Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones

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

#61

Post by pyman » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 11:45 AM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #30

pyman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He downloaded millions of academic articles and the government charged him with multiple felonies. The difference is, Aaron Swartz wasn't planning to build massive datacenters with expensive Nvidia servers all over the world.

>the government charged him with multiple felonies. This was the result of a cruel and zealous overreach by the prosecutor to try to advance her political career. It should never have gone that far. The failure of MIT to rally in support of Aaron will never be forgiven.

I agree

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

#62

Post by KoolKat23 » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 11:45 AM UTC

pyman wrote: post #57

j_w wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no copyright on knowledge.

If it outputs parts of the book verbatim then that's a different story.

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

#63

Post by suyjuris » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 11:46 AM UTC

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?

Just downloading them is of course cheaper, but it is worth pointing out that, as the article states, they did also buy legitimate copies of millions of books. (This includes all the books involved in the lawsuit.) Based on the judgement itself, Anthropic appears to train only on the books legitimately acquired. Used books are quite cheap, after all, and can be bought in bulk.

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

#64

Post by lofaszvanitt » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 11:48 AM UTC

pyman wrote: post #48

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't be needed anymore, once singularity is reached. This might be their thought process. This also exemplifies that the loathed caste system found in India is indeed in place in western societies. There is no equality, and seemingly there are worker bees who can be exploited, and there are privileged ones, and of course there are the queens.

:D Note: My definition of singularity isn't the one they use in San Francisco. It's the moment founders who stole the life's work of thousands of teachers finally go to prison, and their datacentres get seized.

You can bet that this never gonna happen...

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

#65

Post by pyman » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 11:48 AM UTC

YPPH wrote: post #47

pyman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no credible evidence Spotify built their company and business on pirated music. This is a narrative that gets passed around in certain circles to justify stealing content.

"Stealing" isn't an apt term here. Stealing a thing permanently deprives the owner of the thing. What you're describing is copyright infringement, not stealing. In this context, stealing is often used as a pejorative term to make piracy sound worse than it is. Except for mass distribution, piracy is often regarded as a civil wrong, and not a crime.

Pirating a book and selling it on claude.ai is stealing, both legally and morally.

Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to make money on Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your Shopify website. The original creators don't get payment, and someone's profiting off their work.

Try doing that yourself and you'd get a knock on the door real quick.

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

#66

Post by KoolKat23 » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 11:50 AM UTC

YPPH wrote: post #47

pyman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no credible evidence Spotify built their company and business on pirated music. This is a narrative that gets passed around in certain circles to justify stealing content.

"Stealing" isn't an apt term here. Stealing a thing permanently deprives the owner of the thing. What you're describing is copyright infringement, not stealing. In this context, stealing is often used as a pejorative term to make piracy sound worse than it is. Except for mass distribution, piracy is often regarded as a civil wrong, and not a crime.

Best/most succinct explanation I've seen to date.

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

#67

Post by KoolKat23 » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 11:50 AM UTC

pyman wrote: post #65

YPPH wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Stealing" isn't an apt term here. Stealing a thing permanently deprives the owner of the thing. What you're describing is copyright infringement, not stealing. In this context, stealing is often used as a pejorative term to make piracy sound worse than it is. Except for mass distribution, piracy is often regarded as a civil wrong, and not a crime.

Pirating a book and selling it on claude.ai is stealing, both legally and morally. Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to make money on Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your Shopify website. The original creators don't get payment, and someone's profiting off their work. Try doing that yourself and you'd get a knock on the door real quick.

Properly remixing the content so that it can be considered distinct would be fair use. You can't copyright a style, concept or idea.

Also mostly this would be a civil lawsuit for "damages".

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

#68

Post by BlackFly » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 11:51 AM UTC

pyman wrote: post #26

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright infringement is not stealing.

[flagged]

Making a copy differs from taking an existing object in all aspects: literally, technically, legally and ethically. Piracy is making a copy you have no legal right to. Stealing is taking a physical object that you have no legal right to. While the "no legal right to" seems the same superficially, in practice the laws differ quite a bit because the literal, technical and ethical aspects differ.

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

#69

Post by pyman » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 11:53 AM UTC

tliltocatl wrote: post #20

57473m3n7Fur7h3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I think they will manage to get themselves out of trouble for it, while the rest of us will still face serious problems if we are caught torrenting even one singular little book.

Even so, would be hard to prove that this particular little book wasn't generated by Claude (oopsie, it happens to be a verbatim copy of a copyrighted work, that happens sometimes, those pesky LLMs).

You just need to audit their system. Shouldn't take more than a couple of hours.

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

#70

Post by suyjuris » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 12:00 PM UTC

pyman wrote: post #52

kevingadd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

The judge appears to disagree with you on this. They found that training and selling an LLM are fair use, based on the fact that it is exceedingly transformative, and that the copyright holders are not entitled to any profits thereof due to copyright. (They also did get paid — Anthropic acquired millions of books legally, including all of the authors in this complaint. This would not retroactively absolve them of legal fault for past infringements, of course.)