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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

#671

Post by starttoaster »

bnjms wrote: post #619
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.

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.

They're always more common in metro areas of the US. You must be from a relatively rural area and don't get out of it much.

That said, uh, the use of getting a taxi to drive you to or from the airport was just not having to park at the airport which generally costs a lot of money, and in certain areas is a little sketchy on whether or not your car will get cracked open while you're away.

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

#673

Post by darkhorse222 »

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.

I know how much my ride will be and I know it doesn't vary based on what happens along the way. L

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

#674

Post by tpmoney »

soks86 wrote: post #89
wmf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not if 100 companies did it and they all got away. This is to teach a lesson because you cannot prosecute all thieves. Yale Law Journal actually writes about this, the goal is to deter crime because in most cases damages cannot be recovered or the criminal will never be caught in the first place.

Even if the goal is to deter crime, we still have a principle of proportionate punishment. We don't cut people's hands of for petty theft, and we don't execute people for exceeding the speed limit even though both should be pretty effective deterrents.

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

#675

Post by JustExAWS »

troupo wrote: post #608
JustExAWS wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are multiple jobs to choose from. California’s attempt to regulate contractors was a disaster. Jason Snell, the former editor of Macworld, left to go independent and makes a living based on a combination of podcasting, writing books and freelance writing and he said how much harder the rules made it for him to do freelance writing because of the requirenments around hiring contractors.

Trust me, Snell is far from a fire breathing libertarian conservative.

It’s not the responsibility of a corporation to decide what a “living wage” is. Should Uber pay more to a single mother with three kids than a single father with no kids? Again it’s society’s responsibility to provide for a safety net and to tax corporations to fund it.

On the federal level, that’s what the earned income tax credit was suppose to do and until 2016, it had wide bi-partisan support and was championed by both Republican and Democratic Presidents.

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

#676

Post by tpmoney »

shortformblog wrote: post #146
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.

Thanks for the reminder that what the Internet Archive did in its case would have been legal if it was in service of an LLM.

I like the IA as much as anyone else, but surely there's a significant difference between distributing literal word for word exact copies of copyrighted material and distributing statistical indexes about copyrighted material right?

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

#677

Post by heavyset_go »

jack_pp wrote: post #431
heavyset_go wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ethically speaking, if Anthropic (a) did later purchase every book it pirated or (b) compensated every author whose book was pirated, would it absolve an illegally trained model of its "sins"? No, it part because it removes agency from the authors/rightsholders. Maybe they don't want to sell Anthropic their books, maybe they want royalties, etc.

Can authors even claim such rights though? I doubt think they even had such agency to begin with

If they're the rightsholders, they can do whatever they want with their IP, including changing licensing terms, adding contractual obligations forbidding certain types of use, forbidding sale, etc.

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

#678

Post by tpmoney »

simoncion wrote: post #425
zer00eyz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, I think that this is a distinction many people miss. If you take all the works of Shakespeare, and reduce it to tokens and vectors is it Shakespeare or is it factual information about Shakespeare? It is the latter, and as much as organizations like the MLB might want to be able to copyright a fact you simply cannot do that…

> If you take all the works of Shakespeare, and reduce it to tokens and vectors is it Shakespeare or is it factual information about Shakespeare? To rephrase the question: Is a PDF of the complete works of Shakespeare Shakespeare, or is it factual information about Shakespeare? Reencoding human-readable information into a form that's difficult for humans to read without machine assistance is nothing new.

Like most things in law, the answers are going to come down to intent and outcome. If you distribute the PDF to other people with the intent that they can read the copyrighted works of an author, then you have distributed that author's content in violation of copyright. If on the other hand, you encrypted the entire contents of that PDF, threw away the encryption key and the published prints of the PDF as artwork of binary code, that's probably going to fall on the side of "fair use" even though the entire copyrighted work is input to and contained in your final output. Though you might get into some legal hot water if you promoted your work using the author's name, but that's more of a trademark issue than a copyright issue.

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

#679

Post by troupo »

JustExAWS wrote: post #675
troupo wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There are multiple jobs to choose from. California’s attempt to regulate contractors was a disaster. Jason Snell, the former editor of Macworld, left to go independent and makes a living based on a combination of podcasting, writing books and freelance writing and he said how much harder the rules made it for him to do freelance writing because of the requirenments around hiring contractors. Trust me, Snell is far fr…

> California’s attempt to regulate contractors was a disaster.

You have to decide whether you want the society to provide safety nets through healthcare, strong labor protections etc. or not.

> Again it’s society’s responsibility to provide for a safety net and to tax corporations to fund it.

Indeed. That's why governments and regulators eventually stepped in.

You can't in good conscience or good faith argue that Uber didn't offload anything onto society and people working for it just because "it's not the job of a company" etc. Uber literally engaged in multiple illegal and borderline illegal practices across the globe, including the US.

And yes, it's the literal job of a taxi company to make sure its drivers work a healthy amount of hours. In Uber's case it meant that it had to pay drivers enough money to cover the costs Uber offloaded onto them, and enough money left over so that they didn't have to drive 18-20 hours a day to make ends meet.

And yeah, not everyone can become Jason Snell

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

#680

Post by _heimdall »

kelnos wrote: post #570
_heimdall wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe is in fact what Waymo has had, of chosen to, deal with. They didn't go for an end run around regulations related to vehicles on public roads. They committed to driverless vehicles and worked with local governments to roll it out as quickly as regulators were willing to allow. Uber could have made the same decision and worked with regulators to be allowed into markets one at a time. It was an intenti…

That doesn't really feel like the same thing to me. With Uber you had a company that wanted to enter an existing market but couldn't due to legally-granted monopolies on taxi service. And given that existing market, you can be sure that the incumbents would lobby to keep Uber locked out. With Waymo you have a new technology that has a computer driving the car autonomously. There isn't really any directly-incumbent pa…

My understanding is that regulations for Waymo were much more strict because they billed themselves from the beginning as fully self-driving and wanted to operate on public streets.

My assumption is that they could have found ways to work around that by technically having someone in the drivers west, for example, but maybe I'm wrong there!

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