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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

#71

Post by paxys »

pier25 wrote: post #57

This is not even than a slap on the wrist. Publishers who negotiated this really fucked up writers. According to US federal law, pirating a single copyrighted work and gaining commercial advantage of it (which Anthropic 100% did) represents five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. But it gets worse: "Penalties for a copyright infringement conviction may increase if the defendant has previous similar convictions, mad…

It's valid to not take AI companies' side here but people who think publishers are fighing for the little guy's rights are delusional. Tech companies have been exploiting artists for a few years, publishers/record labels/media companies have been doing it for centuries.

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

#73

Post by Aurornis »

ekianjo wrote: post #47
Aurornis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

100x the books? Buying a book does not let you redistribute its contents. If you are selling more than 100 books you are clearly losing out

The judge already ruled that training on the books does not constitute reselling their content.

The authors were only owed money for the piracy.

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

#74

Post by telotortium »

See, Judge Alsup should have been the person Biden put on the Supreme Court, that or re-nominate Merrick Garland. Instead, he made a silly promise to sate Black Lives Matter, which even when he took office was fast on its way to ignominy, and now Kagan is stuck being the only competent liberal justice on the court. At least Alsup can continue setting the direction of law as it applies to the tech industry.

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

#75

Post by conradkay »

pier25 wrote: post #57

This is not even than a slap on the wrist. Publishers who negotiated this really fucked up writers. According to US federal law, pirating a single copyrighted work and gaining commercial advantage of it (which Anthropic 100% did) represents five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. But it gets worse: "Penalties for a copyright infringement conviction may increase if the defendant has previous similar convictions, mad…

Those are the maximum penalties though

It's seemingly $3,000 per book, so they could've (and did, partially) just bought the books themselves for way cheaper, and with only a fraction of that money going to the authors

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

#76

Post by protocolture »

timmmmmmay wrote: post #53
ollysb wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Of course it is. If I write a movie review and sell it to a magazine or whatever, it's derived from the movie, and it's fair use, and I don't need to ask the movie owner for permission first, or give them a cut of my sales. Even if I use some reasonable number of screenshots and video clips, as long as the resulting work is "transformative" i.e. actually a new work, a movie review instead of a copy of the movie. Do y…

>I constantly see people in the AI debate working themselves into wildly copyright maximalist positions

I really dont get this. I know its that conflation fallacy or whatever, but I was under the impression we had sort of gotten over copyright maximalism as a society after Napster etc.

Whats worse is that, meaningful reform in this space has basically been waiting on a multi billion dollar corporation to come along and push it forward. So now that we have an opportunity to expand and globalise fair use, the sudden and quite angry opposition weirds me out to no end.

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

#77

Post by gruez »

renlo wrote: post #38
Aurornis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

This is innumerate. If it's split 50% between authors and publishers, then it won't be "mostly to publishers". Mathematically it will be equal between "authors" and "publishers", and because lawyers are taking their cut, neither would be able to get "most" of it. Yes, the average publisher will get a bigger paycheck, but that's because there's less of them, not because "most going to publishers".

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

#78

Post by IncreasePosts »

theplumber wrote: post #72

But why not jail like Kim Dotcom? And why no Feds jumping on Dario’s window? They are not only pirating, they also resell it!

Kim built something designed to help everyone pirate stuff. Anthropic pirated specific content.

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

#79

Post by matheusmoreira »

theplumber wrote: post #72

But why not jail like Kim Dotcom? And why no Feds jumping on Dario’s window? They are not only pirating, they also resell it!

Yeah. These AI settlements make such a mockery of past copyright enforcement victims that it's straight up offensive.

Police descended upon Kim Dotcom like he was a terrorist or something. They rappelled down helicopters and stormed his home like he was bin Laden.

Then these big techs come along and they make some absurd cost of doing business settlement.

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

#80

Post by marcus_holmes »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #55
sebzim4500 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its probably 100x more than it would have cost to do it legitimately, so seems like reasonable damages to me

That depends on the answer to a question that hasn't been answered yet. Is what an AI does similar to a human reading a book, and adding it to their knowledge? Or is it similar to a human plagiarizing a book? If it's the second, for at least some books, no, the damages are not reasonable. They are far too small.

Good question. Can you ask an LLM to repeat the entire contents of a novel, word-for-word, and read that instead of the original book? I haven't tried it, but I would guess it would not be able to do this.

Can you ask it questions about the book and expect it to get them right? Yeah, probably. Same as if I read the book and you asked me questions about it. The LLM would probably answer those questions better than I could, and about every single book in its training data, but still same-same.

I don't think this is plaguarism.

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