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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

#311
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 It remains deranged. Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library. (Edit: in fact initially I wrote 'is supposed to' in place of 'has more than a right to' - meaning that "knowledge is there, we made it available: you are supposed to access it, with the fullest encouragement").

> Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library.

Every human has the right to read those books.

And now, this is obvious, but it seems to be frequently missed - an LLM is not a human, and does not have such rights.

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

#313
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.

Were you not around when people were getting sued for running Napster?

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

#314
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He got into trouble for breaking into an unsecured network closet at MIT and using MIT credentials to download a bunch of copyrighted content. 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.

I think the parent may be getting at why he was downloading the content. I don't know the answer to this. Maybe someone here does. What was he intending to do with the articles? The report speculates to his motivations on page 31, but it seems to be unknown with any certainty.

Swartz, like many of us, see pay-for-access journals as an affront. I believe he wanted to "liberate" the content of these articles so that more people could read them.

Information may want to be free, but sometimes it takes a revolutionary to liberate it.

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

#315
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Option 1: $183B valuation, $1.5B settlement. Option 2: near-$0 valuation, $15M purchasing cost. To an investor, that just looks like a pretty good deal, I reckon. It's just the cost of doing business - which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these.

> which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these. What's actually wrong with this? They paid $1.5B for a bunch of pirated books. Seems like a fair price to me, but what do I know. The settlement should reflect society's belief of the cost or deterrent, I'm not sure which (maybe both). This might be controversial, but I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willi…

> I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willing to pay the cost

so you don't think super rich people should be bound by laws at all?

Unless you made the cost proportional to (maybe expontial to) somebody's wealth, you would be creating a completely lawless class who would wreak havoc on society.

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

#316
post #3

> A trial was scheduled to begin in December to determine how much Anthropic owed for the alleged piracy, with potential damages ranging into the hundreds of billions of dollars. It has been admitted and Anthropic knew that this trial would totally bankrupt them had they said they were innocent and continued to fight the case. But of course, there's too much money on the line, which means even though Anthropic settle…

They would only be wiped out if the court awarded the maximum statutory damages (or close to it). There was never any chance of that happening.

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

#317
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one, rich or poor, goes to jail for downloading books.

If I walked into a store and stole $1000 of books I would go to jail. If a tech company steals countless thousands of dollars worth of books, someone should go to jail.

Stealing physical goods is not the same as downloading copyrighted material.

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

#318

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…

I thought the courts decided against Google in Google vs Epic? It was even appealed and upheld. Are you thinking of another case? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Google

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

#319
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one, rich or poor, goes to jail for downloading books.

Tell that to Aaron schwartz

Swartz wasn’t charged only for downloading copyrighted material, he was also charged with wire fraud and breaking and entering.

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

#320
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buying used copies of books It remains deranged. Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library. (Edit: in fact initially I wrote 'is supposed to' in place of 'has more than a right to' - meaning that "knowledge is there, we made it available: you are supposed to access it, with the fullest encouragement").

> Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library. Every human has the right to read those books. And now, this is obvious, but it seems to be frequently missed - an LLM is not a human , and does not have such rights.

By US law, cccording to Author's Guild vs Google[1] on the Google book scanning project, scanning books for indexes is fair use.

Additionally:

> Every human has the right to read those books.

Since when?

I strongly disagree - knowledge should be free.

I don't think the author's arrangement of the words should be free to reproduce (ie, I think some degree of copyright protection is ethical) but if I want to use a tool to help me understand the knowledge in a book then I should be able to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

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