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

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541–550 of 654 posts

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

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be misremembering, as I worked on the loan side, but wasn't the 6% standard set by the state's realtor association until 2024?

No. "Realtor" is a trademarked term for a member of the National Association of Realtors. Real estate agents are licensed by state governments, but prices for real estate agents are not legislated by state governments. If this is the 2024 settlement that you are referring to, it did not say anything about the price a Realtor can charge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnett_v._National_Associatio... >The cooperative…

I'm aware that prices for agents are not legislated by state governments, but prior to 2024, as a realtor that was a member of your state's association, you were standardized at a 6% rate. Because that's what your association standardized. That's partially what the suit was about. What percentage of real estate transactions are done with agents who aren't members of XAR?

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

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaron swartz lost his life because he committed suicide. Something he had tried multiple times before. If he really only committed suicide because of the legal jeopardy he was in, wouldn't it have made more sense to commit suicide after you're found guilty?

You have to consider that the lawsuit was likely extremely stressful and scary.

I'm sure it was. Let's also keep in mind that he was offered a 6 month plea bargain.

Yes, it sucks to accept a plea on something that you think was not illegal. But if we are going to argue that he killed himself because of the charges, we need to admit that he killed himself so he wouldn't have to spend 6 months in a minimum security prison. Heck, it might have even been house arrest.

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

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. "Realtor" is a trademarked term for a member of the National Association of Realtors. Real estate agents are licensed by state governments, but prices for real estate agents are not legislated by state governments. If this is the 2024 settlement that you are referring to, it did not say anything about the price a Realtor can charge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnett_v._National_Associatio... >The cooperative…

I'm aware that prices for agents are not legislated by state governments, but prior to 2024, as a realtor that was a member of your state's association, you were standardized at a 6% rate. Because that's what your association standardized. That's partially what the suit was about. What percentage of real estate transactions are done with agents who aren't members of XAR?

[deleted]

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

#544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kim built something designed to help everyone pirate stuff. Anthropic pirated specific content.

Anthropic pirated that content to help everyone do the same .

I doubt many people are asking anthropic to output Harry Potter for them. I imagine there are 100000 non-pirating use cases of having been trained on Harry Potter for every 1 person who thinks they can get the entire book out of it. Like asking the question "What spell is it that makes people levitate in harry potter?" and things like that which are not infringing on any copyrights

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

#545
"...what you would do if you’re a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be, is if it took off, then you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right? But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content. And do not quote me." -- Eric Schmidt

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

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect the market harm angle is not going to work out either based on the one study I know of on the topic: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34777

> We document a tripling in the number of new books coming to market between late 2022 and late 2025 that mirrors the use of AI that we detect in new books. The effects of this influx on consumer welfare depend on the quality of the additional books. The average quality of new books has fallen with the LLM-induced influx, and books with detected AI are substantially worse than human-authored books, so that much of the new work is of little value to consumers. Still, the LLM influx has delivered some books in the middle range of the usage/quality distribution, and the LLM-era entry process delivered seven percent more consumer surplus from books than the pre-LLM process in 2025.

...

Moreover, the arrival of LLMs does not appear to have displaced activity by incumbent authors. Despite the controversy surrounding LLMs, their effect on book consumers – like other cost-reducing technological changes in the cultural industries – is positive. However, because the new books are mostly of low quality, the effects are modest

So not only are existing authors unharmed (because most of the new competition is slop) there is even a small improvement for consumers.

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

#547
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd place to bring this up. This is one of those situations where copyright is doing what it's meant to do.

But does it, really? A slap on the wrist, that's what it's doing here, isn't it?

Yes, what would you like to happen?

I believe Anthropic shouldn't go bankrupt. I don't think the violated should be filthy rich either.

The richer publishers are still fighting. The ones taking the settlement may not have strong enough grounds and are happy with what they got.

It should be a speed bump. Just enough that it discourages blatantly breaking the law, and doesn't make it a strong incentive for others to resort to piracy as well.

If copyright law didn't exist, writers would still write but everyone would just take the books. A company like Amazon which doesn't give a damn about ethics would pirate all the books; the slap is painful enough to keep them straight.

If it were too tight, we'd have regulatory arbitrage; AI companies would set up in Japan, Singapore, India, China, and so on where they would get just a slap on the wrist.

Or if international laws were stricter, people would be pirating data on Elon Island or SpaceXAI Station. Forbidding something that valuable would be like Prohibition, lucrative for the criminals.

It's not really fair to anyone, and yet that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.

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

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? I don't understand how this is even a question, this is exactly how it worked throughout human history.

In what way is copyright preventing it today?

I can't make and sell a remix of an existing IP and even in cases of free distribution it can get dicey legally.

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

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And?

Therefore copyright is not necessary.

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

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information entropy. The amount of data an LLM ingests cannot be compressed to the size of the weights even at maximum theoretical compression.

Is that relevant? I can use a lossy compression algorithm such that the original could never be recovered from the image I've produced, but that derived image would surely be under copyright. LLMs are obviously capable of producing "exact" phrases as well. Ask it to give you famous quotes, it can do it. Ask it to read a paper for you and cite it, it can do it.

Why would a derived image be under copyright?
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