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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

#211

Post by mdp2021 »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #203
gpm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libraries are neither anarchist free for alls nor are they operating under licensing terms with regards to physical books. They're merely doing what anyone is allowed to with the books that they own, loaning them out, because copyright law doesn't prohibit that, so no license is needed.

Yup. And if Anthropic CEO or whoever wants to drive down to the library and check out 30 books (or whatever the limit is), scan them, and then return them that is their prerogative I guess.

Scanning (copying) is¹ not allowed. Reading is.

What is in a library, you can freely read. Find the most appropriate way. You do not need to have bought the book.

¹(Edit: or /may/ not be allowed, see posts below.)

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

#212

Post by wizzwizz4 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #178
hamdingers wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We hem and haw about metaphorical "book burning" so much we forget that books themselves are not actually precious. The books that are destroyed in scanning are a small minority compared to the millions discarded by libraries every year for simply being too old or unpopular.

>we forget that books themselves are not actually precious. Book burnings are symbolic (Unless you're in the world of Fareinheit 451). The real power comes from the political threat, not the fact that paper with words on them is now unreadable.

Well, the famous 1933-05-10 book burning did destroy the only copies of a lot of LGBT medical research, and destroying the last copy of various works was a stated intent of Nazi book burnings.

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

#213

Post by gpm »

dude250711 wrote: post #209
gpm wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What is the HN term for this? "Bootstrapping" your start up? Or is it "growth-hacking" it?

The latter (I know you're joking, but...)

Bootstrapping in the startup world refers to starting a startup using only personal resources instead of using investors. Anthropic definitely had investors.

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

#214

Post by jrockway »

mdp2021 wrote: post #211
lotsoweiners wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And if Anthropic CEO or whoever wants to drive down to the library and check out 30 books (or whatever the limit is), scan them, and then return them that is their prerogative I guess.

Scanning (copying) is¹ not allowed. Reading is. What is in a library, you can freely read. Find the most appropriate way. You do not need to have bought the book. ¹(Edit: or /may/ not be allowed, see posts below.)

There are no terms and conditions attached to library books beyond copyright law (which says nothing about scanning) and the general premise of being a library (return the book in good condition on time or pay).

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

#215

Post by petralithic »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #76
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.

Fair use isn't about how you access the material, its about what you can do with it after you legally access it. If you don't legally access it, the question of fair use is moot.

Hence, "should"

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

#216

Post by petralithic »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #205
542458 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it implies that having the power to train AI models exclusively consolidated into a handful of extremely powerful companies is bad.

It implies that people want everyone to do this when it's clear no one should do it. I'm not exactly a fan of "this isn't profitable for small businesses to steal from so we should make it so everyone should steal".

Piracy is not stealing. I don't know why everyone on HN suddenly turned into a copyright hawk, only big companies benefit from our current copyright regime, like Disney and their lobbying for increasing its length.

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

#217

Post by rise_before_sun »

ascorbic wrote: post #90
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.

The settlement was for downloading the pirated books, not training from them. Unless they're paywalled it would be hard to argue the same for a blog.

It seems weird that there was legal culpability for downloading pirated books but not for training on them. At the very least, there is a transitive dependency between the two acts.

Other people have said that Anthropic bought the books later on, but I haven't found any official records for that. Where would I find that?

Also, does anyone know which Anthropic models were NOT trained on the pirated books. I want to avoid such models.

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

#218

Post by gpm »

mdp2021 wrote: post #211
lotsoweiners wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And if Anthropic CEO or whoever wants to drive down to the library and check out 30 books (or whatever the limit is), scan them, and then return them that is their prerogative I guess.

Scanning (copying) is¹ not allowed. Reading is. What is in a library, you can freely read. Find the most appropriate way. You do not need to have bought the book. ¹(Edit: or /may/ not be allowed, see posts below.)

Scanning is, under the right circumstances, allowed in the US, at least per the Second Circuit appeals court (Connecticut, New York, Vermont): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild%2C_Inc._v._Googl....

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

#219

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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