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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

#91

Post by theplumber »

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.

Fuck off! what about Aaron Swartz ? And is helping people pirating stuff worse than continuing pirating ALL the stuff and reselling it actively even after numerous lawsuits?

Some of you really don’t deserve good things. You should be blocked from using AI on more than one device without paying an additional subscription plan.

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

#92

Post by BikiniPrince »

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…

How is this ruled as piracy then? I am confused.

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

#93

Post by tzs »

BloodyIron wrote: post #90

Did someone forget to consult with the MPAA and the RIAA on this one? This is a joke of an outcome. $3k per book. How much was it per song for Napster?

The RIAA typically asked for around $2-4 per song to settle without a lawsuit, which would come to a total of a few thousand because they generally only went after people sharing over a thousand songs.

In the couple of few where the party would not agree to a settlement and the RIAA sued, they would pick about 15 of the thousand+ songs to sue over. Statutory damages are a minimum of $750 per infringed work, so the total would now be about 3-5 times what their settlement offer amount had been.

Most parties then got a lawyer, the lawyer told the party that had no chance, and they would then seriously negotiate with the RIAA and get a settlement.

Only a couple would still not settle, went to trial, and did an absolutely terrible job and the judge/jury awarded well above the minimum statutory damages. The RIAA still tried to settle for well below that, but the defendants refused and kept trying to fight and did not have a happy time.

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

#94

Post by keeda »

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.

> That depends on the answer to a question that hasn't been answered yet.

It has been answered in a sense, because the courts (so far) have ruled that training is Fair Use. Whether this is similar to a human learning from a book was not quite the question being answered, but AFAICT there is no other relevant doctrine under Copyright law to address it, largely because the question didn't even exist until LLMs came along.

Also, these are not damages, it's a settlement i.e. a negotiated agreement between both parties.

Relevant sub-thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997766

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

#97

Post by tzs »

driverdan wrote: post #70

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...

Alsup is an interesting judge. He has handled several important tech cases, such as Oracle v Google, and Waymo v Uber.

He's also a longtime hobbyist programmer working in BASIC, much of it in support of his ham radio hobby. Screenshots of his shortwave propagation prediction program here [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...

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

#98

Post by modeless »

fluoridation wrote: post #85
modeless wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My complaint is that after this settlement nothing has materially changed except that the big labs now benefit from higher barriers to entry in their market. Authors don't make more money (other than a one time protection payment from Anthropic to publishers and some lawyers). Literally no one else benefits, except I guess used book marketplaces and book scanner vendors.

To be clear, this isn't a problem with the court process. Everything here appears perfectly in accordance with the law. It's just an absurd state to be in.

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

#99

Post by ariwilson »

tzs wrote: post #93
BloodyIron wrote: post #90

Did someone forget to consult with the MPAA and the RIAA on this one? This is a joke of an outcome. $3k per book. How much was it per song for Napster?

The RIAA typically asked for around $2-4 per song to settle without a lawsuit, which would come to a total of a few thousand because they generally only went after people sharing over a thousand songs. In the couple of few where the party would not agree to a settlement and the RIAA sued, they would pick about 15 of the thousand+ songs to sue over. Statutory damages are a minimum of $750 per infringed work, so the to…

Weird to hear a full throated defense of the RIAA here

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

#100

Post by kg »

BikiniPrince wrote: post #92
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…

How is this ruled as piracy then? I am confused.

They also pirated the books
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