-nothing fines? The justice system really needs an overhaul wit…

the irony is that all of this money will go to rent-seeking publishers who won't pass it on to the artists; basically a dispute between the wealthy you're upset with

The lawsuit was a mixed blend of individual authors and publishers.

It was started by a group of authors, not publishers.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#23

Post by nadermx »

Aurornis wrote: post #19
Varelion wrote: post #8

I sincerely don't understand what the point of these laws are, when the cost of flagrant violations is no more than a slap on the wrist -- these really meager sums that serve as nothing more than something to point at and say "Look, we did something!" Cover-your-ass strategy, and nothing more. Who, besides the ones at fault, are ever happy with these mean-nothing fines? The justice system really needs an overhaul wit…

This is a settlement that the authors and Anthropic agreed upon. They agreed on the amount last year. The judge approved it now. The lawsuit was for the way the books were acquired. They already ruled that it's not infringement to use the books. The award was $3,000 per book, which is about 100X higher than it would have cost to buy the books. It's never going to appease the people who demand companies be sued into c…

This case did at least shed light on the fair use argument.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#24

Post by robterrell »

renlo wrote: post #12
Varelion wrote: post #8

I sincerely don't understand what the point of these laws are, when the cost of flagrant violations is no more than a slap on the wrist -- these really meager sums that serve as nothing more than something to point at and say "Look, we did something!" Cover-your-ass strategy, and nothing more. Who, besides the ones at fault, are ever happy with these mean-nothing fines? The justice system really needs an overhaul wit…

the irony is that all of this money will go to rent-seeking publishers who won't pass it on to the artists; basically a dispute between the wealthy you're upset with

Not true. Individual authors could sign up for the settlement. One of my books was in there under my name.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#25

Post by Aurornis »

EmoteSupportBot wrote: post #16
jdlshore wrote: post #4

To be clear, the issue is not that the books were used to train Claude, but that they were pirated.

A critical distinction, because they were going to to find terabytes of not pirated books to train on that contained the sum history of humanities knowledge /s

They actually did this.

> Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase millions of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Each print book resulted in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with machine-readable text (including front and back cover scans for softcover books

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#26

Post by qq66 »

EmoteSupportBot wrote: post #16
jdlshore wrote: post #4

To be clear, the issue is not that the books were used to train Claude, but that they were pirated.

A critical distinction, because they were going to to find terabytes of not pirated books to train on that contained the sum history of humanities knowledge /s

They bought, scannned, trained from, and destroyed millions of paper books, which was ruled legal. This lawsuit was for training from LibGen.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#27

Post by BeetleB »

wgjordan wrote: post #11
BeetleB wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As was pointed out, the settlement is for piracy, not training. They had already ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted material for training fell within fair use. As such, if you pirated a book and had to pay $3000 for that one instance, I don't think you'd like it if I said you should have paid $30K or $300K instead. If anything, this is analogous to the ridiculous fines people had to pay when pirating music. (N…

> As such, if you pirated a book and had to pay $3000 for that one instance, I don't think you'd like it if I said you should have paid $30K or $300K instead. If you pirated a book for personal use the amount of liability wouldn't match a company whose profit could be attributed to pirating the same book. In US copyright law, a copyright infringer could be liable for "any profits of the infringer that are attributabl…

I would imagine that for over 99% of the books covered in this lawsuit, they're earning less than $3000 per book.

Put another way, their revenues wouldn't drop much if they simply hadn't trained on those 99%.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#30

Post by xboxnolifes »

trentor wrote: post #15
BeetleB wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As was pointed out, the settlement is for piracy, not training. They had already ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted material for training fell within fair use. As such, if you pirated a book and had to pay $3000 for that one instance, I don't think you'd like it if I said you should have paid $30K or $300K instead. If anything, this is analogous to the ridiculous fines people had to pay when pirating music. (N…

Thomas-Rasset got 80k per song and Tennenbaum got 22k per song. The law says up to 150k per work. It was a gift.

Sure, but in any other instance of piracy, HN would call awarding $20k per pirated song insane.
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