Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 761 posts

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

#141

Post by gpm »

gooosle wrote: post #77
GodelNumbering wrote: post #58

Settlement Terms (from the case pdf) 1. A Settlement Fund of at least $1.5 Billion: Anthropic has agreed to pay a minimum of $1.5 billion into a non-reversionary fund for the class members. With an estimated 500,000 copyrighted works in the class, this would amount to an approximate gross payment of $3,000 per work. If the final list of works exceeds 500,000, Anthropic will add $3,000 for each additional work. 2. Des…

So... it would be a lot cheaper to just buy all of the books?

Yes, much.

And they actually went and did that afterwards. They just pirated them first.

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

#142

Post by freejazz »

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.

Well it's willful infringement so a court would be entitled to add a punitive multiplier anyway. But this is something Anthropic agreed to, if that wasn't clear.

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

#143

Post by varenc »

non_aligned wrote: post #31

I'm gonna say one thing. If you agree that something was unfairly taken from book authors, then the same thing was taken from people publishing on the web, and on a larger scale. Book authors may see some settlement checks down the line. So might newspapers and other parties that can organize and throw enough $$$ at the problem. But I'll eat my hat if your average blogger ever sees a single cent.

Books aren't hosted publicly online free for anyone to access. The court seems to think buying a book and scanning it is fair use. Just using pirated books is forbidden. Blogs weren't accessed via pirating.

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

#144

Post by testing22321 »

GodelNumbering wrote: post #58

Settlement Terms (from the case pdf) 1. A Settlement Fund of at least $1.5 Billion: Anthropic has agreed to pay a minimum of $1.5 billion into a non-reversionary fund for the class members. With an estimated 500,000 copyrighted works in the class, this would amount to an approximate gross payment of $3,000 per work. If the final list of works exceeds 500,000, Anthropic will add $3,000 for each additional work. 2. Des…

I’m an author, can I get in on this?

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

#145

Post by gpm »

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?

Yes to the first part. Put your site behind a login wall that requires users to sign a contract to that effect before serving them the content... get a lawyer to write that contract. Don't rely on copyright.

I'm not sure to what extent you can specify damages like these in a contract, ask the lawyer who is writing it.

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

#146

Post by shortformblog »

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.

Thanks for the reminder that what the Internet Archive did in its case would have been legal if it was in service of an LLM.

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

#147

Post by ryao »

dkdcio wrote: post #45
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

If it allowed them to move faster than their completion, I imagine management would consider it money well spent. They are expected to spend absurd amounts of money to get ahead. They were never expected to spend money efficiently if it meant taking additional months/years to get results.

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

#148

Post by freejazz »

privatelypublic wrote: post #93
gooosle wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... it would be a lot cheaper to just buy all of the books?

Few. This settlement potentially weakens all challenges to the use of copyrighted works in training LLM's. I'd be shocked if behind closed doors there wasn't some give and take on the matter between Executives/investors. A settlement means the claimants no longer have a claim, which means if they're also part of- say, the New York Times affiliated lawsuit- they have to withdraw. A neat way of kneecapping a country wi…

That's not even remotely true. Page 4 of the settlement describes released claims which only relate to the pirating of books. Again, the amount of misinformation and misunderstanding I see in copyright related threads here ASTOUNDS.

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

#149

Post by GMoromisato »

If you are an author here are a couple of relevant links:

You can search LibGen by author to see if your work is included. I believe this would make you a member of the class: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/searc...

If you are a member of the class (or think you are) you can submit your contact information to the plaintiff's attorneys here: https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/

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

#150

Post by kennywinker »

shortformblog wrote: post #146
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.

Thanks for the reminder that what the Internet Archive did in its case would have been legal if it was in service of an LLM.

LLM’s are turning out to be a real get-out-of-legal-responsibilities card, hey?
Post reply on HN