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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

#291

Post by pj_mukh »

runroader wrote: post #282
visarga wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. So, by that logic, you need to be paying every time you regurgitate any of my ideas. Or anyone else's. Copyright now protects abstractions and vibes. Substantial similarity test be damned. Nobody can write stories about wizard schools, the idea is taken.

Humans are not computers. Humans are not a service. In the end, all laws are made up rules and can absolutely be written to have different outcomes and restrictions based on if a human is doing something or if a program is doing it.

Real question, if an LLM shouldn't be able to remix someone's written work, why should a robot be able to build a chair that kinda looks like a chair a carpenter built that one time? The carpenter was a human, and humans are not a service.

Why this distinction only for intellectual work?

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

#292

Post by echelon_musk »

pj_mukh wrote: post #291
runroader wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are not computers. Humans are not a service. In the end, all laws are made up rules and can absolutely be written to have different outcomes and restrictions based on if a human is doing something or if a program is doing it.

Real question, if an LLM shouldn't be able to remix someone's written work, why should a robot be able to build a chair that kinda looks like a chair a carpenter built that one time? The carpenter was a human, and humans are not a service. Why this distinction only for intellectual work?

I suspect chairs have been public domain since the advent of man.

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

#293

Post by phire »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #200

A one time payment like 1.5B doesn’t do anything. There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the correct way to legislate this. If anything a human does can instantly be copied by an LLM, and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change

This settlement has basically nothing to do with LLMs.

At least not as far as the courts are concerned. Alsup ruled [0] that feeding a book into an LLM is transformative and counts as fair use. Especially when they purchased a physical copy of the book, scanned it, and destroyed the original.

But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as long as they planned to eventually deleted them afterwards)

Where Anthropic ran into problems is that they put all their pirated books into a big central library (file on a server), and planned to keep those copies forever. Including copies they never actually fed into the LLM (a point that seriously worked against them).

Alsup ruled this central library of pirated books was copyright infringement. And it's this "pirated central library" that Anthropic are now paying a a 1.5B settlement for, nothing else.

The fact that the pirated books were also used to train LLMs is legally irrelevant. Though... I suspect a non AI company could have negotiated a significantly smaller settlement.

[0] https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar...

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

#294

Post by shakna »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #277
shakna wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as not every book is a textbook, I'd say quite a lot of what I've read never went to any kind of knowledge in my head at all. But I reckon the author still deserves to eat.

You too deserve to eat. Does it mean we're all supposed to pay you in perpetuity for that HN comment you just posted, because we read it and it's encoded in our brains now?

No... But as we're discussing people who tried to pay nothing... Maybe they should have just bought the books in the first place. And comparing my single sentence on HN, to the hundreds of millions ingested, does suggest that maybe scale changes something.

Like most things said on social media, not being copyrightable.

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

#296

Post by Orygin »

visarga wrote: post #265
sashank_1509 wrote: post #200

A one time payment like 1.5B doesn’t do anything. There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the correct way to legislate this. If anything a human does can instantly be copied by an LLM, and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change

> There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. So, by that logic, you need to be paying every time you regurgitate any of my ideas. Or anyone else's. Copyright now protects abstractions and vibes. Substantial similarity test be damned. Nobody can write stories about wizard schools, the idea is taken.

You indeed need to pay someone if you take their copyrighted materials and regurgitate it. Ask DJ's and producers how they need to include royalties for samples used in their tracks.

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

#297

Post by one33seven »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #200

A one time payment like 1.5B doesn’t do anything. There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the correct way to legislate this. If anything a human does can instantly be copied by an LLM, and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change

If it is based on all our data, we should all own it and democratically chose what is done with it or profits it generates

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

#298

Post by echoangle »

Orygin wrote: post #296
visarga wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. So, by that logic, you need to be paying every time you regurgitate any of my ideas. Or anyone else's. Copyright now protects abstractions and vibes. Substantial similarity test be damned. Nobody can write stories about wizard schools, the idea is taken.

You indeed need to pay someone if you take their copyrighted materials and regurgitate it. Ask DJ's and producers how they need to include royalties for samples used in their tracks.

There’s a difference between an abstract idea and the concrete thing. Regurgitating an idea is different than repeating the text verbatim. Ideas are protected by patents, not copyright.

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

#299

Post by Jtarii »

visarga wrote: post #267
timmb wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why something more advanced than copyright is needed to protect human creative endeavour against AI appropriation. Copyright is demonstrated here not to be up to the job but it doesn’t mean there isn’t regulation needed to give human creators rights and a reward for their contribution

What you are saying leads to "pulling the ladder behind you" effect on creativity. It's impossible to protect more than substantial similarity and still allow creativity to exist.

If a human makes something there should be broad protection for creativity, if a LLM generates something there should be extremely limited protection for creativity.

You should not be able to mass generate images in a particular artists style and claim it as fair use, even if a human making the same images would have protection.

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

#300

Post by embedding-shape »

phire wrote: post #293
sashank_1509 wrote: post #200

A one time payment like 1.5B doesn’t do anything. There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the correct way to legislate this. If anything a human does can instantly be copied by an LLM, and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change

This settlement has basically nothing to do with LLMs. At least not as far as the courts are concerned. Alsup ruled [0] that feeding a book into an LLM is transformative and counts as fair use. Especially when they purchased a physical copy of the book, scanned it, and destroyed the original. But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as lon…

> At least not as far as the courts are concerned. Alsup ruled [0] that feeding a book into an LLM is transformative and counts as fair use. Especially when they purchased a physical copy of the book, scanned it, and destroyed the original.

> But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as long as they eventually deleted them afterwards)

The way I understood it, was that essentially the entire case rested on if Anthropics use was "transformative" or not. And since they literally destroyed the books (not just delete files, which would be copied), that made it transformative.

Regardless if they deleted files or not, if nothing existing was transformed, it would have been illegal. But because of the destruction of k̶n̶o̶w̶l̶e̶d̶g̶e̶ physical property, this ended up being legal.

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