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

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 761 posts

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

#551

Post by kelnos »

gpm wrote: post #296
alpinisme wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same could be said of grand larceny. The difference would seem to be a mix of social norms and, more notably for this conversation, very different consequences.

I think the most notable difference is that grand larceny actually deprived someone of something they would have otherwise had, while pirating something you couldn't afford to buy doesn't because there was no circumstance in which they were getting the money and piracy doesn't involve taking anything from them...

Ah yes, the "I wouldn't have paid for it anyway, so I'm entitled to it for free" argument...

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

#552

Post by kelnos »

almosthere wrote: post #401
beowulfey wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's actually wrong with this? It's because they did not choose to pay for the books; they were forced to pay and they would not have done so if the lawsuit had not fallen this way. If you are not sure why this is different from "they paid for pirated books (as if it were a transaction)", then this may reflect a lack of awareness of how fair exchange and trust both function in a society.

Settling is not forced

Not sure what point that's trying to make. Settling is a) a tacit admission that you feel you might lose, b) thinking legal costs will be to expensive to win, c) thinking the bad publicity of the trial dragging on isn't worth your time, d) just no wanting to spend the cycles dealing with it.

Settling isn't "forced", but it's a choice that tells you that the company believes settling is a better deal for them than letting the trial go forward. That's something.

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

#554

Post by TimByte »

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.

You can't grab pirated stuff and then hope fair use magically sanitizes it

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

#555

Post by kelnos »

fn-mote wrote: post #303
crote wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Option 1: $183B valuation, $1.5B settlement. Option 2: near-$0 valuation, $15M purchasing cost. To an investor, that just looks like a pretty good deal, I reckon. It's just the cost of doing business - which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these.

> which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these. What's actually wrong with this? They paid $1.5B for a bunch of pirated books. Seems like a fair price to me, but what do I know. The settlement should reflect society's belief of the cost or deterrent, I'm not sure which (maybe both). This might be controversial, but I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willi…

> The settlement should reflect society's belief of the cost or deterrent

Settlements have nothing to do with either of those things. Settlement has to do with what the plaintiff believes is good enough for the cost that will avoid the uncertainty of trial. This is a civil case, "society" doesn't really come into play here. (And you can't "settle" a criminal case; closest analogue would be a plea deal.)

If the trial went forward to a guilty verdict, then the fines would represent society's belief of cost or deterrent. But we didn't get to see that happen.

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

#556

Post by TimByte »

rchaud wrote: post #228
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.

> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future. That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract wit…

What's wild is that $1.5B sounds huge… until you compare it to the potential upside of owning the dominant AI model trained on everything

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

#558

Post by kelnos »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #460
zmmmmm wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willing to pay the cost so you don't think super rich people should be bound by laws at all? Unless you made the cost proportional to (maybe expontial to) somebody's wealth, you would be creating a completely lawless class who would wreak havoc on society.

The law was not broken by "super rich people". It was broken by a company of people who were not very rich at all and have managed to produce billions in value (not dollars, value) by breaking said laws. They're not trafficking humans or doing predatory lending, they're building AI. This is why our judicial system literally handles things on a case by case basis.

> It was broken by a company of people who were not very rich at all

I think the company's bank account would beg to differ on that.

> managed to produce billions in value (not dollars, value) by breaking said laws.

Ah, so breaking the law is ok if enough "value" is created? Whatever that means?

> They're not trafficking humans or doing predatory lending, they're building AI.

They're not trafficking humans or doing predatory lending, they're infringing on the copyright of book authors.

Not sure why you ended that sentence with "building AI", as that's not comparing apples to apples.

But sure, ok, so it's ok to break the law if you, random person on the internet, think their end goals are worthwhile? So the ends justify the means, huh?

> This is why our judicial system literally handles things on a case by case basis.

Yes, and Anthropic was afraid enough of an unfavorable verdict in this particular case that they paid a billion and a half to make it go away.

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

#559

Post by kelnos »

techpression wrote: post #524
crote wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should I be allowed to walk into the Louvre, steal the Mona Lisa, then pay $10.000 once caught? Should I be allowed to do this if I am employed by Stealing The Mona Lisa, LLC? > They paid $1.5B for a bunch of pirated books. They didn't pay, they settled . And considering flesh-and-blood people get sued for tens of thousands per download when there isn't a profit motive, that's a bargain. > The settlement should refle…

And to top it off, the money they pay is VC money that is created from nothing in ”valuations”. So in the end nobody paid anything for this crime.

Well, presumably this will mean ever so slightly lower returns in the future for their investors, so it's not like it was free. But ultimately I'm sure this settlement was money well spent for Anthropic, and if they could go back and do it all over again, they would have done the exact same thing.

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

#560

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

kelnos wrote: post #547
silisili wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, that seems pretty unfair, no, giving one set of transportation companies an arbitrary advantage over another? This sort of thing is exactly why Uber started in the first place: because taxis had unfair monopolistic advantages for no particular reason, and gave customers a poor experience, because they knew they didn't have to do better to keep their jobs. I have no idea what I'm going to get with those taxis…

In the US, as well.

I won't recount what recently happened to a friend in Milwaukee. It was an unpopular story (because the ripoff was Uber-based, and not the traditional taxi).

There's bad actors in every industry. I have found that industries that get "entrenched," tend to breed the most bad actors.

If anything turns into a "pseudo-monopoly," expect the grifters to start popping up. They'll figure out how to game the system.

Post reply on HN