251–260 of 761 posts
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I wonder what Aaron Swartz would think if he lived to see the era of libgen.
Didn't he get in trouble for contributing to sci-hub before he died?
The whole incident is written up in detail, https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ by Hal Abelson (who wrote SICP among other things). It is a well-researched document.
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It is related to scalable mode training, however. Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. And don't forget about the cost of 1) finding 2) purchasing 3) processing and 4) recycling that volume of books.
> Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. That's how Google Books, the Internet Archive, and Amazon (their book preview feature) operated before ebooks were common. It's not scalable-in-a-garage but perfectly scalable for a commercial operation.
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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?
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
> Also, do we know if the newer models were trained without the pirated books?
I'm pretty sure we do but I couldn't swear to it or quickly locate a source.
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…
Don't forget: NO LEGAL PRECEDENT! which means, anybody suing has to start all over. You only settle in this scenario/point if you think you'll lose. Edit: I'll get ratio'd for this- but its the exact same thing google did in it's lawsuit with Epic. They delayed while the public and courts focused in apple (oohh, EVIL apple)- apple lost, and google settled at a disadvantage before they had a legal judgment that couldn…
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.
> otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so
Only well funded companies can afford to hire a lot of expensive engineers and train AI models on hundreds of thousands of expensive GPUs, too.
Something tells me many the grassroots LLM training people are less concerned about legality of their source training set than the big companies anyway.
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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.
You’ve never authored, created, or published something? Never worked for a company that sells something protected by copyright?
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I didn't realize Vernor Vinge had passed away... Sad TIL
There was a nice discussion & nostalgia at the time (1151 points, 2024, 320 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775304
Reminds me of permutation city
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.
If you put a “contract” on your website that users click through without paying you or exchanging value with you and then you try to collect damages from them according to your contract, it’s not going to get you anywhere.
So if a startup wants to buy book PDFs legally to use for AI purposes, any suggestions on how to do that?
Give them this order : "I want to buy all your books as epub"
Pay and fetch the stuff
That's all
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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.
Contracts generally require an exchange of consideration (something of value, like money). If you put a “contract” on your website that users click through without paying you or exchanging value with you and then you try to collect damages from them according to your contract, it’s not going to get you anywhere.
The consideration you received was a promise to refrain from using those documents to train AI.
I'm not a lawyer, but by my understanding of contract law consideration is trivially fulfilled here.