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

#411

Post by rpdillon » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

economistbob wrote: post #395

embedding-shape wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

This is not backed up by any evidence. Ripping CDs was never illegal. The DMCA made the circumvention of an effective copyright protection mechanism illegal, which made ripping DVDs and Blu-rays a crime. But that's separate from copyright itself. The RIAA sued Napster users not because they were converting files, but because they were obtaining them from others without a license.

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

#412

Post by bandrami » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

croes wrote: post #363

bandrami wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why copyright infringement is legally different from theft

They call it piracy, not me

It's even less like attacking merchant vessels without a letter of marque than it is like theft, though

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

#413

Post by economistbob » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 1:07 PM UTC

rpdillon wrote: post #411

economistbob wrote: post #395

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…

This is not backed up by any evidence. Ripping CDs was never illegal. The DMCA made the circumvention of an effective copyright protection mechanism illegal, which made ripping DVDs and Blu-rays a crime. But that's separate from copyright itself. The RIAA sued Napster users not because they were converting files, but because they were obtaining them from others without a license.

There is a lot of evidence. I lived through it. Every family with children and an internet connection or MP3 player was terrified of getting ruined suddenly via a letter. It was in the news every day about some other grandpa or single mother losing their house.

Ripping CDs was long illegal. Perhaps the Librarian of Congress made an exception. Now they hid everything behind a CCB that is like Arbitration so we will never know because they have hid almost aspects of societal justice about copyright and business labor behind arbitration style secrecy. The most useful courts are secret and now people believe there are no proceedings and they do not understand how much of our society was litigated and debated before.

Here is an article from 2008 Specifically explaining that ripping a CD to format convert for personal use is illegal and the RIAA and Sony BMG saying it merited suit but they had bigger fish to fry.

1. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/17814972

Mr. FISHER: That's right. So then, you have to ask yourself, why is the industry continuing to cling to that notion that there is no such legal right? (1)

"Bigger fish to fry" is not the same as "legal".

People selling software to easily convert VHS to hard drive were also punished. For decades they were very clear that format shifting was outlawed. But now that it supports centralizing power and creating a permanent class of info-priests to rule the society, they allow it for them.

Frankly, making all the justice system secret is why the media had to turn to personality cult nonsense for most reporting. All the great stories of the past were informed via the justice system activities. Since all the court stuff is secret now, all they had to talk about was Donald Trump.

"Discovery" provided the bulk of news facts before they secreted away all the justice system proceedings for liability, labor, negligence, medical care, copyright.

It used to be possible to know stuff about America and there was "evidence" all over the place. Now there is never any evidence for anything anywhere. That's Scalia's legacy thanks to Concepcion, absolutely gutting the ability of the society to use Hawthorne effects to discern legality and behavior.

This country used to have evidence for everything, and now a lack of evidence is so common that it is a trope level popular refrain.

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

#414

Post by andsoitis » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

skinfaxi wrote: post #406

smolder wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You’re arguing that freely remixing original work will give rise to greatness that’s even better than original work?

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

#415

Post by oblio » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

economistbob wrote: post #394

klabb3 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of this argument with libertarians/ancaps: A: rich people pay less % in taxes than wage workers, we should close the loopholes B: but taxes are immoral to begin with A: ok, but can we do something now about the unequal enforcement? Unrealized gains, tax havens, trusts, fake charities, etc? B: well a society based on property rights… ackhully you should read this book by Mises/Rothbard/Rand

Never really understood how libertarians expect to have someone making guns for their fiefdoms when there is no one to enforce property rights for said gun elements and manufactories.

Libertarianism is not a philosophy. It's selfishness taken to extremes and trying to find ways to justify it at a societal level. The only reason we're the top species is because we're ultra social and have culture, which is inherently a social trait (don't eat those red berries, they're poisonous). Libertarianism want all the benefits of working together with no actual thought into how that working together happens in real life, including punishment for bad behavior.

