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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

#131

Post by mvdtnz »

mdp2021 wrote: post #115
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.

> Buying used copies of books It remains deranged. Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library. (Edit: in fact initially I wrote 'is supposed to' in place of 'has more than a right to' - meaning that "knowledge is there, we made it available: you are supposed to access it, with the fullest encouragement").

Huh?

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

#132

Post by Aachen »

siliconpotato wrote: post #46
dkdcio wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe I’m bad at math but paying >5% of your capital raised for a single fine doesn’t seem great from a business perspective

It's VC money, I don't think anyone believes it's real money

If it weren't, why are we taking it as legal tender? I certainly wouldn't mind being paid in VC money

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

#133

Post by HDThoreaun »

unaut wrote: post #20

This settlement I guess could be a landmark moment. $1.5 billion is a staggering figure and I hope it sends a clear signal that AI companies can’t just treat creative work as free training data.

All the ai companies are still using books as training data. Theyre just finding the cheapest scanned copies they can get their hands on to cover their ass

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

#134

Post by johnnyanmac »

wmf wrote: post #68
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.

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

Fines should be disproportionate at this scale. So it discourages other businesses from doing the same thing.

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

#135

Post by 7952 »

r_lee wrote: post #67

One thing that comes to mind is... Is there a way to make your content on the web "licensed" in a way where it is only free for human consumption? I.e. effectively making the use of AI crawlers pirating, thus subject to the same kind of penalties here?

Maybe some kind of captcha like system could be devised that could be considered a security measure under the DMCA and not allowed to be circumvented. Make the same content available under a licence fee through an API.

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

#137

Post by imron »

vineyardmike wrote: post #96
wmf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I feel like proportionality is related also to the scale. If a student pirates a textbook, I’d agree that 100x is excessive, but this is a corporation handsomely profiting off of mass piracy. It’s crazy to imagine, but there was surely a document or slack message thread discussing where to get thousands of books, and they just decided to pirate them and that was OK. This was entirely a decision based on ease or cost,…

> handsomely profiting

Well actively generating revenue at least.

Profits are still hard to come by.

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

#138

Post by riquito »

mvdtnz wrote: post #131
mdp2021 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buying used copies of books It remains deranged. Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library. (Edit: in fact initially I wrote 'is supposed to' in place of 'has more than a right to' - meaning that "knowledge is there, we made it available: you are supposed to access it, with the fullest encouragement").

Huh?

I think he implies that because one can borrow hypothetically any book for free from a library, one could use them for legal training purposes, so the requirement of having your own copy should be moot

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

#139

Post by ianks »

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…

There’s alternatives to wiping out the company that could be fair. For example, a judgement resulting in a shares of the company or revenue shares in the future rather than a one time pay off.

Writers were the true “foundational” piece of LLMs, anyway.

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

#140

Post by Ekaros »

golly_ned wrote: post #104

> "The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes" A judge making on a ruling based on his opinion of how transformative a technology will be doesn't inspire confidence. There's an equivocation on the word "transformative" here -- not just transformative in the fair use sense, but transformative as in world-changing, impactful, revolutionary. The latter shouldn't matter…

Printing press, audio recording, movies, radio, television were also transformative. Did not get rid of copyright or actually brought them.

I feel it is insane that authors do not receive some sort of standard compensation for each training use. Say a few hundred to a few thousand depending on complexity of their work.

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