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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

#651

Post by mdp2021 »

LunaSea wrote: post #561
mdp2021 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an elision for " public knowledge". Of course there are nuances. In the case of books, there is little doubt: printed for sale is literally named "published". (The "for sale" side does not limit the purpose to sales only, before somebody wants to attack that.)

Books are private objects sold to buyers. By definition, its not public knowledge.

Again and again: the "book", the item, is a private object, access to the text is freely available - to those member of societies that have decided that knowledge be freely available and have thus established libraries. (They have collected the books - their own - so that we can freely access the texts.)

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

#652

Post by tene80i »

mdp2021 wrote: post #649
tene80i wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libraries are great and authors get paid when you borrow the book. But we’re talking about piracy. As for window washing vs knowledge production, not sure what you mean. Books have a price. Nobody’s decided they should be free either.

> authors get paid In the standard system for libraries, the book is paid once. That is "libraries" as in "we have societally decided to make published knowledge freely available". > window washing vs knowledge production Societies have not decided that window washing should be freely available - on the other side, they have decided that published knowledge be freely available (that is the meaning of the establishmen…

It must differ by geography. In my country, authors are paid library revenue according to the number of times their books are borrowed. Perhaps as well as an upfront purchase.

Re: what “society has decided”, are you arguing that because libraries exist, no one may sell books for a price?

Seems extreme, not widely agreed by the population or the relevant parties, and likely to cause immense problems with the economics of knowledge production, but it’s certainly one point of view!

Similarly I argue that because open source code exists, software engineers must all work for free, and that because public parks exist, everyone’s home gardens are open to all.

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

#653

Post by ahepp »

33MHz-i486 wrote: post #400
jimmaswell wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel. Now you don't even have to use Uber in many of these places because taxis had to compete - they otherwise never would have stopped pulling the "credit card reader is broken" scam, taking long routes on p…

i dont know that its such a great thing in the end. Uber/Lyft is 50-100% more expensive now than taxis were before. Theyre entrenched in different ways.

“Entrenched” because that’s how consumers prefer to spend their money?

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

#654

Post by JustExAWS »

safety1st wrote: post #613
JustExAWS wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> *and generally the engine of American innovation/growth/wealth equality for 200 years: Come up with a cool technology, build it in your garage, get people to fund it and sell it because it's a better mousetrap.” So exactly when was there “wealth equality” in the US? Are you glossing over that whole segregation, redlining, era of the US? And America was built on slavery and genocide.

Honest question: what's with the penchant some people have to turn every conversation into a referendum on how horrible America is? You realize there are countries that are even worse to their citizens right? Like I'm really asking, why do so many people online seek to eliminate all conversation that isn't a simple and un-nuanced condemnation of America? I am able to have criticisms of America while also thinking the…

It’s the BS “American exceptionalism” like this country was founded on “hard work” and the idea of “equality” when it was literally founded on slavery and enshrined in the constitution that an entire race of people were considered 3/5th of a person.

Right this very second, the same Republican Party who fights tooth and nail for the right to bare arms is trying not to let transgender people carry guns.

Which industrial country has a higher rate of incarceration than the US? A higher infant mortality rate? Less people covered by health insurance? A lower life expectancy?

There is absolutely no objective quality of life measurement that you can name where the median American citizen is better off than a country in Europe or in Canada or the UK.

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

#655

Post by JustExAWS »

safety1st wrote: post #429
Spooky23 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, except that you’re too positive. The United States is already a banana republic. The federal courts are a joke - the supreme court now has at least one justice whose craven corruption is notorious — openly accepting material value (ie bribes) from various parties. The district courts are being stuffed with Trump appointees with the obvious problems that go with that. The congress is supine. Obviousl…

It's bad but I think it's important to recognize how much worse it can get. Otherwise why would you work to save anything? I'm "positive" because I come from the US and I now live in an actual banana republic and I see firsthand how much worse things will get in America if the trajectory doesn't change. Imagine a future where election results are casually and publicly nullified if the people with the guns don't like…

You realize that 1500 people were just pardoned for storming federal buildings, trying to kill elected official and trying to overturn an election?

Right now, the President is sending federal troops and occupying cities and just bombed a ship in Venezuela

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

#656

Post by biztos »

silisili wrote: post #512
33MHz-i486 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i dont know that its such a great thing in the end. Uber/Lyft is 50-100% more expensive now than taxis were before. Theyre entrenched in different ways.

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.

It helped that they started in places like San Francisco, where the taxi cartel was so absurdly terrible that you'd win fans just by showing up.

I lived in SF when Uber started. We used to call Veteran's Cab because they were the only company that wouldn't ditch on the way to pick you up, but it was completely normal to wait more than an hour for a cab in the dark hinterlands of 24th and Dolores or the industrial wasteland of 2nd and Folsom. An hour during which you had to be ready to jump as soon as the car arrived. Everybody had at least one black-car driver's cell number for downtown use because if they happened to be free, you could at least get picked up.

Uber would have had a religious following of fanpersons even if all they'd done was an estimated pickup time that was accurate to within 20 minutes.

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

#657

Post by jama211 »

33MHz-i486 wrote: post #400
jimmaswell wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel. Now you don't even have to use Uber in many of these places because taxis had to compete - they otherwise never would have stopped pulling the "credit card reader is broken" scam, taking long routes on p…

i dont know that its such a great thing in the end. Uber/Lyft is 50-100% more expensive now than taxis were before. Theyre entrenched in different ways.

Where I live Ubers are WAY cheaper than taxis, even if you go back years and years.

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

#658

Post by fragmede »

JustExAWS wrote: post #654
safety1st wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: what's with the penchant some people have to turn every conversation into a referendum on how horrible America is? You realize there are countries that are even worse to their citizens right? Like I'm really asking, why do so many people online seek to eliminate all conversation that isn't a simple and un-nuanced condemnation of America? I am able to have criticisms of America while also thinking the…

It’s the BS “American exceptionalism” like this country was founded on “hard work” and the idea of “equality” when it was literally founded on slavery and enshrined in the constitution that an entire race of people were considered 3/5th of a person. Right this very second, the same Republican Party who fights tooth and nail for the right to bare arms is trying not to let transgender people carry guns. Which industria…

Womens suffrage was also not part of the deal in 1776.

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

#659

Post by spion »

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.

Its not settled whether AI training is fair use.

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

#660

Post by qingcharles »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #294
djoldman wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the settlement doesn't. However, the judge already ruled on the only important piece of this legal proceeding: > Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work to train Claude...

I suspect that ruling legally gets wiped off the books by the settlement since the case gets dismissed, no? Even if the ruling legally remains in place after the settlement, district court rulings are at most persuasive precedent and not binding precedent in future cases, even ones handled by the same court. In the US federal court system, only appellate rulings at either the circuit court of appeals level or the Sup…

That ruling does not get wiped off, you're right it is persuasive precedent, and it certainly can be cited in other cases, even if it's non-binding. It will be useful. District court rulings are used all the time as cites in novel applications of law like this.
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