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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

#341

Post by triceratops »

mdp2021 wrote: post #115
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 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").

Well great so the Internet Archive is off the hook then.

Also, at least so far, we don't call computers "someone".

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

#343

Post by burningion »

GMoromisato wrote: post #149

If you are an author here are a couple of relevant links: You can search LibGen by author to see if your work is included. I believe this would make you a member of the class: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/searc... If you are a member of the class (or think you are) you can submit your contact information to the plaintiff's attorneys here: https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/

Thank you for posting this!

I suspected my work was in the dataset and it looks like it is! I reached out via the form.

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

#344

Post by alchemist1e9 »

petralithic wrote: post #216
johnnyanmac wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s shifts like that, going from a copyleft to a copyright crowd, that make me increasingly suspicious the HN is authentic as it was years ago. Another weird one is the socialism lean instead of more libertarian ideals by many commentators. I think it might be generational issues and being 50+ years old makes me an old timer!

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

#346

Post by rise_before_sun »

hcs wrote: post #327
ijk wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The judge's ruling from earlier certainly seemed to me to suggest that the training was fair use. Obviously, that's not part of the current settlement. I'm no expert on this, so I don't know the extent to which the earlier ruling applies.

If I'm reading this right yes the training was fair use, but I was responding (unclearly) to the claim that the pirated books weren't used to train commercially released LLMs. The judge complained that it wasn't clear what was actually used, from the June order https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/... [pdf]: > Notably, in its motion, Anthropic argues that pirating initial copies of Authors’ boo…

Thanks for this info. I was looking for which pirated books were used for which model.

Ethically speaking, if Anthropic (a) did later purchase every book it pirated or (b) compensated every author whose book was pirated, would it absolve an illegally trained model of its "sins"?

To me, the taint still remains. Which is a shame, because it's considered the best coding model so far.

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

#347

Post by gpm »

rise_before_sun wrote: post #332
gpm wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for the link. Among several places where judge mentions Anthropic buying legit copies of books it pirated, probably this sentence is most relevant: "That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages." But document does not say Anthropic bought EVERY book it pirated. Other sections in th…

> But document does not say Anthropic bought EVERY book it pirated

Yeah, I wouldn't make this exact claim either. For instance it's probably safe to assume that the pirate datasets contain some books that are out of circulation and which Anthropic happened not to get a used copy of.

They did happen to get every book published by any of the lead plaintiffs though, as a point towards them probably having pretty good coverage. And it does seem to have been an attempt to purchase "all" the books for reasonable approximate definitions of "all".

> When you say, "I'm pretty sure we do...", do you mean that pirated books were used, or were they not used?

I'm pretty sure pirated books were not used, but not certain, and I really don't remember when/why I formed that opinion.

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

#348

Post by scotty79 »

btmiller wrote: post #297
petralithic wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence, "should"

It’s the sign of a health economy when we respect the creation of content.

It's a sign of rent seeking economy in decline. Rising economies never respect IPs.

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

#349

Post by 93po »

mNovak wrote: post #328

Everything talks about settlement to the 'authors'; is that meant to be shorthand for copyright holders? Because there are a lot of academic works in that library where the publisher holds exclusive copyright and the author holds nothing. By extension, if the big publishers are getting $3000 per article, that could be a fairly significant windfall.

very unsurprisingly, new york times is going to frame this as a win for "the little guy" when in reality it's just multi-billion dollar publishers, with a long rich history of their own exploitive practices, hanging on for dear life against generative AI

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

#350

Post by skywhopper »

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.

Then shouldn’t they be liable for at least 25 times this amount?
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