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

nytimes.com

231–240 of 761 posts

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

#231
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.

To be even more clear - this is a settlement, it does not establish precedent, nor admit wrongdoing. This does not establish that training is fair use, nor that scanning books is fine. That's somebody else's battle.

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

#233

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.

[deleted]

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Copyright law in the USA may be more liberal about scanning than other jurisdictions (see the parallel comment from gpm), which expressly regulate the amount of copying of material you do not own as an item.

The jurisdictions I'm familiar with all give vague fair use/fair dealing exceptions which would cover some but not all copying (including scanning) with less than clear boundaries.

I'd be interested to know if you knew of one with bright line rules delineating what is and isn't allowed.

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

#235
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rainbows End was prescient in many ways. Agreed. Great book for those looking for a read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102439.Rainbows_End The author, Vernor Vinge, is also responsible for popularizing the term 'singularity'.

RIP to the legend. He has a lot of really fun ideas spread across his books.

One of my favorites

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

#236
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The message being you’ll likely get away with it?

They're setting up a pretty simple EV calc: (Probability of not getting away with it) 0.01 * (Cost if caught) 1000 = 10x (Expected Cost) = not worth it

The EV calculation completely goes away if you add a layer of limited liability corporation.

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

#237
post #68
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.

[deleted]

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many things become legal when the perpetrator has money.

The golden rule:

He who has the gold makes the rules

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

#239
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.

Yes, the ruling was a massive win for generative AI companies.

The settlement was a smart decision by anthropic to remove a huge uncertainty. 1.5 is not small, but it won't stop them or slow them significantly.

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

#240

They also agreed to destroy the pirated books. I wonder how large of a portion of their training data comes from these shadow libraries, and if AI labs in countries that have made it clear they won't enforce anti-piracy laws against AI companies will get a substantial advantage by continuing to use shadow libraries.

They already, prior to this lawsuit, prior to serving public models, replaced this data set with one they made by scanning purchased books. Destroying the data set they aren't even using should have approximately zero effect.
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