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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

#431

Post by jack_pp »

heavyset_go wrote: post #405
rise_before_sun wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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"? No, it part because it removes agency from the authors/rightsholders. Maybe they don't want to sell Anthropic their books, maybe they want royalties, etc.

Can authors even claim such rights though? I doubt think they even had such agency to begin with

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

#432

Post by teiferer »

ryandrake wrote: post #325
zmmmmm wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hate to break it to you, but that's currently the world we live in. And yes, it sucks.

Well that's what he's arguing, against another post which somehow claims that that's ok.

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

#433

Post by heavyset_go »

petralithic wrote: post #21

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.

I don't know if I agree with it, but you could argue that if a model was built for purely academic purposes, and then used for purely academic purposes, it could meet requirements for fair use.

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

#434

Post by nl »

vkou wrote: post #335
nl wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Since when? Since in our legal system, only humans and groups of humans (the corporation is a convenient legal proxy for a group of humans that have entered into an agreement) have rights. Property doesn't have rights. Land doesn't have rights. Books don't have rights. My computer doesn't have rights. And neither does an LLM.

Ok the corporation (or group of humans) that builds the LLM.

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

#435

Post by nl »

TheDong wrote: post #378
nl wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Knowledge should be free. Unfortunately, OpenAI and most other AI companies are for-profit, and so they vacuum up the commons, and produce tooling which is for-profit. 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.

I don't pay OpenAI and I use their model via ChatGPT frequently.

By this logic one shouldn't be able to research for a newspaper article at a library.

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

#436

Post by 0dte »

eviks wrote: post #422

> the law allowed the company to train A.I. technologies using the books because this transformed them into something new. Unless, of course, the transformation malfunctioned and you got the good old verbatim source, with many of examples compiled in similar lawsuits

This notably wasn't one of the allegations levied against Anthropic, as Claude was accompanied by software that filtered any infringing outputs. From the relevant opinion finding Anthropic's use of the books to be fair use:

> When each LLM was put into a public-facing version of Claude, it was complemented by other software that filtered user inputs to the LLM and filtered outputs from the LLM back to the user. As a result, Authors do not allege that any infringing copy of their works was or would ever be provided to users by the Claude service.

(from Bartz v. Anthropic in the Northern District of California)

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

#437

Post by heavyset_go »

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 isn't black and white, you can be against some aspects of copyright and be for some others.

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

#438

Post by zkmon »

It's the concentration of power, monopolies driving this trend of ignoring the fines and punishments. The fine system was not designed for these monstrous beasts. Legal code was designed to deter the common man from wrong doing. It did not anticipate the technological super powers doing winner-take-it-all in a highly connected world, and growing beyond the control of law. Basically, it's law of jungle for these companies. Law and punishment is never going to have any effect on them, as long as they can grab enough market share and customer base. Same as any mafia.

We are entering a world which is filled with corporate mafia that is above law (due to insignificant damage it can cause). These mafia would grip the world providing the essential services that make up the future world. The State would become much weaker, as policy makers could be bought by lobbying, punishments can be offset by VC funding.

It is all part of the playbook.

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

#439

Post by miohtama »

jayd16 wrote: post #277
rchaud wrote: post #228

Earlier 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…

> But nobody was ever going to that Didn't Google have a long standing project to do just that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

This lawsuit also makes sure that only parties that can train an AI with good enough training material are now

- Google

- Anthropic

- Any Chinese company who do not care about copyright laws

What is the cost of buying and scanning books?

Copyright law needs to be fixed and its ridiculous hundred years tenure chopped away.

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

#440

Post by tene80i »

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 very funny when people declare “piracy isn’t stealing”, as if the metaphor of piracy is all about singing and drinking.

Copying and distributing works isn’t identical to theft (deliberately depriving someone of their property), but you’re enjoying someone’s work without compensating them, so it isn’t totally unlike depriving them of something.

I guess it depends how you feel about refusing to pay a window washer. Or indeed you not being paid by your employer. It isn’t theft, but someone is clearly stiffing someone else.

As for only big companies benefitting from the copyright regime… seems like an ideological assumption. I know plenty of authors and they are quite happy having legal protections around their work which means they can earn from their labour.

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