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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

#451

Post by falconroar »

swiftcoder wrote: post #449

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!)

I thought the opposite - they set a precedent indicating that reproduction of a copyrighted text by an LLM is infringement. If authors refuse to sell to them (via legal terms indicating LLMs aren't allowed), it's infringement. No?

I'd be curious to hear from a legal professional...

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

#452

Post by aucisson_masque »

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.

This isn’t is a race to the bottom. They could have bought these books instead of pirating them.

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

#453

Post by ijk »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #201
riquito wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he implies that because one can borrow hypothetically any book for free from a library, one could use them for legal training purposes, so the requirement of having your own copy should be moot

Afaik to scan a book you need to destroy it by cutting the spine so it can feed cleanly into the scanner. Would incur a lot of fines.

There are book scanners that don't require cutting the spine, though Anthropic doesn't seem to have used that approach.

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

#454

Post by dureuill »

gblargg wrote: post #408
TheDong wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> vacuum up the commons A vacuum removes what it sucks in. The commons are still as available as they ever were, and the AI gives one more avenue of access.

> The commons are still as available as they ever were,

That is false. As a direct consequence of LLMs:

1. The web is increasingly closed to automated scraping, and more marginally to people as well. Owners of websites like reddit now have a stronger incentive to close off their APIs and sell access.

2. The web is being inundated with unverified LLM output which poisons the well

3. More profoundly, increasingly basing our production on LLM outputs and making the human merely "in the loop" rather than the driver, and sometimes eschewing even the human in the loop, leads to new commons that are less adapted to the evolutions of our world, less original and of lesser quality

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

#456

Post by whateveracct »

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.

Okay, so the blame for the offense was laundered..

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

#457

Post by [deleted] »

falconroar wrote: post #451
swiftcoder wrote: post #449

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!)

I thought the opposite - they set a precedent indicating that reproduction of a copyrighted text by an LLM is infringement. If authors refuse to sell to them (via legal terms indicating LLMs aren't allowed), it's infringement. No? I'd be curious to hear from a legal professional...

[deleted]

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

#458

Post by TheDong »

nl wrote: post #435
TheDong wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

journalism and newspapers indeed should not be for-profit, and current for-profit news corporations are doing harm in the pursuit of profit.

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

#459

Post by troupo »

jimmaswell wrote: post #381
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…

> It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel. Now you don't even have to use Uber in many of these places because taxis had to compete - they otherwise never would have stopped pulling the "credit card reader is broken" scam, taking long routes on p…

> And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel

And instead Uber offloaded everything onto gig workers and society. And still lost 20 billion dollars in the process (price dumping isn't cheap).

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

#460

Post by LMYahooTFY »

zmmmmm wrote: post #315
fn-mote wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The law was not broken by "super rich people".

It was broken by a company of people who were not very rich at all and have managed to produce billions in value (not dollars, value) by breaking said laws.

They're not trafficking humans or doing predatory lending, they're building AI.

This is why our judicial system literally handles things on a case by case basis.

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