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

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

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supposed 'taxi cartel' were just (some) scummy operators ... not really a cartel. Fast forward to today => you are paying more for what is essentially very similar service (because it literally turned into a monopoly because of network effects) and the money ends up in the pocket of some corporate douche not even the people doing the actual work. This is the business model: get more money out of customers (becaus…

Classic indications of a cartel (in the economic sense) are deliberate limitations of supply and fixing of prices through collusion. I don’t know about other cities, but NYC absolutely had a taxi cartel.

In the classical economic sense, Lyft/Uber should be competing to drive prices down to razor thin margins for the facilitator service. Is that happening? Or are they pocketing fat margins?

And it wasn't much of a cartel in NYC before, anyways. Most subways stops in Brooklyn had a black car nearby if you knew how to look for them.

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

#572

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/

wow, I found 8 of my books!

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

#573

Settlement Terms (from the case pdf) 1. A Settlement Fund of at least $1.5 Billion: Anthropic has agreed to pay a minimum of $1.5 billion into a non-reversionary fund for the class members. With an estimated 500,000 copyrighted works in the class, this would amount to an approximate gross payment of $3,000 per work. If the final list of works exceeds 500,000, Anthropic will add $3,000 for each additional work. 2. Des…

Don't forget: NO LEGAL PRECEDENT! which means, anybody suing has to start all over. You only settle in this scenario/point if you think you'll lose. Edit: I'll get ratio'd for this- but its the exact same thing google did in it's lawsuit with Epic. They delayed while the public and courts focused in apple (oohh, EVIL apple)- apple lost, and google settled at a disadvantage before they had a legal judgment that couldn…

There is already a mountain of legal precedent that you can't just download copyrighted work. That's what this lawsuit is about. Just because one of the parties is Anthropic doesn't mean this is some new AI thing.

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

#574
post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can only speak in EU terms in any more detail here, but the EU laws are based on "dominant market position". Monopoly is one route to that but it's not the only route and there is no minimum market share required, as e.g. Qualcomm found out ( https://www.cliffordchance.com/insights/resources/blogs/talk... )

Which EU country reacted against Uber's predatory pricing when it was actually happening? Ie. which EU government refused investor money flowing into their economy? The only examples I can find are a few cities, and some of those are in the US. No EU state did, unless I'm missing something.

Sure now that it costs them money, they're reacting, making things worse for literally everyone: the taxi drivers, who've been victimized by the governments not reacting when they should. The customers, who are now paying more. The Uber drivers, who are certainly not the ones getting the money.

A great lawyer will tell you laws don't matter if they're not applied, and then tell you how laws are applied and what you can and can't get away with (this is a necessity since most laws aren't very clear at all, especially where it comes to actual real-world cases or penalties). The EU are absolute masters of that. The famous GPDR, for example, isn't protecting anyone's data in any way it matters since governments have the power to grant themselves exceptions to them. Which lead to all the things the GPDR tried to avoid: insurance getting private medical data (who are mostly part of governments in the EU), private medical data being used by the police or in court, just to give some examples.

Hell, it's now been confirmed every 2 years or so since 2015 that essentially all European countries think all of the FANGs are abusing their market position. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, ... they've given them billions of dollars in fines. Tell me, what has been fixed? US advertising companies are deeper entrenched than ever before (even outside of the internet, ie. ClearChannel). Law is supposed to fix the problems. Well, obviously the problem of US companies' dominance is not solved, in fact it's gotten a lot worse.

And this is nothing new. Take what EU countries signed in the Budapest memorandum. You will find that it states that if Russia ("any of the ... blabla", which includes Russia) takes Crimea a bunch of EU countries (France, UK) would, first, declare war on the country that did it (Russia) and initiate actual hostile action against that country (ie. not just support to Ukraine). That meant they agreed to have UK and French (and ...) soldiers attack Russia. That was the security guarantee Ukraine had, and that was an international treaty, which in the EU (look it up) has the power of law.

As everyone and their grandmother's cat knows, they didn't actually follow through. They "gave support". That's just one, at the moment important, example.

And of course, the effect is the same: it became worse and worse. Russia's actions became worse and worse and worse. Now the EU countries have given the same guarantees for countries like Poland, Latvia and even Estonia, either directly or through NATO. Will Russia attack? Why not? It's not like these countries will (or let's be real: can) actually fight under any circumstance.

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

#575
post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you’re missing the point. They acquired market power by killing them through predatory pricing, leaving incumbents unprofitable and forcing them to exit - while creating a steep barrier to entry for any new comers and strategically manipulating existing riders by offering high take rates initially and subsidising rides to create artificial demand and inflate market share - then once they kicked out the incumbents,…

I get why we look on Uber with disdain today. They're the big rich behemoths who treat drivers poorly, previously had a CEO who was a raging asshole, and have now raised their prices (gasp!) to a level that they need to be for a sustainable business. But I remember when I started using Uber back in 2012. It was amazing compared to every single other option out there. Yes, they entered the market in questionably-legal…

Yes ... THAT was when governments should have stepped in and prevented uber from undercutting taxi drivers with investor money.

As pointed out here, many governments have laws stating that they will step in ... and they didn't.

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

#576

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/

wow, I found 8 of my books!

8 works x $3k/work is not a bad payout!

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

#577

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/

wow, I found 8 of my books!

[deleted]

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

#578

After the book publishers burned Google Book's Library of Alexandria, they are now making it impossible to train a LLM unless you engage in the medieval process of manually buying paper-copies of work just to scan & destroy them...

for recent books, they could buy digital version of the books and use them for training, though.

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

#579
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But that's the thing, isn't it? Universal healthcare isn't magic. It's paid for by taxes. Yet Uber claimed its drivers where independent contractors that had to pay for anything: taxes, medical, insurance, car depreciation etc. etc.

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

#580

This is sad for open source AI, piracy for the purpose of model training should also be fair use because otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so. There is no way to buy billions of books just for model training, it simply can't happen.

Setting aside whether or not I think it should be fair use, you’re only going to be training a new foundation model these days if you have billions of dollars to spend on the endeavor anyway. Nobody is training Llama 5 in their garage.
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