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

#461

Post by gspr » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

0x3f wrote: post #248

gspr wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that if someone writes a book or records a song, anyone should be able to use it for anything forever without consent? How does intellectual work get funded in this insane world if yours, pray tell?

You assume your premise. But plenty of "intellectual work" is already done without legal cover. It just typically attracts normal profits, rather than super-normal rent-seeking ones.

I, too, hate rentseeking. Owning one's intellectual output, however, is not in and of itself rentseeking.

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

#462

Post by YetAnotherNick » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #309

Zambyte wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The correct way to legislate this is to abolish copyright. It is strictly a negative force. Nobody makes art because of copyright, only in spite of it.

Commercial enterprises make content , like Marvel movies and Netflix series, because of copyright.

What copyright law helps them? They have the least to worry about copyright as even if someone copies the movie script or something it's not like their views will be gone because of that.

I am not against trademark. e.g. Disney has a right on who can sell Mickey Mouse figurine, or Marvel has right over Iron man character and franchise.

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

#463

Post by economistbob » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #423

oblio wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah its wrong in very very similar ways to communism.

What very very similar ways would that be?

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

#464

Post by tarnith » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

flir wrote: post #453

freejazz wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So will you owe life long compensation for all the knowledge you got from books too? You're just falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing the phrase "training" in the context of LLMs, which is not the same things as what humans do. There is no evidence they are the same thing and there is nothing to support the notion that what an LLM does when it "trains" on a book is equivalent to a human reading it.

Whatever "training" is, if you can't persuade the machine to spit substantially the same text back out verbatim, it's clearly not something that falls under copy right law either, because there's no copy. Yes, for some texts that's possible. But for the vast majority, it is not.

Can you cite any information on this not being possible for the vast majority?

Or is it simply that the correct prompt hasn't been written for all possible cases?

I also fail to see the difference if logic/harnessing is added around a vector database that can output the complete corpus, but simply is instructed not to.

It very clearly is still compressing the information into the vector weights, and then recovering that information, thus the information is encoded.

Why is a vector database somehow completely different from maintaining a library of the text itself?

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

#465

Post by deaton » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

Lerc wrote: post #442

freejazz wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there is nothing to distribute if the author is not incentivized to write... which you seemed to skip past.

Indeed, perhaps I should have said There needs to be a way to support the creation of art.

Great, that way is called copyright. The author has the right to control who has the rights to distribute their work, and can require compensation in exchange for that right; what economists refer to as "selling".

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

#466

Post by fooker » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

IMO this ruling will be the inflection point that kills either the book publishing industry or the US big model frontier lab industry.

It's trendy to say it'll be the later, but I see a credible case for the former.

I see no reason to pay for a textbook in 2026, while I'm happy to pay an expensive monthly subscription for a coding agent.

(And before someone accuses me of being anti education or anything, bona fide scientist with a PhD here and I have written book chapters for a couple of popular textbooks).

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

#467

Post by gspr » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

pishpash wrote: post #289

gspr wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that if someone writes a book or records a song, anyone should be able to use it for anything forever without consent? How does intellectual work get funded in this insane world if yours, pray tell?

Lots of ways. Selling author signings, talks, authorized copies, subscriptions/merch, sponsorships. How do newfangled "content creators" fund their work? We already live in this world. Maybe not all creative works are deserving of monopoly profits just by sitting on the ass in any case, and should stand on their own merits by producing downstream value that can be sold for whatever they can be sold for, by whoever pu…

> Selling author signings, talks, authorized copies, subscriptions/merch, sponsorships.

Most of these turn intellectual work into that of indie musicians, or outright beggars. You are stepping dangerously close to stripping people rights in favour of giant AI companies.

> How do newfangled "content creators" fund their work? We already live in this world.

"Content creators" heavily rely on IP protections. You could always try taking some youtube videos with 100M views, altering them a bit an using them as your own and seeing how that goes down. Do let me know!

> Maybe not all creative works are deserving of monopoly profits just by sitting on the ass in any case, and should stand on their own merits by producing downstream value that can be sold for whatever they can be sold for, by whoever puts in the work to deliver the value to the end user in a competitive manner. You know, open markets.

And open market is not one where I can say that you are just sitting on your ass, so I'll take your stuff and sell it.

> Attribution I can see. Consent or payment beyond market value, why?

Because it's my stuff of course! And why should one even pay market value in your world? Why not always 0?

> Just because you put in a billion hours to make a shitty $1 value output I should pay you a billion hours worth of labor?

What in the world are you on about? If the price someone puts on their IP seems too high to you, you should not pay that price. We wholeheartedly agree. Where we disagree is where you from this conclude that you can just choose the price yourself and take it anyway!

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

#468

Post by deaton » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:41 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?

Go read a few fanfics and tell me you still think that theres added value.

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

#469

Post by skinfaxi » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #414

skinfaxi wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Isn't most creative work synthesis rather than unique whole-cloth creation? Look at what happens with software when it is open sourced and allowed to be remixed freely. Are we better or worse off because of it?

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

#470

Post by PhunkyPhil » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

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.

This isn't that out there in our current scenario. These models compress our collective thought and effort. Why not make these publicly owned, all profits distributed back to us?