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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

#441

Post by 0dte »

Taek wrote: post #248

I can't help but feel like this is a huge win for Chinese AI. Western companies are going to be limited in the amount of data they can collect and train on, and Chinese (or any foreign AI) is going to have access to much more and much better data.

I think western companies will be just fine -- Anthropic is settling because they illegally pirated books from LibGen back in 2021 and subsequently trained models on them. They realized this was an issue internally and pivoted to buying books en masse and scanning them into digital formats, destroying the original copies in the process (they actually hired a former lead in the Google Books project to help them in this endeavor!). And a federal judge ruled a couple months ago that training on these legally-acquired scanned copies does not constitute fair use -- that the LLM training process is sufficiently transformative.

So the data/copyright issue that you might be worried about is actually completely solved already! Anthropic is just paying a settlement here for the illegal pirating that they did way in the past. Anthropic is allowed to train on books that they legally acquire.

And sure, Chinese AI companies could probably scrape from LibGen just like Anthropic did without getting in hot water, and potentially access a bit more data that way for cheap, but it doesn't really seem like the buying/scanning process really costs that much in the grand scheme of things. And Anthropic likely already has legally acquired most of the useful texts on LibGen and scanned them into its internal library anyways.

(Furthermore, the scanning setup might actually give Anthropic an advantage, as they're able to digitize more niche texts that might be hard to find outside of print form)

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

#442

Post by simonw »

rchaud wrote: post #228
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, 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…

Anthropic started scanning books in February 2024. I don't think these lawsuits had been filed by then - as far as I can tell that was in August 2024: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/bartz-v-anthro...

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

#443

Post by miohtama »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #387
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/

It’s pretty incredible that the vast majority of authors will make more money for their books from this settlement that they ever have from selling their books.

God bless capitalistic America.

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

#445

Post by miohtama »

whatever1 wrote: post #419

I don’t understand how training an LLM on a book and then selling its contents via subscriptions is fine but using a probabilistic OCR to read a book and then selling its contents is a crime that deserves jail time.

It's not a crime. It is civil lawsuit.

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

#446

Post by lukan »

hypercube33 wrote: post #430
koolala wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wont Facebook just get sued for the same thing now and maybe set precedent?

I thought meta had been sued and forgiven as it was impulsive that they do it to make money and faced no charge.

This is what is confusing me here. I did not really follow any case, but as far as I remember meta seems to have gotten away with pirating books, but anthropic needs to pay $1.5B ?

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

#447

Post by lIl-IIIl »

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.

Do they actually need to scan the book?

Or can they buy the book, and then use the pirated copy?

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

#448

Post by JCharante »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #267
dekhn wrote: 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.

I think legally nobody knows why he was downloading the content to the point where he had to come to his hidden laptop to swap out hard drives of papers.

but also prior to that he had written the guerilla open access manifesto so it wasn't great optics to be caught doing that

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

#449

Post by swiftcoder »

So this is a straight-up victory for Anthropic, right?

They pay out (relative) chump change as a penalty for explicitly pirating a bunch of ebooks, and in return they get a ruling that they can train on copyrighted works forever, for the purchase price of the book (not the price that would be needed to secure the rights!)

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

#450

Post by vessenes »

dbalatero wrote: post #26
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.

This implies training models is some sort of right.

Curious: are you trolling? Or do you really think doing math shouldn’t be a priori allowed to humans?
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