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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

#31

Post by ctippett »

BeetleB wrote: post #27
wgjordan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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%.

IANAL, but the parent comment quotes "any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement", which I take to mean it's the profit Anthropic stands to make based on its use of the pirated content that's recoverable.

Given the entire global economy is currently bullish on the potential profitability of AI, I dare say they got off incredibly lightly settling for just $3k per book.

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

#34

Post by trentor »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #30
trentor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because we are mostly discussing a single private person that got caught for maybe 20 songs. I don't want to bring up Aaron but the taste gets saltier the more we see settlements like this.

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

#36

Post by scotty79 »

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…

> The award was $3,000 per book, which is about 100X higher than it would have cost to buy the books.

How many of the authors would license their book for endless creation of derivative works for that amount?

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

#37

Post by scotty79 »

robterrell wrote: post #24
renlo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's gonna be your payout and are you satisfied with it?

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

#38

Post by renlo »

Aurornis wrote: post #22
renlo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the downvotes, my response is to read: https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/wh...

> If there is a current publisher(s) (which still possesses an exclusive license), the author(s) will split the $3000 with the publisher. Any co-authors will share the author portion and, if there are multiple publishers (e.g., different publishers have exclusive rights to different formats), they will share the publisher portion. Assume that the co-authors and co-publishers will share the portion equally unless their contracts provide otherwise. The standard default split between publishers and authors of noneducational texts is 50/50, as described below. Authors who are the sole rightsholder in a work—such as self-published authors and authors whose rights have reverted or where the contracts have otherwise terminated—will receive the full award amount.

It is split between the publisher and the author, also publishers will have a large catalog of books they will submit, an author typically will only have a few -- the payout will be going to the lawyers and mostly to publishers.

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

#39

Post by scotty79 »

qq66 wrote: post #26
EmoteSupportBot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is such a petty and impotent ruling. If you want to ban them from using culture to make derivative works without proper compensation then do that.

But if you don't want to ban them, telling them to buy one book of each, likely second hand, is complete pettiness that resulted in destructive scanning of millions of books, many of which were already practically available in digital form.

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

#40

Post by zajio1am »

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…

Civil justice is primarily about restoring damages, not about punishing wrongdoing (although common law in US it is more punitive than civil law in european countries). Therefore compensations are based on damages, not on profit from wrongdoings.
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