Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 686 posts

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#461

Post by badlibrarian »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #440
badlibrarian wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statutory damages were written into the first federal copyright law in 1790, and earlier in state law (specified in Pounds because the dollar hadn't been invented yet).

The first federal copyright law in 1790: https://copyright.gov/about/1790-copyright-act.html Specified in dollars because dollars had been invented (in 1789), but in the amount of one half of one dollar, i.e. $0.50. That's 1790 dollars, of course, so a little under $20 today. (There was basically no inflation for the first 100+ years of that because the US dollar was still backed by precious metals then; a dollar was…

My fault for the hanging clause: nearly a dozen state laws preceded it and used pounds. Mostly because they were based on the British law and also because the war made a mess of the currency situation.

Statutory damages were added to reduce the burden on plaintiffs. Which encourages people to stay in line. How well this worked out and what it means when some company nobody heard of 4 years ago downloads a billion copyrighted pages and raises $3.5 billion against a $60 billion valuation...

Well suddenly $20/page still sounds about right.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#462

Post by AnthonyMouse »

MrJohz wrote: post #436
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This part of the ruling is pretty much existing law. If you have a physical book (or own a digital copy of a book), you can largely do what you like with it within the confines of your own home, including digitising it. But you are not allowed to distribute those digital copies to others, nor are you allowed to download other people's digital copies that you don't own the rights to. Can you point me to the US Supre…

I cannot point to the case, because my entire knowledge about the legality of this stuff comes from vaguely following the articles about this case. But feel free to read the judgement in this case where it will be spelled out in much more detail. Also, I don't quite understand how your example is relevant to the case. If you give a book to a friend, they are now the owner of that book and can do what they like with i…

> If you give a book to a friend, they are now the owner of that book and can do what they like with it.

We're talking about lending rather than ownership transfers, though of course you could regard lending as a sort of ownership transfer with an agreement to transfer it back later.

> If you photocopy that book and give them the photocopy, they are not the owner of the book and you have reproduced it without permission.

But then the question is whether the copy is fair use, not who the owner of the original copy was, right? For example, you can make a fair use photocopy of a page from a library book.

> They were not the legal owners of the digital books, which means they can get prosecuted for copyright infringement.

Even if the copy they make falls under fair use and the person who does own that copy of the book has no objection to their doing this?

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#463

Post by jasonlotito »

eikenberry wrote: post #327
jasonlotito wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding: > pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use. "Pirating" is a fuzzy word and has no real meaning. Specifically, I think this is the cruz: > without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies Essentially: downloading is fine, sharing/uploading up is not. Which makes sense. The assertion here is that Anthropic (from this line) did not distribute the…

Given that downloading requires you to copy the data to download it, I'd think it would fall under "adding new copies".

> All Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased ... with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies..."

That suggests otherwise.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#464

Post by fakeBeerDrinker »

hellohihello135 wrote: post #400
fakeBeerDrinker wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it stolen from Business Insider? When I visit businessinsider.com/anthropic-cut-pirated-millions-used-books-train-claude-copyright-2025-6 I get the same story. My browser caches the story, and I save it for archival purposes. How is this theft?

BI decides who can access this content and who will get the paywall. The link to archive page allows people to access this content without permission. That’s called stealing.

When I hop on a VPN and enter ingconito mode from a clean browser session, bypassing their paywall, is that stealing? This doesn't meet the definition of stealing that I'm familiar with.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#465

Post by cusaitech »

MrJohz wrote: post #414
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is, he ruled that > - buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use > - pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use. That seems inconsistent with one another. If it's fair use, how is it piracy? It also seems pragmatically trash. It doesn't do the authors any good for the AI company to buy one copy of their book (and a used one at that), bu…

These are two separate actions that Anthropic did: * They downloaded a massive online library of pirated books that someone else was distributing illegally. This was not fair use. * They then digitised a bunch of books that they physically owned copies of. This was fair use. This part of the ruling is pretty much existing law. If you have a physical book (or own a digital copy of a book), you can largely do what you…

The judge said they can train however I believe the judge did not make any ruling regarding model outputs

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#466

Post by mormegil »

wood_spirit wrote: post #416
jonas21 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As they mentioned, the piracy part is obvious. It's the fair use part that will set an important precedent for being able to train on copyrighted works as long as you have legally acquired a copy.

Cue physical books being licensed not sold in the futur with restricted agreements …

See first-sale doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine>

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#467

Post by rahimnathwani »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #412
superfrank wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to find the quote, but I'm pretty sure the judge specifically said that going and buying the book after the fact won't absolve them of liability. He said that for the books they pirated they broke the law and should stand trial for that and they cannot go back and un-break in by buying a copy now. Found it: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/federal-judge-rules-c... > “That Anthropic later bought a cop…

Is copyright in America different to Britain? There, it is legal to download books you don't own. Only distribution is a crime, which most torrenters break by seeding.

What do you mean by 'it is legal'?

Do you mean:

A) It's not a criminal offence?

B) The copyright owner cannot file a civil suit for damages?

C) Something else?

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#468

Post by NoOn3 »

mrkstu wrote: post #220
shrubble wrote: post #214

Let’s say my AI company is training an AI on woodworking books and at the end, it will describe in text and wireframe drawings (but not the original or identical photos) how to do a particular task. If I didn’t license all the books I trained on, am I not depriving the publisher of revenue, given people will pay me for the AI instead of buying the book?

If you paid a human author to do the same you’d be breaking no law. Learning is the point of books existing in the first place.

Humans learning, not machines learning is the point of books.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#469

Post by AlotOfReading »

jasonlotito wrote: post #459
AlotOfReading wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal context here is that "format shifting" has not previously been held to be sufficient for fair use on its own, and downloading for personal use has also been considered infringing. Just look at the numerous media industry lawsuits against individuals that only mention downloading, not sharing for examples. It's a bit surprising that you can suddenly download copyrighted materials for personal use and and it'…

> the numerous media industry lawsuits against individuals that only mention downloading, I never saw any of these. All the cases I saw were related to people using torrents or other P2P software (which aren't just downloading). These might exist, but I haven't seen them. > It's a bit surprising that you can suddenly download copyrighted materials for personal use and it's kosher as long as you don't share them with…

I just checked first individual suit I could find, which was BMG v. Gonzalez. She used P2P, but the case was specifically about her downloading, not redistributing.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#470

Post by pier25 »

theteapot wrote: post #383
pier25 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use So Suno would only really need to buy the physical albums and rip them to be able to generate music at an industrial scale?

Yes.

Actually it remains to be seen.

If you read the ruling, training was considered fair use in part because Claude is not a book generation tool. Hence it was deemed transformative. Definitely not what Suno and Udio are doing.

Post reply on HN