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

51–60 of 686 posts

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

#51

Post by CuriouslyC »

pyman wrote: post #18
ramon156 wrote: post #10

Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

The problem with this thinking is that hundreds of thousands of teachers who spent years writing great, useful books and sharing knowledge and wisdom probably won't sue a billion dollar company for stealing their work. What they'll likely do is stop writing altogether. I'm against Anthropic stealing teacher's work and discouraging them from ever writing again. Some teachers are already saying this (though probably no…

If you care so little about writing that AI puts you off it, TBH you're probably not a great writer anyhow.

Writers that have an authentic human voice and help people think about things in a new way will be fine for a while yet.

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

#52

Post by pyman »

kevingadd wrote: post #38
ramon156 wrote: post #10

Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

Google did it the legal way with Google Books, didn't they?

[flagged]

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

#53

Post by bayindirh »

tliltocatl wrote: post #12

If the AI movement will manage to undermine Imaginary Property, it would redeem it's externalities threefold.

What are your feelings about how the small fish is stripped of their arts, and their years of work becomes just a prompt? Mainly comic artists and small musicians who are doing things they like and putting out for people, but not for much money?

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

#54

Post by pyman »

drcursor wrote: post #32
pyman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone on Twitter said: "Oh well, P2P mp3 downloads, although illegal, made contributions to the music industry" That's not what's happening here. People weren't downloading music illegally and reselling it on Claude.ai. And while P2P networks led to some great tech, there's no solid proof they actually improved the music industry.

Let's not forget Spotify ;) https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-f...

Those claims were never proved.

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

#55

Post by maeln »

ramon156 wrote: post #10

Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

If you wanted to be legit with 0 chance of going to court, you would contact publisher and ask to pay a license to get access to their catalog for training, and negotiate from that point.

This is what every company using media are doing (think Spotify, Netflix, but also journal, ad agency, ...). I don't know why people in HN are giving a pass to AI company for this kind of behavior.

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

#56

Post by Kim_Bruning »

actual title:

"Anthropic cut up millions of used books to train Claude — and downloaded over 7 million pirated ones too, a judge said."

A not-so-subtle difference.

That said, in a sane world, they shouldn't have needed to cut up all those used books yet again when there's obviously already an existing file that does all the work.

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

#57

Post by pyman »

j_w wrote: post #50
KoolKat23 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really profiting from piracy. They don't make money off the raw input data. It's no different to consuming for personal use. They make money off the model weights, which is fair use (as confirmed by recent case law).

This is absurd. Remove all of the content from the training data that was pirated and what is the quality of the end product now?

With Claude, people are paying Anthropic to access answers that are generated from pirated books, without the authors permission, credit, or compensation.

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

#58

Post by KoolKat23 »

j_w wrote: post #50
KoolKat23 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really profiting from piracy. They don't make money off the raw input data. It's no different to consuming for personal use. They make money off the model weights, which is fair use (as confirmed by recent case law).

This is absurd. Remove all of the content from the training data that was pirated and what is the quality of the end product now?

That's the law.

Please keep in mind, copyright is intended as a compromise between benefit to society and to the individual.

A thought experiment, students pirating textbooks and applying that knowledge later on in their work?

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

#59

Post by glimshe »

pyman wrote: post #18
ramon156 wrote: post #10

Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

The problem with this thinking is that hundreds of thousands of teachers who spent years writing great, useful books and sharing knowledge and wisdom probably won't sue a billion dollar company for stealing their work. What they'll likely do is stop writing altogether. I'm against Anthropic stealing teacher's work and discouraging them from ever writing again. Some teachers are already saying this (though probably no…

That will be sad, although there will still be plenty of great people who will write books anyway.

When it comes to a lot of these teachers, I'll say, copyright work hand in hand with college and school course book mandates. I've seen plenty of teachers making crazy money off students' backs due to these mandates.

A lot of the content taught in undergrad and school hasn't changed in decades or even centuries. I think we have all the books we'll ever need in certain subjects already, but copyright keeps enriching people who write new versions of these.

Post reply on HN