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

Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 654 posts

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#251

Post by shevy-java »

One thing I always wondered ...

There used to be libgen. Then it went down. It went semi-back up but ... it is still kind of down.

Those issues kind of coincided with the big greedy mega-corporations leeching off data en masse; Anthropic was not the only one, Facebook is another example here. I always wondered whether the decline in quality, fewer liberated books published, coincided with what the big corporations were doing. Would be great to be able to see any underlying strategy here. Imagine Anthropic, just as a scenario, leeching off of everyone else, and then also sending in their lawyers to try to close down what they leeched off here. I mean the rise of bots kind of coincides with the rise of AI. So why not them also trying to make it harder for the rest of the world to access liberated books.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#252

Post by olalonde »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #200

A one time payment like 1.5B doesn’t do anything. There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the correct way to legislate this. If anything a human does can instantly be copied by an LLM, and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change

Regurgitating existing ideas is not copyright infringement. Reproducing works verbatim is and AI companies already implement guardrails to prevent that.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#253

Post by shevy-java »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #200

A one time payment like 1.5B doesn’t do anything. There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the correct way to legislate this. If anything a human does can instantly be copied by an LLM, and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change

I think the only way to stop that is to put the responsible folks in prison permanently. Small criminals are being jailed permanently on repeated offence. I think big guns with a lot of money need to get much higher sentences by default. And no monetary way to avoid that. The whole prison system is kind of screwed up here. A leech system for lawyers and judges.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#254

Post by wraptile »

remify wrote: post #247
nikanj wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't do anything? Au contraire! Now the creations of the LLMs stand on legal ground. This was an excellent deal for Anthropic

The legal ground is: If you're rich enough you can do it. Now only big tech companies can train models

AFAIK this does not set a legal precedent as it has been settled and last summer finding is that Anthropic was wrong for "acquiring books illegally" not for training which is fair use.

With model distillation being so effective now nobody actually needs to pirate books to train their models. You can get an open-weight Chinese model and get all that. Or you can just buy the books or buy a library - there are many creative solutions here that aren't piracy and not going to cost you billions of dollars.

The moat right now seems to be the compute resources which might actually be worse for us common folk than a legal moat as we need compute for many more things that aren't LLMs too.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#255

Post by rzmmm »

olalonde wrote: post #252
sashank_1509 wrote: post #200

A one time payment like 1.5B doesn’t do anything. There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the correct way to legislate this. If anything a human does can instantly be copied by an LLM, and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change

Regurgitating existing ideas is not copyright infringement. Reproducing works verbatim is and AI companies already implement guardrails to prevent that.

It depends. In music for example it's often question whether the artist has been exposed to the original work. In that spirit, small language models are less likely to infringe copyright.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#256

Post by FeepingCreature »

leni536 wrote: post #238
FeepingCreature wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that avid readers cannot complete entire passages from books they've read several times when fed a prefix.

And can these avid readers publish these recited passages without infringing copyright?

I mean, the debate would then turn on whether publishing the passages and publishing the model is the same sort of thing. I think there's mainly two views: "we know the passages are in there, so publishing the model is publishing the passages is copyright violation", and "nothing happens until you go through considerable effort to elicit the passages, so the user is committing copyright violation using the model as a tool."

Personally I think our legal system is just not set up for a world where we can download mindstates in numeric form. Would a sufficiently detailed recording of my brain violate copyright? If simulated, it could certainly be elicited to commit violations.

edit: At any rate, Anthropic are not publishing the Sonnet 3.7 weights.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#257

Post by wraptile »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #147
onionisafruit wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a class action law suit. I may be wrong, but I don’t think jail is ever an option in a civil suit.

right, the thread you responded to is asking why there hasn't been a parallel criminal suit

The answer is because US government finds AI more useful than some hosting service for pirated media. It's kinda boring, but it's as simple as that.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#258

Post by theplumber »

leni536 wrote: post #243
usef- wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and I don't think people wanted him chased for it either?

Abolish copyright then. The selective enforcement needs to stop.

This is my point too. This fucking double standard/class discrimination pisses me off.

Re: Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

#260

Post by nicce »

jdlshore wrote: post #4

To be clear, the issue is not that the books were used to train Claude, but that they were pirated.

Which is another issue. In the context of pirating, it should be also an issue, because it is a benefit from the crime.
Post reply on HN