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

nytimes.com

481–490 of 761 posts

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

#481
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

“Society” should have things like universal healthcare like every other industrial country in the world. The US is the only country with an ass backwards system where you are dependent on your employer for health benefits.

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

#482
post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk how it is in the US but in eastern Europe that's only true if surge is on and even so considering how shitty the quality of service was before Uber it's fine.

And it’s still shitty. Uber/Bolt is like on par with 90s taxis. At least here there was a short attempt to make things better in early 2010s with nicer cars and trying to force drivers to be nicer. But then it was „disrupted“.

The disruption worked in most cities I use uber in. It’s far more trustworthy to use uber.

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

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But drivers got to eat

who cares about the drivers....

Especially because in 10 years from now they will progressively get replaced by AI like Waymo, so no point into making sure they are happy in the long-term

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

#486

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/

Wild - I searched my name out of curiosity and my PhD research papers turned up. Worth submitting my contact details I guess

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

#487
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.

I think the jury is still out on how fair use applies to AI. Fair use was not designed for what we have now. I could read a book, but its highly unlikely I could regurgitate it, much less months or years later. An LLM, however, can. While we can say "training is like reading", its also not like reading at all due to permanent perfect recall. Not only does an LLM have perfect recall, it also has the ability to distrib…

One more fundamental difference. I can't read all of the books and then copy my brain.

Which is one fundamental things how copyright is handled. Copying in general or performing multiple times. So I can accept argument that training model onetime and then using singular instance of that model is analogues to human learning.

But when you get to running multiple copies of model, we are clearly past that.

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

#488
It is a very good deal for them, did not have to acquire books and had them in a very convenient format (no digitalization), saved tons of time (5+ years), got access to rare books and the LLM is not considered derived work, when it is actually clearly one

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

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair use wasn't designed for AI, but AI doesn't change the motivations and goals behind copyright. We should be returning back to the roots - why do we have copyright in the first place, what were the goals and the intent behind it, and how does AI affect them? The way this technology is being used clearly violates the intent behind copyright law, it undermines its goals and results in harm that it was designed to pr…

> but AI doesn't change the motivations and goals behind copyright That's the point they're making

The person I responded to? Yes I'm agreeing with them, just adding my own thoughts. Maybe I could've worded that better :)

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

#490
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.

It should not be fine to train on them, because you are creating derivative works, exactly like when you deal with music.
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