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

#416

Post by ethbr1 » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

Zambyte wrote: post #353

ivell wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People make art to also get recognized for that art. Otherwise they would keep that art secret at home. Without copyright, anyone can copy the art and call it their own. What is then the incentive for the creator to share the art, if there is neither monetory gain and nor fame. And worse than them being recognized, they might even get accused of copying their own art if someone else became famous due to a copy. Socie…

There are lots of famous artists that are older than copyright. > And worse than them being recognized, they might even get accused of copying their own art if someone else became famous due to a copy. You mean like right now? Here is A24 claiming copyright for Backrooms related media that came out before their Backrooms related film: https://kotaku.com/backrooms-a24-copyright-strikes-kane-pars... Being "accused" of…

> There are lots of famous artists that are older than copyright.

There are lots of famous artists that made art before color image capture and reproduction (1930s-60s) and digital image capture and reproduction (90s-00s).

Copyrightless artist fame and economic viability is enabled by a lack of widely-accessible, cheap reproductive methods.

> You mean like right now? Here is A24 claiming copyright for Backrooms related media...

Since resolved: https://kotaku.com/backrooms-director-kane-parsons-a24-copyr...

Turns out when you outsource copyright policing to minimum wage folks, ambiguity goes out the window.

> Society actively misses out a lot. We could have had tons of derivative art that has been buried for the sake of propping up companies. We could have had Aaron Swartz. Abolish copyright.

The problem with absolutist arguments is that they ignore inconvenient facts.

At a time when creative and art economics is under siege, how would copyrightless art make enough money for the creators?

The fact of the acquisition of large swaths of copyright rights by large corporations does not negate the fact that artists need food (and ideally, a place to live and a way to provide for their family).

There are positions that might enable that (Hey, what if we banned the assignment of copyright to corporations? Human only? Original creator only?), but none of them are stripping all rights from intellectual property.

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

#417

Post by dec0dedab0de » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 1:13 PM UTC

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.

We're trying to own ideas now?

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

#418

Post by inigyou » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 1:14 PM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #407

inigyou wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is not the only thing that is criminalised. This clearly violates 506(a)(1)(A): copyright infringement for commercial advantage is criminal.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506#a_1_A

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

#419

Post by Jensson » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 1:15 PM UTC

Morromist wrote: post #365

aetherspawn wrote: post #349

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…

That's oversimplifying things. Copyright doesn't actually stop me from pirating a book or an mp3 right now. Heck, I'll just download a book right now. Bam. Done. Some things are so difficult to keep from being pirated, such a photographs, that saying the copyright system protects photographers strikes me as a bit silly. It does protect some commercial photographers if a magazine wants to sell their photo sometimes, b…

> It does protect some commercial photographers if a magazine wants to sell their photo sometimes, but that's a very very small slice of all the photos in copyright that are being shared online right now.

That is a very small slice thanks to copyrights. Without copyrights then corporations stealing from the small guy like this would be the majority of it.

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

#420

Post by Lerc » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 1:16 PM UTC

aetherspawn wrote: post #349

davidguetta wrote: post #343

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…

How many times were hugely popular books rejected before a publisher decided they were worthy?

Copyright far more protects the wealthy than the good. They don't need to sell your book, they just need to own the book that people are buying right now. Giving your book a chance to sell would dectract from those sales.

If there were no copyright anyone trying to sell the book $1 cheaper would be undercut by someone selling $1 cheaper them them, and so on. The financial incentive to do that goes away. People then choose to distribute based on different incentives, like the fact that they have seen something worthy that others should see. We have almost completely lost that today because the financial incentive doesn't care what it is as long as you buy it. That might lead to a world dominated by an optimisation for whatever it takes to get you engaged, or worse, addicted. That world might really suck.

There needs to be a way to support the creation of art. Copyright lets a few corporations decide the subset of available art is seen enough and available to pay for (in the hope that maybe some of the patment gets to the creator). It is not a system that works in the modern world.