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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

#601

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

woooooo wrote: post #571
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Last time I checked, neither Uber nor Lyft were profitable (at all!) before the 2023-2024 time period.

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

#602

Post by e40 »

apwell23 wrote: post #587
e40 wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the problem of sexual assault by drivers? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/business/uber-sexual-assa...

what about it?

The comment to which I replied said Uber was better than taxis. The article I referenced details why that might not be the case, when it comes to passenger safety.

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

#603

Post by arduanika »

pennomi wrote: post #595
arduanika wrote: post #593

Let us not forget that this one is the good, ethical AI company. The one founded by splinter AI safety cultists who thought that OpenAI wasn't deep enough in the safety cult for their liking. And here they are, keeping the humans safe. By robbing them. Because it turns out that nobody in the whole safety cult cares a whit for the human mind, the human experience, human art. Maybe for something they call "human values…

I don’t think that copyright is related to safety at all. Copyright is something that doesn’t really exist, except as a social agreement, while safety is something that exists whether or not society believes it does.

We are gods, we are very smart, we make our own rules, says the cult. We define what safety is, not you. Safety is protecting you from imagined monsters for your own good, not protecting you from getting robbed by us. And anyways, property rights are just made up, man, a social construct.

But investors, please give us billions of dollars worth of that imaginary social agreement. We need it so that we can build the inevitable future. We're gonna do it more ethically than those guys over there.

What a swindle.

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

#604

Post by [deleted] »

kelnos wrote: post #545
utyop22 wrote: post #523

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…

[deleted]

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

#605

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

vintermann wrote: post #566
InCom-0 wrote: post #541

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…

Taxis were a cottage industry - pretty much the opposite of a cartel (so were Bed and Breakfasts, another "app-disrupted" business).

Could you tell me why you think that?

In NYC, prior to Uber entering the market, taxi medallions changed hands for up to $1mm. Prices were fixed by the TLC.

If these are no strong indications of a cartel, I don’t know what is.

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

#606

Post by petralithic »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #344
petralithic wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy is not stealing. I don't know why everyone on HN suddenly turned into a copyright hawk, only big companies benefit from our current copyright regime, like Disney and their lobbying for increasing its length.

It’s shifts like that, going from a copyleft to a copyright crowd, that make me increasingly suspicious the HN is authentic as it was years ago. Another weird one is the socialism lean instead of more libertarian ideals by many commentators. I think it might be generational issues and being 50+ years old makes me an old timer!

I'm guessing it's because every year, younger people join HN. I've been on this site for at least a decade and a half with various accounts and it's interesting to see the shift.

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

#607

Post by ryao »

carstenhag wrote: post #159
ryao wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it allowed them to move faster than their completion, I imagine management would consider it money well spent. They are expected to spend absurd amounts of money to get ahead. They were never expected to spend money efficiently if it meant taking additional months/years to get results.

Someone here commented saying they claimed they did not even use it for training, so apparently it was useless.

In that case, this was one of the most expensive no-ops in history.

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

#608

Post by troupo »

JustExAWS wrote: post #594
troupo wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that’s fine. Uber drivers should pay taxes and Uber itself pays taxes - or at least should. And the drivers have the free will to choose to drive for Uber.

> Uber drivers should pay taxes and Uber itself pays taxes - or at least should.

Yup. The drivers should have to pay everything because despite working for Uber they are "free contractors"

> And the drivers have the free will to choose to drive for Uber

Ah yes, I forgot that's exactly how price dumping works: there are multiple companies to chose from and all of them offer competitive wages.

I mean, it's not ancient history. For half of Uber's existence the ongoing story was: drivers have to drive almost 24 hours a day to make living wage with Uber randomly stealing their wages.

This only somewhat changed once governments stepped in and forced Uber to change some of its practices.

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

#609

Post by mcintyre1994 »

jbeard4 wrote: post #280

"$3,000 per work" seems like an incredibly good deal to license a book.

If the case is about piracy rather than use (which is I think the case?), wouldn’t the comparison be to buying all the books? $3000 each would be a pretty bad deal for that.

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

#610

Post by coliveira »

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…

There are many schemes nowadays on Uber cars. I know some stories in developing countries where people are robbed and even killed because they foolishly think that by getting a Uber this means a safe ride. In some countries a regular taxi is actually better regulated and safer than Uber.
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