Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors • Hacker News Board

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

#661

Post by manwe150 » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 6:26 PM UTC

spwa4 wrote: post #574

Macha wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

A couple EU countries bans on Uber seem to date back from 2015-2019, which is slow, but still fairly early as to worldwide adoption per https://dig.watch/trends/uber

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

#662

Post by jowea » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 6:43 PM UTC

ghiculescu wrote: post #504

TeMPOraL wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> plus Uber Lyft initially losing money on rides to capture market share before they eventually had to actually breakeven? That's typically considered to be somewhere between assholish and straight up illegal in most civilized economies.

What law is it breaking?

I believe the equivalent for international trade is called "dumping" and is somewhat regulated, although that doesn't apply to Uber.

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

#663

Post by jowea » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 6:48 PM UTC

dns_snek wrote: post #467

amradio1989 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the jury is still out on how fair use applies to AI. Fair use was not designed for what we have now. I could read a book, but its highly unlikely I could regurgitate it, much less months or years later. An LLM, however, can. While we can say "training is like reading", its also not like reading at all due to permanent perfect recall. Not only does an LLM have perfect recall, it also has the ability to distrib…

Fair use wasn't designed for AI, but AI doesn't change the motivations and goals behind copyright. We should be returning back to the roots - why do we have copyright in the first place, what were the goals and the intent behind it, and how does AI affect them? The way this technology is being used clearly violates the intent behind copyright law, it undermines its goals and results in harm that it was designed to pr…

I don't know the word but it's similar to arguing morality or public policy from the current status of the law.

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

#664

Post by tpmoney » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #374

crote wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Option 1: $183B valuation, $1.5B settlement. Option 2: near-$0 valuation, $15M purchasing cost. To an investor, that just looks like a pretty good deal, I reckon. It's just the cost of doing business - which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these.

In most places, a legal settlement is considered a tax deductible loss. At a certain scale it will likely cost the company nothing, but these kinds of cases often trigger speculators grabbing discount stock from panicking amateurs. lol We still have no idea what they sell, so avoided exposure to their antics... =3

But that isn't how tax deductions work. Since taxes are always a fraction of income, a deduction can never save you more money than you already paid out to get the deduction in the first place. If you have a 10% tax rate, your options are:

A) Make 100M, pay 10M in taxes

or

B) Make 100M, pay 10M in lawsuit settlements, pay 9M in taxes

You come out ahead every time by not paying the settlement in the first place.

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

#665

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 6:57 PM UTC

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.

I keep thinking,if they bought ebooks,would that be fine or is this required to be paper books? If it doesn't work with ebooks, the world is going to be a nightmare

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

#666

Post by jart » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 6:59 PM UTC

JustExAWS wrote: post #481

troupo wrote: 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.

My employer is a lot more dependable than the US government.

If you trust the overlord you didn't choose more than the one you did, then you might want to rethink your career.

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

#667

Post by tpmoney » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 7:02 PM UTC

amradio1989 wrote: post #329

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.

I think the jury is still out on how fair use applies to AI. Fair use was not designed for what we have now. I could read a book, but its highly unlikely I could regurgitate it, much less months or years later. An LLM, however, can. While we can say "training is like reading", its also not like reading at all due to permanent perfect recall. Not only does an LLM have perfect recall, it also has the ability to distrib…

> I think the jury is still out on how fair use applies to AI.

The judge presiding over this case has already issued a ruling to the effect that training an LLM like Anthropic's AI with legally acquired material is in fact fair use. So unless someone comes up with some novel claims that weren't already attempted, claims that a different form of AI is significantly different from a copyright perspective from an LLM or tries their hand in a different circuit to get a split decision, the "jury" is pretty much settled on how fair use applies to AI. Legally acquired material used to train LLMs is fair use. Illegally obtaining copies of material is not fair use, and the transformative nature of LLMs don't retroactively make it fair use.

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

#668

Post by tpmoney » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 7:09 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #411

amradio1989 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the jury is still out on how fair use applies to AI. Fair use was not designed for what we have now. I could read a book, but its highly unlikely I could regurgitate it, much less months or years later. An LLM, however, can. While we can say "training is like reading", its also not like reading at all due to permanent perfect recall. Not only does an LLM have perfect recall, it also has the ability to distrib…

> I could read a book, but its highly unlikely I could regurgitate it, much less months or years later. And even if one could, it would be illegal to do. Always found this argument for AI data laundering weird.

Has anyone actually made the argument that having an AI regurgitate a word for word copy of an otherwise copyrighted work is fair use? Or have they made the argument that training the AI is transformative and fair use, and using that AI to generate works that are similar but not duplications of the copyrighted work is fair use?

A xerox machine can reproduce an exact copy of a book if you ask it to, but that doesn't make a xerox machine inherently a copyright violation, nor does it make every use of a xerox machine a violation of copyright, even when the inputs are materials under copyright. So far the judge in this case has ruled that training an AI is sufficiently transformative, and that using legally acquired works for that purpose is not a violation of copyright. That outcome seems entirely unsurprising given the years of case law around copyright and technology that can duplicate copyrighted works. See the aforementioned xerox machines, but also CD ripping, DVRs, VHS recording of TV shows, audio cassette recording, emulators, the Java API lawsuit and also the Google Books lawsuit.

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

#669

Post by JustExAWS » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 7:11 PM UTC

jart wrote: post #666

JustExAWS wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

My employer is a lot more dependable than the US government. If you trust the overlord you didn't choose more than the one you did, then you might want to rethink your career.

What’s more likely - your company is going to get rid of you in the next five years or the government is going to take away your citizenship?

Did you try to get insurance on the open market before 2012 with a pre-existing condition? Every other industrial country in the world has health insurance not tied to your employer. Even smaller countries like Costa Rica and Panama have better more affordable insurance. Yes I’ve done my research on caja, Costa Rica’s national health care system. We will be staying there a couple of months in the winter starting next year and it’s our Plan B to retire there.

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

#670

Post by bnjms » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 7:12 PM UTC

internetter wrote: post #643

bnjms wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I was aware taxis were an imagined thing we saw in movies. I understand you could call a number and ask for a ride to the airport though they were never useful.

What?

Taxis weren’t actually available in most US cities before ride share. Only the large dense cities really had them. This argument that things were better before is only relevant for a small handful of metros. The ride shares are better in spite of their flaws.