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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

#511

Post by mdp2021 »

vkou wrote: post #311
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").

> Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library. Every human has the right to read those books. And now, this is obvious, but it seems to be frequently missed - an LLM is not a human , and does not have such rights.

> this is obvious

I think it is obvious instead that readers employed by humans fit the principle.

> rights

Societally, it is more of a duty. Knowledge is made available because we must harness it.

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

#512

Post by silisili »

33MHz-i486 wrote: post #400
jimmaswell wrote: post #381

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…

i dont know that its such a great thing in the end. Uber/Lyft is 50-100% more expensive now than taxis were before. Theyre entrenched in different ways.

Uber did a great job convincing lay people that taxis were ripoffs and they were a good deal. For some time that was probably true.

Now, I see people at the airport walk over to the pickup lot, joining a crowd of others furiously messing with their phones while scanning the area for presumably their driver.

All the while the taxis waiting immediately outside the exit door were $2 more expensive, last time I checked.

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

#513

Post by mdp2021 »

LunaSea wrote: post #476
nl wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By US law, cccording to Author's Guild vs Google[1] on the Google book scanning project, scanning books for indexes is fair use. Additionally: > Every human has the right to read those books. Since when? I strongly disagree - knowledge should be free. I don't think the author's arrangement of the words should be free to reproduce (ie, I think some degree of copyright protection is ethical) but if I want to use a tool…

> knowledge should be free As soo as OpenAI open sources their model's source code I'll agree.

That is an elision for "public knowledge". Of course there are nuances. In the case of books, there is little doubt: printed for sale is literally named "published".

(The "for sale" side does not limit the purpose to sales only, before somebody wants to attack that.)

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

#514

Post by jsilence »

zinglersen wrote: post #510
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…

That is part of the ‚first mover advantage‘. Sometimes operating and experimenting in grey zones before they become regulated.

The European and especially German approach of regulating pre-emptive might be more fair, but apparently it also stifles innovation, as we can observe. Almost no significant players from Europe and Germany.

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

#515

Post by mdp2021 »

gpm wrote: post #234
mdp2021 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright law in the USA may be more liberal about scanning than other jurisdictions (see the parallel comment from gpm), which expressly regulate the amount of copying of material you do not own as an item.

The jurisdictions I'm familiar with all give vague fair use/fair dealing exceptions which would cover some but not all copying (including scanning) with less than clear boundaries. I'd be interested to know if you knew of one with bright line rules delineating what is and isn't allowed.

> if you knew of one with bright line rules

(I know by practice but not from the letter of the law; to give you details I should do some research and it will take time - if I will manage to I will send you an email, but I doubt I will be able to do it soon. The focus is anyway on western European Countries.)

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

#516

Post by atleastoptimal »

Reminder that just recently, Anthropic raised a $13 billion series F at a $183 billion post-money evaluation.

In March, they were worth $61.5 billion

In six months they've created $120 billion in value. That's almost 700 million dollars per day. Avoiding being slowed down by even a few days is worth a billion dollar payout when you are on this trajectory. This lawsuit, and any lawsuit AI model companies are likely to get, will be a rounding error at the end of the fiscal year.

They know that superintelligent AI is far larger than money, and even so, the money they'll make on the way there is hefty enough for copyright law to not be an issue.

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

#517

Post by Macha »

ghiculescu wrote: post #504
TeMPOraL wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#Legal_aspect...

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

#518

Post by Luker88 »

5 days ago GamesNexus did a piece on Meta having the same problems, but resolving it differently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdtBgB7iS8c

Somehow excuses like "we torrented it, but we configured low seeding" "temptation was too strong because there was money to be made" "we tried getting a licenses, but then ignored it" and more ludicrous excuses actually worked.

Internal meta emails seemed to point to people knowing the blatant breach of copyright, and yet Meta won the case.

I guess there are tiers of laws even between billionaire companies.

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

#520

Post by ghiculescu »

Macha wrote: post #517
ghiculescu wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What law is it breaking?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#Legal_aspect...

In all those countries what’s illegal is abuse of a monopoly, which is not what’s being discussed here. The parent cited Uber and Lyft when they first started. Nothing is illegal about startups undercutting established competitors.
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