Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scanning (copying) is¹ not allowed. Reading is. What is in a library, you can freely read. Find the most appropriate way. You do not need to have bought the book. ¹(Edit: or /may/ not be allowed, see posts below.)
There are no terms and conditions attached to library books beyond copyright law (which says nothing about scanning) and the general premise of being a library (return the book in good condition on time or pay).
Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
371–380 of 761 posts
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#372Settlement 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…
Only 500,000 copyrighted works? I was under the impression they had downloaded millions of books.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
What you describe is in fact what Waymo has had, of chosen to, deal with. They didn't go for an end run around regulations related to vehicles on public roads. They committed to driverless vehicles and worked with local governments to roll it out as quickly as regulators were willing to allow. Uber could have made the same decision and worked with regulators to be allowed into markets one at a time. It was an intenti…
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Sir. These were carpoolers, just sharing a ride to their new online friends' B&B.
Judge: "But this app facilitated them."
Lawyer: "Well, you presume so-called genuine carpoolers are not facilitated? The manufacturers of their cell phones, the telecom operators, their employers or the bar where they met, or the bus company at whose bus stop they met, they all facilitated their carpooling behavior."
Judge: "But your company profits from this coordination!"
Lawyer: "Well we pay taxes, just like the manufacturer of the cell phone, the telecom operator, their employers, the bus company or the bar... But let's ignore that, what you -representing the government (which in turn supposedly represents the people)- are really after is money or power. As a judge you are not responsible for setting up the economy, or micromanaging the development of apps, so its not your fault that the government didn't create this application before our company did. In a sense you are lucky that we created the app given that the government did not create this application in a timely fashion!"
Judge: "How so?"
Lawyer: "If the population had created this app they would have started thinking about where the proceeds should go. They would have gotten concerned about the centralization of power (financial and intelligence). They would have searched for ways to decentralize and secure their app. They would have eventually gotten cryptographers involved. In that world, no substantial income would be generated, your fleet of taxi's would be threatened as well, and you wouldn't even have the juicy intel we occasionally share either!"
This conversation almost never takes place, since it only needs to take place once, after which a naive judge has learned how the cookie crumbles. Most judges have lost this naivety before even becoming a judge. They learn this indirectly when small "annoyances" threaten the scheme (one could say the official taxi fleet was an earlier such scheme).
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#376To 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.
> pirating of the books is the issue I have an author friend who felt like this was just adding insult to injury. So not only had his work been consumed into this machine that is being used to threaten his day job as a court reporter, not only was that done without seeking his permission in any way, but they didn’t even pay for a single copy . Really embodies raising your middle finger to the little guy while you ste…
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#377Settlement 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…
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
If you use the commons to create your model, perhaps you should be obligated to distribute the model for free (or I guess for the cost of distribution) too.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#379To 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…
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#380To 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.
There are also a lot of usage rules that now make many games unfeasible.
We dug into the private markets seeking less Faustian terms, but found just as many legal submarines in wait... "AI" Plagiarism driven projects are just late to the party. =3