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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

#241

Post by slg »

masterjack wrote: post #75
slg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe small compared to the money raised, but it is in fact enormous compared to the money earned. Their revenue was under $1b last year and they projected themselves as likely to make $2b this year. This payout equals their average yearly revenue of the last two years.

I thought they were projecting 10B and said a few months ago they have already grown from a 1B to 4B run rate

Here is an article that discusses why those numbers are misleading[1]. From a high level, "run rate" numbers are typically taking a monthly revenue number and multiplying it by 12 and that just isn't an accurate way to report revenue for reasons outlined in that article. When it comes to actual projections for annual revenue, they have said $2b is the most likely outcome for their 2025 annual revenue.

[1] - https://www.wheresyoured.at/howmuchmoney/

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

#242

Post by djoldman »

gnabgib wrote: post #231
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.

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.

Right, the settlement doesn't.

However, the judge already ruled on the only important piece of this legal proceeding:

> Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work to train Claude...

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

#244

Post by GabeIsko »

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.

Yes, but the cat is out of the bag now. Welcome to the era of every piece of creative work coming with an EULA that you cannot train on it. It will be like clearing samples.

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

#245

Post by jychang »

karahime wrote: post #204
griffzhowl wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recent MEGATHREAD on status of libgen and alternatives https://www.reddit.com/r/libgen/comments/1n4vjud/megathread_...

It's in the megathread linked in this comment, but I want to specifically point to https://open-slum.org/ which is basically a status page for different sites dedicated to this purpose, and which I've found helpful.

Lol. I opened that link and was like "hmmm, that UI looks familiar".

I'm pretty sure that's just a frontend for Uptime Kuma https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma

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

#246

Post by ReFruity »

rchaud wrote: post #228
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, scanning them, and training on it is fine. But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future. That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract wit…

> But nobody was ever going to that

If this is a choice between risking to pay 1.5 billion or just paying 15 mil safely, they might.

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

#247

Post by dekhn »

beambot wrote: post #221
AlwaysRock wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I didn't realize Vernor Vinge had passed away... Sad TIL

I got to meet him and person and tell him that his books (along with The Coming Technological Singularity) had a huge influence on my decision to go into ML. He seemed pleased. I just wish he had wrapped up the Fire Upon the Deep series.

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

#249

Post by rise_before_sun »

gpm wrote: post #141
gooosle wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where can I find source that says Anthropic bought the pirated books afterwards? I haven't seen this in any official document.

Also, do we know if the newer models were trained without the pirated books?

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

#250

Post by OhioMan2943 »

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 wish the hn rules were more flexible because I would write the best comment to you right now.
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