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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

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see: - what's APOSD - "it's illegal since it's copyrighted" makes no sense to me - The settlement should be exactly to cover their licenses for training

Edited to clarify APOSD == the book _A Philosophy of Software Design_ Please ask John Ousterhout what his cut of this settlement will be, and whether or no he agreed to it and finds it acceptable.

Yeah ask him how much he gets paid for one copy of the book, I assure you it's not much

If he's not getting a cut of this settlement then that's between him and his publisher.

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

#532
post #21

If you have the time, read the judge's response to the motion: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43... The big deal for publishers and authors is the payout per eligible title is $3k. For a traditional publishing contract involving one author, the amount will be split down the middle. The other thing which caught my eye is the judge slashed the class counsel's fee by half, from 12.5% ($187.5m)…

>The class counsel's unreimbursed litigation expenses were $2.6m. In what sane state does it even get that high?

Associates are billing over $1000/hr and can bill 12 hours a day easily enough. If you have 5 associates billing an average of 50 hours a week then in a month thats a million dollar bill just for the junior lawyers.

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

#533
post #453

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.

> if you can't persuade the machine to spit substantially the same text back out verbatim

That's exactly what they've done in a number of the lawsuits, so I'm not sure why you think that hasn't occurred.

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

#534

Judge Alsup issued the original order that determined they were liable for piracy but that training LLMs on books was fair use. It's worth reading if you're interested in the topic. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/231/bartz-v-an...

So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use? It's funny that crimes can be settled in cash. IOW, everything has a price; and the price is always right. Settlement ought to be the euphemism for blood money. In addition to the settlement, what I'd consider fair is to have these companies pay royalties in perpetuity. Of course, that's not tractable.

> So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use?

Yes, that is the entire history of humanity. People steal the last generations works and build something from it to make it their own.

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

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of that knowledge speed on your brain? No, because that's not what copyright is about. Learning from and building on previous work is civilization. Copyright maximalism is a plague.

Am I an LLM?

Why does that matter?

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

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a settled area of law and there is a SDNY judge that has a completely different application of the fair use analysis in the same exact context and came to a completely different conclusion (that it is not fair use).

I would like to see a citation on that b/c I am unaware of it. The only case I see in SDNY is the NYT v OpenAI case which has not been ruled on yet. https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/copyright-law-20...

Sorry, I'm thinking of Kadrey, where the court rejected Anthropic's "training" argument and provided an explanation as to how author litigants should demonstrate market harm in order to succeed on a fair use analysis, a factor that Alsup did not effectively weigh.

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

#537
post #442

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.

>There needs to be a way to support the creation of art.

Yeah, it's called "copyright."

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

#538
post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

People have been paid artists before copyright even existed, what some might call patronage.

And?

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

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If money is the only incentive, then it's not a product of artistic work. Also current copyright laws only exists to fulfill the constitutional mandate to promote the progress of science and useful arts. There are a lot of alternative ways to fulfill that mandate that don't include a lot of the baggage we have presently in copyright law which is now slowing down progress.

>If money is the only incentive, then it's not a product of artistic work.

This is just bullshit and no one said it's the only incentive.

> There are a lot of alternative ways to fulfill that mandate that don't include a lot of the baggage we have presently in copyright law which is now slowing down progress.

such as??

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