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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

#61

Post by freejazz »

non_aligned wrote: post #14
arjunchint wrote: post #10

Wait so they raised all that money just to give it to publishers? Can only imagine the pitch, yes please give us billions of dollars. We are going to make a huge investment like paying of our lawsuits.

You're joking, but that's actually a good pitch. There was a significant legal issue hanging over their heads, with some risk of a potentially business-ending judgment down the line. This makes it go away, which makes the company a safer, more valuable investment. Both in absolute terms and compared to peers who didn't settle.

It just resolves their liability with regards to books they purported they did not even train the models on, which is all that was left in this case after summary judgment. Sure the potential liability was company ending, but it's all a stupid business decision when it is ultimately for books they did not even train on.

It basically does nothing for them besides that. Given the split decisions so far, I'm not sure what value the Alsup decision is going to bring to the industry, moving forward, when it's in the context of books that Anthropic physically purchased. The other AI cases are generally not fact patterns where the LLM was trained with copyrighted materials that the AI company legally purchased copies of.

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

#62

Post by taejavu »

non_aligned wrote: post #31

I'm gonna say one thing. If you agree that something was unfairly taken from book authors, then the same thing was taken from people publishing on the web, and on a larger scale. Book authors may see some settlement checks down the line. So might newspapers and other parties that can organize and throw enough $$$ at the problem. But I'll eat my hat if your average blogger ever sees a single cent.

The blogger’s content was freely available, this fine is for piracy.

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

#64

Post by privatelypublic »

GodelNumbering wrote: post #58

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't be challenged latter.

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

#65

Post by ortusdux »

jimmydoe wrote: post #30
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.

Google scanned many books quite a while ago, probably way more than LibGen. Are they good to use them for training?

They litigated this a while ago and my understanding was that they were able to claim fair use, but I'm no expert.

What I'm wondering is if they, or others, have trained models on pirated content that has flowed through their networks?

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

#66

Post by taftster »

nottorp wrote: post #47

I thought 1.5 B is the penalty for one torrent, not for a couple million torrents. At least if you're a regular citizen.

Make sure to grab the mother-of-all-torrents I guess if you're going to go that path. That way you get more bang for your 1.5B penalty.

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

#68

Post by wmf »

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.

Paying $3,000 for pirating a ~$30 book seems disproportionate.

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

#69

Post by tonfa »

novok wrote: post #44

I wonder who will be the first country to make an exception to copyright law for model training libraries to attract tax revenue like Ireland did for tech companies in the EU. Japan is part of the way there, but you couldn't do a common crawl type thing. You could even make it a library of congress type of setup.

As long as you're not distributing, it's legal in Switzerland to download copyrighted material. (Switzerland was on the naughty US/MPAA list for a while, might still be)

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

#70

Post by non_aligned »

taejavu wrote: post #62
non_aligned wrote: post #31

I'm gonna say one thing. If you agree that something was unfairly taken from book authors, then the same thing was taken from people publishing on the web, and on a larger scale. Book authors may see some settlement checks down the line. So might newspapers and other parties that can organize and throw enough $$$ at the problem. But I'll eat my hat if your average blogger ever sees a single cent.

The blogger’s content was freely available, this fine is for piracy.

This is not a fine, it's a settlement to recompense authors.

More broadly, I think that's a goofy argument. The books were "freely available" too. Just because something is out there, doesn't necessarily mean you can use it however you want, and that's the crux of the debate.

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