Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by beering » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:26 AM UTC

ariwilson wrote: post #99

tzs wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A summary of what happened is not a full-throated defense of anyone.

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

#102

Post by koolba » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:31 AM UTC

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!

Kill a man you’re a murderer. Kill a thousand, you’re a conqueror.

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

#103

Post by beering » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:31 AM UTC

IncreasePosts wrote: post #81

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?

You have to consider that the lawsuit was likely extremely stressful and scary.

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

#104

Post by nickphx » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:36 AM UTC

onemoresoop wrote: post #87

IncreasePosts wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

anthropic etal would not have a product to sell without their violation.. kdc had a service that just happened to be popular for pirating... how are the two even remotely similar?

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

#105

Post by abuhl98 » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:37 AM UTC

It is wild to see a $1.5 billion resolution in the AI copyright space—especially with around $3,000 per book going directly to affected authors.

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

#106

Post by jamesjhare » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:44 AM UTC

onemoresoop wrote: post #87

IncreasePosts wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

the company is valued at basically 1000x the settlement it is a rounding error for them

copyright infringement was enough to get judgements that ruined entire lives when i was in my late teens and early 20s

now you get to be a founder of a trillion dollar business by extremely large copyright infringement

fuck these ghouls fuck LLMs and fuck the waste of money for this shit

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

#107

Post by kryogen1c » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:47 AM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #83

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…

> Fun fact: a pallet of books is called a "gaylord,"

A Gaylord is a type of box that fits on a pallet. There are multiple ways to palletize products, like shrink wrapping or metal banding

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

#108

Post by wtfHN26 » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:50 AM UTC

tim-projects wrote: post #95

This is a too big to fail scenario. If these companies fail, so does the US economy. Normal laws for individuals don't apply, so any comparison to that is pointless.

> If these companies fail, so does the US economy.

I would be really worried about the US economy then.

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

#109

Post by jamesjhare » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:57 AM UTC

jdlshore wrote: post #4

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

how much of your economic output are you comfortable with companies like Anthropic stealing to put you out of work?

at least in Player Piano they paid the workers who made the cassette tapes that made the robots work.

our current LLM overlords demand that they be able to basically steal the sum total of all human knowledge so that they can sell it back to us at a rate they set.

they should have been shunned by society and made penniless when they first announced their goals but we have a bunch of deeply misanthropic people who have money and want to make a world where computer slaves do their bidding.

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

#110

Post by jamesjhare » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:58 AM UTC

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…

well if they made a PDF copy to process they violated copyright