Live data from Hacker News

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

apnews.com

111–120 of 654 posts

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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually did this. > Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase millions of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Each print book resulted in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with machine-readable text (including front an…

Great, so now instead of allowing anyone to train on already scanned books for free, we can have only the richest big labs buy all the books and scan them privately to train their proprietary models. And since they buy the books used, authors still don't get any money. But at least the books are destroyed afterwards! What an improvement!

no we should destroy the works of these ghouls and support humans instead of this destructive and useless technology

the people operating frontier labs are bad people they cannot be trusted in any way

the best solution to them would be to send them to monster island (even though it's really a peninsula)

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

#112
post #93

Did someone forget to consult with the MPAA and the RIAA on this one? This is a joke of an outcome. $3k per book. How much was it per song for Napster?

The RIAA typically asked for around $2-4 per song to settle without a lawsuit, which would come to a total of a few thousand because they generally only went after people sharing over a thousand songs. In the couple of few where the party would not agree to a settlement and the RIAA sued, they would pick about 15 of the thousand+ songs to sue over. Statutory damages are a minimum of $750 per infringed work, so the to…

[flagged]

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

#114

But why not jail like Kim Dotcom? And why no Feds jumping on Dario’s window? They are not only pirating, they also resell it!

It was a class action law suit. I may be wrong, but I don’t think jail is ever an option in a civil suit.

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

#116
post #4

To be clear, the issue is not that the books were used to train Claude, but that they were pirated.

how much of your economic output are you comfortable with companies like Anthropic stealing to put you out of work? at least in Player Piano they paid the workers who made the cassette tapes that made the robots work. our current LLM overlords demand that they be able to basically steal the sum total of all human knowledge so that they can sell it back to us at a rate they set. they should have been shunned by societ…

All of it.

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

#117
post #4

To be clear, the issue is not that the books were used to train Claude, but that they were pirated.

It's an unfortunate outcome. Now to be a big player in AI, you have to have enough capital to buy your own library worth of books and digitize them. (Fun fact: a pallet of books is called a "gaylord," and they buy hundreds of gaylords.) I created books3 to help settle the question of whether AI companies should be allowed to train on books. The outcome of "it's okay to pirate books as long as you're only training on…

Ladder-pulling at its best. It's also easier to swallow the fine once you've launched a successful product after pirating the books.

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

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually did this. > Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase millions of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Each print book resulted in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with machine-readable text (including front an…

> Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. This is worse than pirating books to an absurd degree, it's almost a parody - the company that slurps all human knowledge ends up not only metaphorically, but also physically destroying those books, like an information vampire. Authors don't even rece…

No, it’s proof purchase of how stupid the publishing industry is. Maybe publishing houses should just pay authors good money, like a goddamn salary, and get a book out of them every few years.

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

#120
For anyone who thinks the problem is Anthropic, I want you all to know that most authors make less than the median income. Most make less than $20,000 a year, because publishing houses give authors an advance, and then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work.

Most never do.

Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years.

https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author...

Post reply on HN