Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 654 posts

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

#81

Post by IncreasePosts »

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…

Aaron swartz lost his life because he committed suicide. Something he had tried multiple times before. If he really only committed suicide because of the legal jeopardy he was in, wouldn't it have made more sense to commit suicide after you're found guilty?

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

#82

Post by nextaccountic »

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…

> 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.

This is worse than pirating books to an absurd degree, it's almost a parody - the company that slurps all human knowledge ends up not only metaphorically, but also physically destroying those books, like an information vampire.

Authors don't even receive any financial compensation if the books were bought second hand, either. There's no benefit in doing that. (Not that making one final sale of a hardcover copy would make any difference though)

If Anthropic were at least buying ebooks, this insanity wouldn't need to happen. Unfortunately there is no bulk rates for buying millions of ebooks like you have in the used book market

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

#83

Post by sillysaurusx »

jdlshore wrote: post #4

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

It's an unfortunate outcome. Now to be a big player in AI, you have to have enough capital to buy your own library worth of books and digitize them. (Fun fact: a pallet of books is called a "gaylord," and they buy hundreds of gaylords.)

I created books3 to help settle the question of whether AI companies should be allowed to train on books. The outcome of "it's okay to pirate books as long as you're only training on them" was a long shot, but it would've let individual hackers train their own AI models (assuming access to sufficient compute, which you can get e.g. via https://sites.research.google/trc/about/).

Now we're in a world where you have to have dozens of millions in capital to do substantial work.

I heard at one point Eleuther was gathering public domain training data. I wonder if they ever built a corpus large enough so that training on books doesn't really matter...

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

#84

Post by dijit »

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!

Maybe if they could have fined him $1.5B he would have gotten away with it too.

What was Sean Parker sued for again?

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

#85

Post by fluoridation »

modeless wrote: post #64
Aurornis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

>instead of allowing anyone to train on already scanned books for free

That would be pirating. So your complaint is that they didn't do more piracy?

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

#86

Post by ceejayoz »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #78
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.

Anthropic pirated that content to help everyone do the same.

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

#87

Post by onemoresoop »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #78
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.

If Anthopic had bought all the books it had trained for say at market rate we’d be having a different conversation now. Anthropic, through this settlement, has been forced to pay back, at least something… Kim would likely not have had enough money to compensate the victims and probably caused some more direct dammage by sharing pirated content. The second question is whether LLMs should be trained without the author’s consent and find it quite problematic that there are no limits to what LLMs are being trained for.

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

#88

Post by xienze »

ceejayoz wrote: post #86
IncreasePosts wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Anthropic pirated that content to help everyone do the same .

Please post the prompts that will reproduce the pirated works verbatim. Or even halfway.

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

#89

Post by ceejayoz »

xienze wrote: post #88
ceejayoz wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic pirated that content to help everyone do the same .

Please post the prompts that will reproduce the pirated works verbatim. Or even halfway.

A shitty cam rip of a movie is still punishable as infringement.

That said, it's been done: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

> In some cases, jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet outputs entire books near-verbatim (e.g., nv-recall=95.8%).

Post reply on HN