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Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
71–80 of 686 posts
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#72Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#73If the AI movement will manage to undermine Imaginary Property, it would redeem it's externalities threefold.
What are your feelings about how the small fish is stripped of their arts, and their years of work becomes just a prompt? Mainly comic artists and small musicians who are doing things they like and putting out for people, but not for much money?
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Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#74Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?
If you wanted to be legit with 0 chance of going to court, you would contact publisher and ask to pay a license to get access to their catalog for training, and negotiate from that point. This is what every company using media are doing (think Spotify, Netflix, but also journal, ad agency, ...). I don't know why people in HN are giving a pass to AI company for this kind of behavior.
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Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#75These are the people shaping the future of AI? What happened to all the ethical values they love to preach about? We've held China accountable for counterfeiting products for decades and regulated their exports. So why should Anthropic be allowed to export their products and services after engaging in the same illegal activity?
This is the underlying caste system coming to life right before your eyes :D.
I think caste system is the wrong analogy here.
Comment is more about the pseudo ethical high ground
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The judge appears to disagree with you on this. They found that training and selling an LLM are fair use, based on the fact that it is exceedingly transformative, and that the copyright holders are not entitled to any profits thereof due to copyright. (They also did get paid — Anthropic acquired millions of books legally, including all of the authors in this complaint. This would not retroactively absolve them of leg…
The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That's when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing over seven million pirated books
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pirating a book and selling it on claude.ai is stealing, both legally and morally. Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to make money on Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your Shopify website. The original creators don't get payment, and someone's profiting off their work. Try doing that yourself and you'd get a knock on the door real quick.
Properly remixing the content so that it can be considered distinct would be fair use. You can't copyright a style, concept or idea. Also mostly this would be a civil lawsuit for "damages".
It might be legal in the US, but not in the rest of the world.
The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That’s when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing over seven million pirated books
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#78Apparently it's a common business practice. Spotify (even though I can't find any proof) seems to have build their software and business on pirated music. There is some more in this Article [0]. https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files... Funky quote: > Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in…
It was the opposite. Their mission was to combat music piracy by offering a better, legal alternative. Daniel Ek said: "my mission is to make music accessible and legal to everyone, while ensuring artists and rights holders got paid" Also, the Swedish government has zero tolerance for piracy.
I know this might come as a shock to those living in San Francisco, but things are different in other parts of the world, like Uruguay, Sweden and the rest of Europe. From what I’ve read, the European committee actually cares about enforcing the law.
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absurd. Remove all of the content from the training data that was pirated and what is the quality of the end product now?
That's the law. Please keep in mind, copyright is intended as a compromise between benefit to society and to the individual. A thought experiment, students pirating textbooks and applying that knowledge later on in their work?
When you say that's the law, as far as I'm aware a single ruling by a lower court has been issued which upholds that application. Hardly settled case law.
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
With Claude, people are paying Anthropic to access answers that are generated from pirated books, without the authors permission, credit, or compensation.
There is no copyright on knowledge. If it outputs parts of the book verbatim then that's a different story.
Let's don't change the focus of the debate.
Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to power Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your personal website. The original creators don't get credit or payment, and someone’s profiting off their work.
All this happens while authors, many of them teachers, are left scratching their heads with four kids to feed