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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

#121

Post by neilv »

$1.5B is a nothing but a handslap for the big gold rush companies.

It's less than 1% Anthropic's valuation -- a valuation utterly dependent on all the hoovering up of others' copyrighted works.

AFAICT, if this settlement signals that the typical AI foundation model company's massive-scale commercial theft doesn't result in judgments that wipe out a company (and its execs), then we have confirmation that is a free-for-all for all the other AI gold rush companies.

Then making deals to license rights, in sell-it-to-us-or-we'll-just-take-it-anyway deals, becomes only a routine and optional corporate cost reduction exercise, but not anything the execs will lose sleep over if it's inconvenient.

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

#122

Post by xnx »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15
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.

The money they don't pay out in settlements goes to Nvidia.

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

#125

Post by gpm »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #118
wmf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying $3,000 for pirating a ~$30 book seems disproportionate.

Realistically it will be $30 per book and $2,970 for the lawyers

That's not how class actions work. Ever.

In this specific case the settlement caps the lawyer fees at 25%, and even that is subject to the courts approval. In addition they will ask for $250k total ($50k / plaintiff) for the lead plaintiffs, also subject to the courts approval.

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

#126

Post by xnx »

neilv wrote: post #121

$1.5B is a nothing but a handslap for the big gold rush companies. It's less than 1% Anthropic's valuation -- a valuation utterly dependent on all the hoovering up of others' copyrighted works. AFAICT, if this settlement signals that the typical AI foundation model company's massive-scale commercial theft doesn't result in judgments that wipe out a company (and its execs), then we have confirmation that is a free-for…

> It's less than 1% Anthropic's valuation

The settlement is real money though. Valuation is imaginary.

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

#127

Post by HDThoreaun »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #92
tonfa wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you're not distributing, it's legal in Switzerland to download copyrighted material. (Switzerland was on the naughty US/MPAA list for a while, might still be)

Is it distribution though if someone trains a model in switzerland through downloading copyrighted material, training AI on it and then distributing it... Or what if not even distributing it but rather distributing the outputs of the LLM (so closed source LLM like anthropic) I am genuinely curious as to if there is some gray area that might be exploited by AI companies as I am pretty sure that they don't want to pay…

Using copyrighted material to train AI is a legal grey zone. The nyt vs openAI case is litigating this. The anthropic settlement here is about how the material is obtained. If openAI wins their case and switzerland rules the same way I dont think there would be a problem

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

#128

Post by mgraczyk »

bhaktatejas922 wrote: post #119

This weirdly seems like its the best mechanism to buy this much data. Imagine going to 500k publishers to buy it individually. 3k per book is way cheaper. The copyright system is turning into a data marketplace in front of our eyes

It's a tiny amount of data relatively speaking. Much more expensive per token than almost any data source imaginable

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

#129

Post by reassess_blind »

greensoap wrote: post #27
nicce wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they must delete all models since they acquired the source illegally and benefitted from it, right? Otherwise it just encourages others to keep going and pay the fines later.

In a prior ruling, the court stated that Anthropic didn't train on the books subject to this settlement. The record is that Anthropic scanned physical books and used those for training. The pirated books were being held in a general purpose library and were not, according to the record, used in training.

So how did they profit off the pirated books?

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

#130

Post by GMoromisato »

sefrost wrote: post #59
petralithic wrote: post #21

This is sad for open source AI, piracy for the purpose of model training should also be fair use because otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so. There is no way to buy billions of books just for model training, it simply can't happen.

I wonder how much it would cost to buy every book that you'd want to train a model.

500,000 x $20 = $10 million

Obviously there would be handling costs + scanning costs, so that’s the floor.

Maybe $20 million total? Plus, of course, the time it would take to execute.

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