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Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

nytimes.com

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Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#11

Post by nerevarthelame »

on_meds wrote: post #2

It will be interesting to see how this impacts the lawsuits against OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. Will they quickly try to settle for billions as well? It’s not precedent setting but surely it’ll have an impact.

Anthropic certainly seems to be hoping that their competitors will have to face some consequences too:

>During a deposition, a founder of Anthropic, Ben Mann, testified that he also downloaded the Library Genesis data set when he was working for OpenAI in 2019 and assumed this was “fair use” of the material.

Per the NYT article, Anthropic started buying physical books in bulk and scanning them for their training data, and they assert that no pirated materials were ever used in public models. I wonder if OpenAI can say the same.

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#12

Post by mschild »

typs wrote: post #7
on_meds wrote: post #2

It will be interesting to see how this impacts the lawsuits against OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. Will they quickly try to settle for billions as well? It’s not precedent setting but surely it’ll have an impact.

Maybe, though this lawsuit is different in respect to the piracy issue. Anthropic is paying the settlement because they pirated the books, not because training on copyrighted books isn’t fair use which isn’t necessarily true with the other cases.

Didn't Meta do the exact same thing?

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#14

Post by non_aligned »

arjunchint wrote: post #10

Wait so they raised all that money just to give it to publishers? Can only imagine the pitch, yes please give us billions of dollars. We are going to make a huge investment like paying of our lawsuits.

You're joking, but that's actually a good pitch. There was a significant legal issue hanging over their heads, with some risk of a potentially business-ending judgment down the line. This makes it go away, which makes the company a safer, more valuable investment. Both in absolute terms and compared to peers who didn't settle.

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#15

Post by Wowfunhappy »

arjunchint wrote: post #10

Wait so they raised all that money just to give it to publishers? Can only imagine the pitch, yes please give us billions of dollars. We are going to make a huge investment like paying of our lawsuits.

From the article:

> Although the payment is enormous, it is small compared with the amount of money that Anthropic has raised in recent years. This month, the start-up announced that it had agreed to a deal that brings an additional $13 billion into Anthropic’s coffers. The start-up has raised a total of more than $27 billion since its founding in 2021.

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#16

Post by therobots927 »

aeon_ai wrote: post #8

To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.

It is related to scalable mode training, however. Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. And don't forget about the cost of 1) finding 2) purchasing 3) processing and 4) recycling that volume of books.

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#17

Post by Onavo »

aeon_ai wrote: post #8

To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.

Wdym Rainbows End was prescient?

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#18

Post by Onavo »

therobots927 wrote: post #16
aeon_ai wrote: post #8

To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.

It is related to scalable mode training, however. Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. And don't forget about the cost of 1) finding 2) purchasing 3) processing and 4) recycling that volume of books.

> Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable.

That's how Google Books, the Internet Archive, and Amazon (their book preview feature) operated before ebooks were common. It's not scalable-in-a-garage but perfectly scalable for a commercial operation.

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#19

Post by markasoftware »

They also agreed to destroy the pirated books. I wonder how large of a portion of their training data comes from these shadow libraries, and if AI labs in countries that have made it clear they won't enforce anti-piracy laws against AI companies will get a substantial advantage by continuing to use shadow libraries.
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