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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

#61

Post by gruez »

scotty79 wrote: post #39
qq66 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

That's because the judges are supposed to rule on questions of law (ie. "is AI training fair use?"), not whether they think AI's good or not.

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

#62

Post by gruez »

ollysb wrote: post #50
protocolture wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont see the relevance. If Anthropic had bought the book at the store, shredded the spine, scanned the pages and trained on that data instead, there wouldnt have been an issue. Authors cant simply license away fair use. If it could be dismissed so easily the right wouldn't exist.

Creating derivative products you charge for surely can't be considered fair use?

>Creating derivative products you charge for surely can't be considered fair use?

All US courts so far have ruled yes.

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

#63

Post by skippyfish »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #60
pier25 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a settlement that the authors and Anthropic agreed upon. The authors or the publishers? I have a hard time believing they agreed with the millions of authors they pirated.

There were individual authors in the class. They initiated it. Individual authors were allowed to sign up. If you’re so interested, go read past the headline. Maybe you’ll find that you’re working about what “authors” will agree to.

To sign up for what? The experience of approximately every author on the planet is that they found out that Anthropic did something bad at the same time they were "opted into" the class. The only thing they could do is opt out and litigate on their own against a company with a valuation approaching $1T.

This is a sweet deal for lawyers and for publishers, and nothing else.

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

#64

Post by modeless »

Aurornis wrote: post #25
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 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 an…

Great, so now instead of allowing anyone to train on already scanned books for free, we can have only the richest big labs buy all the books and scan them privately to train their proprietary models. And since they buy the books used, authors still don't get any money. But at least the books are destroyed afterwards! What an improvement!

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

#65

Post by mediaman »

ctippett wrote: post #31
BeetleB wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

None of this matters, this is the judge approving a voluntary settlement reached between the parties last year.

If you think it should be different then you have to make a cogent argument why the public should get to interfere with a settlement the two sides mutually agree on.

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

#66

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by userbinator »

br0ceph wrote: post #48

I support anthropics position here, on both learning from and "pirating" books. The way i see things , the publishers and authors are happy with any policy that makes them more money, and more market control, regardless of what is ethical/just/right. They would shutdown public libraries , all libraries, if they could. Aaron Swartz lost his life because he tried to make public knowledge public, and they would be happy…

Exactly. Everything is a derivative work, and AI is now making people realise the full extent of that reality.

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

#68

Post by jdlshore »

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

Default payout is 50/50 author/publisher. If the author and publisher have a contract that states otherwise, then their contract overrides the default.

Source: I’m an author and signed up to be part of the class action, and this was the class action documents said.

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

#69

Post by sensanaty »

What a fucking joke of a country the US is, allowing this kind of behaviour with such a pathetic "punishment". Barely even qualifies as a tap on the wrist, Anthropic should be getting gutted into non-existence for this shit and the execs should be given the Aaron Swartz treatment.

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

#70

Post by driverdan »

Judge Alsup issued the original order that determined they were liable for piracy but that training LLMs on books was fair use. It's worth reading if you're interested in the topic. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/231/bartz-v-an...
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