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

181–190 of 654 posts

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

#181

Post by FeepingCreature »

globular-toast wrote: post #177
FeepingCreature wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that they're testing for 100-word passages. This is a level of memorization that avid readers can credibly also reach. Note also that Sonnet 3.7 had to be jailbroken. Note also that they got high memorization for a few books that were widely quoted. The books in question can probably also be "retrieved" by putting phrase prefixes into Google, which is probably why Sonnet 3.7 knows them with the precision of a fa…

No "avid reader" could recall anywhere near that much text. That takes dedicated effort to commit to memory. Copyright was never meant to stop people copying books anyway, it was meant to stop machines (ie. printing presses) copying them. Edit: Apologies, I misread it as "100 pages". My point about copyright still stands, though.

I disagree that avid readers cannot complete entire passages from books they've read several times when fed a prefix.

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

#182

Post by consensus1 »

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…

That is a false statement. Gaining commercial advantage means selling pirated copies which Anthropic absolutely did not do, so none of your following statements are correct either.

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

#183

Post by JAlexoid »

globular-toast wrote: post #177
FeepingCreature wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that they're testing for 100-word passages. This is a level of memorization that avid readers can credibly also reach. Note also that Sonnet 3.7 had to be jailbroken. Note also that they got high memorization for a few books that were widely quoted. The books in question can probably also be "retrieved" by putting phrase prefixes into Google, which is probably why Sonnet 3.7 knows them with the precision of a fa…

No "avid reader" could recall anywhere near that much text. That takes dedicated effort to commit to memory. Copyright was never meant to stop people copying books anyway, it was meant to stop machines (ie. printing presses) copying them. Edit: Apologies, I misread it as "100 pages". My point about copyright still stands, though.

I used to use the initial letters of a whole paragraph from Lord of The Rings as my password.

Some of us have a good enough memory.

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

#184

Post by JAlexoid »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #147
onionisafruit wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a class action law suit. I may be wrong, but I don’t think jail is ever an option in a civil suit.

right, the thread you responded to is asking why there hasn't been a parallel criminal suit

Maybe because Anthropic isn't actively facilitating copyright infringement?..

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

#185

Post by protocolture »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #126
protocolture wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 a…

There's two issues with copyright. 1. author owns the right to distribute copies of the work 2. this right goes on for faaaaaar too long. I don't have an issue with 1. You had a good idea, you implemented it, you deserve something for it. Given some people got sued into oblivion with ridiculous dollar value outcomes on a per unit basis - why doesn't this apply here? Sure 1.5 billion is a lot. But the number of infrin…

>Given some people got sued into oblivion with ridiculous dollar value outcomes on a per unit basis - why doesn't this apply here?

I mean, it feels to me like one or both of:

1. The class action lawyers werent 100% certain they could win in court. 2. The class action lawyers smelled an easy payday.

They get ~100 million out of this.

I also think that the 1500 bucks going to most of these authors is going to be more than they ever saw in royalties. I read somewhere that 500 - 1500 bucks is roughly what a self pub book makes in its lifetime. Why push the envelope? Anthropic hasnt done anything that deserves to pay for the entire lifetime royalties of most books. Their legal alternative is to cut the spine off and scan the book in. In which case the author and publisher will be splitting 20 bucks instead, assuming Anthropic isnt buying used.

This seems like a donation tbh.

>slap on the wrist for what happened here.

Its not a punishment at all because this is a civil case that has been settled out of court.

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

#187

Post by nadermx »

Fantosism wrote: post #163
jamesjhare wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's pretty easy to validate that everything they're saying is accurate. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/september-8/riaa... > in practice the RIAA offered defendants the option of establishing a “Clean Slate” by destroying all of their illegally acquired files and paying a settlement of approximately $3 per illegal song. The two notable cases were: 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v…

Weird, what about this? https://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/riaa_at_four.pdf

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

#188

Post by JAlexoid »

ceejayoz wrote: post #89
xienze wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%).

Infringement is a civil lawsuit, with financial punishment only.

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

#189

Post by JAlexoid »

dataflow wrote: post #176
onemoresoop wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, 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. You're thinking civil. They're talking criminal. Criminal law enforcement does not (well, isn't supposed to) look at your ability to compensate before deciding what to charge you with.

Since we're on the criminal side - what criminal statute would apply to Anthropic? And what criminal statutes were used for the cases we're supposed to compare to?

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

#190

Post by bandrami »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #118
nextaccountic wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rece…

No, it’s proof purchase of how stupid the publishing industry is. Maybe publishing houses should just pay authors good money, like a goddamn salary, and get a book out of them every few years.

They can't for the same reason that cab companies can't make their drivers employees: they would have to employ far, far fewer of them than they do on contingency.
Post reply on HN