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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

#501

Post by BoorishBears »

pbd wrote: post #468
BoorishBears wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if anyone has actually read the article or the ruling, but this is about pirating books. Anthropic went back and bought->scanned->destroyed physical copies of them afterward... but they pirated them first, and that's what this settlement is about. The judge also said: > “The training use was a fair use,” he wrote. “The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifet…

i agree. this is very gray imo. e.g., books in India have cheap EEE editions compared to the ones in US/Europe. so they can pre-process the data in India & then compile it in US. does that save them from piracy rules & reduces cost as well.

I mean relative to the cost of pre-training, books are going to be cheap even if you buy them in the US (as demonstrated by the fact Anthropic bought them after)

For post-training, other data sources (like human feedback and/or examples) are way more expensive than books

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

#502

Post by arresin »

ascorbic wrote: post #78
MaxikCZ wrote: post #13

See kids? Its okay to steal if you steal more money than the fine costs.

They're paying $3000 per book. It would've been a lot cheaper to buy the books (which is what they actually did end up doing too).

That’s not enough punitive damages for the crime (which is egregious and absolutely deplorable).

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

#503

Post by unvritt »

I think that one under-discussed effect for settlements like this is the additional tax on experimentation. The largest players can absorb a $1.5B hit or negotiate licensing at scale. Smaller labs and startups, which often drive breakthroughs, may not survive the compliance burden.

That could push the industry toward consolidation—fewer independent experiments, more centralized R&D inside big tech. I feel that, this might slow the pace of unexpected innovations and increase dependence on incumbents.

This def. raises the question: how do we balance fair compensation for creators with keeping the door open for innovation?

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

#504

Post by ghiculescu »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #498
repeekad wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you remember to factor in well over 30% inflation in America in the past 5 years plus Uber Lyft initially losing money on rides to capture market share before they eventually had to actually breakeven?

> plus Uber Lyft initially losing money on rides to capture market share before they eventually had to actually breakeven? That's typically considered to be somewhere between assholish and straight up illegal in most civilized economies.

What law is it breaking?

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

#505

Post by mdp2021 »

triceratops wrote: post #341
mdp2021 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buying used copies of books It remains deranged. Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library. (Edit: in fact initially I wrote 'is supposed to' in place of 'has more than a right to' - meaning that "knowledge is there, we made it available: you are supposed to access it, with the fullest encouragement").

Well great so the Internet Archive is off the hook then. Also, at least so far, we don't call computers "someone".

> Archive is off the hook then

Probably so, because with "library" I did not mean the "building". It is the decision of the society to make knowledge available.

> we don't call computers "someone"

We do instead, for this purpose. Why should we not. Anything that can read fits the set.

--

Edit: Come up with the arguments, sniper.

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

#506

Post by fph »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #85
arcanemachiner wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but did he die before anybody actually knew about it?

Is lib still around anymore. I can't find any functioning urls

Life pro tip: the Wikipedia pages for Libgen and Scihub contain up-to-date current links in the right sidebar. Only for the purpose of information and documentation, of course.

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

#507

Post by mseri »

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.

META did pirate basically all books in Anna’s archive but if I remember correctly they just whispered a a cried sorry and it ended up as that. Why are they also not asked to pay?

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

#508

Post by IshKebab »

slow_typist wrote: post #464
miohtama wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This lawsuit also makes sure that only parties that can train an AI with good enough training material are now - Google - Anthropic - Any Chinese company who do not care about copyright laws What is the cost of buying and scanning books? Copyright law needs to be fixed and its ridiculous hundred years tenure chopped away.

Training a Model on 100+ years old literature only could be an interesting experience though.

It's been done.

https://github.com/haykgrigo3/TimeCapsuleLLM

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

#509

Post by IshKebab »

phillipcarter wrote: post #364
greensoap wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic literally did exactly this to train its models according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit found that Anthropic didn't even use the pirated books to train its model. So there is that

I'm "team Anthropic" if we're stack ranking the major American labs pumping out SOTA models by ethics or whatever, but there is no universe in which a company like them operating in this competitive environment didn't pirate the books.

Except for Google at least.

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

#510

Post by zinglersen »

unvritt wrote: post #503

I think that one under-discussed effect for settlements like this is the additional tax on experimentation. The largest players can absorb a $1.5B hit or negotiate licensing at scale. Smaller labs and startups, which often drive breakthroughs, may not survive the compliance burden. That could push the industry toward consolidation—fewer independent experiments, more centralized R&D inside big tech. I feel that, this…

"That could push the industry toward consolidation"

Based on history this is not a possibility but a certainty.

The larger players - who grew because of limited regulations - will start supporting stricter regulation and compliance structures in order to increase the barrier of entry with the excuse of "Oh we learned our lesson, you are right". The hypocrisy is crazy but it makes sense from a capitalistic perspective.

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