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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

#401

What a fucking joke of a country the US is, allowing this kind of behaviour with such a pathetic "punishment". Barely even qualifies as a tap on the wrist, Anthropic should be getting gutted into non-existence for this shit and the execs should be given the Aaron Swartz treatment.

Amen! We are watching them incinerate the past so they can lie about the past in the future. They are destroying the books and will censor what was in them.

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

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm concerned, the courts are wrong, and training on ill gotten copyrighted material is not fair use. Given the clear value of highly trained LLMs, the investment they have taken on, and the amount of disruption to the existing economy they stand to make, in a just world, the people who created the training data deserve some level of compensation. I think, in the US, they are very afraid of falling behind C…

So will you owe life long compensation for all the knowledge you got from books too? How about all the pirated books, music, movies, etc you consumed? When will you set up a life long payment plan to corporations that own these rights, because I have a bridge to sell you if you think any of this settlement will go to any of the people who created anything. I’m guessing you have some kind of imagined idea of some smal…

> So will you owe life long compensation for all the knowledge you got from books too?

No because we are people and the laws differ for people, corporations, and machines.

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

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

copyright is bullshit

Copyright is what stops someone from copy+pasting a book that took years to write, then selling it $1 cheaper than the original author on Amazon or whatever and making a margin 1 million percent higher than the original author. Imagine a society without copyright… only physically intensive jobs could make money because everything else would be pirated, ripped-off or free. Thus, only those who are financially independ…

> Thus, only those who are financially independent could afford to publish. Because the world really needs more rich class propaganda…

Yes, all the rich class propaganda being pushed by open source developers working on software in their free time.

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

#404
post #271

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

Ideas are not protected by copyright, nor are facts. You need to have a very specific and 'creative' / 'substantial' expression of an idea for copyright to apply. The output of an LLM can be easily be such, but usually not.

I'll link to a previous comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968156

> You need to have a very specific and 'creative' / 'substantial' expression of an idea for copyright to apply. The output of an LLM can be easily be such, but usually not.

This is incomplete with current US law. You need the above (the typical copyright qualifiers) AND evidence of substantial human involvement in the creation.

Minimally directing an autonomous agent does not qualify.

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

#405
post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet countless families, including old folks were ruined during untold numbers of RIAA suits because "converting to save space" is not a permissable use. They used to go around destroying lives by the thousands after Napster was creating because of the invalidity of that argument. It is a crime to make a CD of your MP3s and vice versa, and you cannot convert your VHS to DVD. A billionaire does it at scale, well then s…

I'm not aware of any cases where the RIAA sued people who ripped their own CD/DVDs/VHS for personal use. Their MO was suing owners of internet connections which were seen sharing content on file sharing networks.

Why is scanning a book transformative(a la Google) but reading data off a CD and putting into a digital format not?

How is streaming bits of the music from your computer not transformative?

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

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright is what stops someone from copy+pasting a book that took years to write, then selling it $1 cheaper than the original author on Amazon or whatever and making a margin 1 million percent higher than the original author. Imagine a society without copyright… only physically intensive jobs could make money because everything else would be pirated, ripped-off or free. Thus, only those who are financially independ…

Right, it's about incentivising intellectual work. While I have big issues with the copyright system, like all the extensions lobbied for by Disney and friends, it did enable a lot of good work to happen.

> it did enable a lot of good work to happen.

How do we know that when we don't have a copy of the world without this regime? How much more and greater works could have been produced without such a repressive system?

A really successful work becomes part of the culture, and remixing, derivatives and other modes of integrating cultural artifacts are prohibited. Why should we allow corporations to own our culture?

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright infringement is in most cases tortious rather than criminal.

This clearly meets the scale requirements for criminality.

It's not really scale so much as circumvention; what got criminalized was circumventing protection mechanisms which AFAICT Anthropic didn't do

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

#408
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

You're mistaken.

The transformativeness of the use is independent of the destruction of the books. The destruction of the books allowed them to argue that they had not duplicated them, and was instrumental in the argument supporting the legality of scanning them. But that's entirely upstream of the way the data was leveraged, which is what is critical in the argument about the use being transformative.

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

#409
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And since they literally destroyed the books (not just delete files, which would be copied), that made it transformative. You have to be careful, just because the judge points a factor out as notable, doesn't mean that factor was required. The destruction of source books makes Anthropic's fair use argument [2] especially air tight, but it would be a mistake to assume that act was required, or is what made it transf…

My understanding comes from here, seems pretty clear to me but won't claim to be a lawyer of course: > Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “cons…

Nope, that's a little bit of sloppy writing on the part of Ars. I am not a lawyer, but I'll be happy to discuss the technicalities with anybody here. I'm fairly passionate about the technicalities of copyright.

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

#410

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

> royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas

That doesn’t make sense. You cannot copyright an idea, only the specific expression of the idea.

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