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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

#71

Post by nicce »

greensoap wrote: post #27
nicce wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they must delete all models since they acquired the source illegally and benefitted from it, right? Otherwise it just encourages others to keep going and pay the fines later.

In a prior ruling, the court stated that Anthropic didn't train on the books subject to this settlement. The record is that Anthropic scanned physical books and used those for training. The pirated books were being held in a general purpose library and were not, according to the record, used in training.

That is something which is extremely difficult to prove from either side.

It is 500,000 books in total so did they really scan all those books instead of using the pirated versions? Even when they did not have much money in the early phases of the model race?

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

#72

Post by manbash »

GodelNumbering wrote: post #58

Settlement Terms (from the case pdf) 1. A Settlement Fund of at least $1.5 Billion: Anthropic has agreed to pay a minimum of $1.5 billion into a non-reversionary fund for the class members. With an estimated 500,000 copyrighted works in the class, this would amount to an approximate gross payment of $3,000 per work. If the final list of works exceeds 500,000, Anthropic will add $3,000 for each additional work. 2. Des…

Thank you. I assumed it would be quicker to find the link to the case PDF here, but your summary is appreciated!

Indeed, it is not only payout, but the destruction of the datasets. Although the article does quote:

> “Anthropic says it did not even use these pirated works,” he said. “If some other generative A.I. company took data from pirated source and used it to train on and commercialized it, the potential liability is enormous. It will shake the industry — no doubt in my mind.”

Even if true, I wonder how many cases we will see in the near future.

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

#73

Post by zer00eyz »

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.

> 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.

Take this one step further. IF you buy the work, and vectorize it, thats fine. But if you feed it in the vectors for Harry Potter so many times that it can reproduce half of the book, it becomes a problem when it spits out that copy.

And what about all the other stuff that LLM's spit out? Who owns that. Well at present, no one. If you train a monkey or an elephant to paint, you cant copyright that work because they aren't human, and neither is an LLM.

If you use an LLM to generate your code at work, can you leave with that code when you quit? Does GPL3 or something like the Elastic Search license even apply if there is no copyright?

I suspect we're going to be talking about court cases a lot for the next few years.

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

#74

Post by ajross »

MaxikCZ wrote: post #13

See kids? Its okay to steal if you steal more money than the fine costs.

That metaphor doesn't really work. It's a settlement, not a punishment, and this is payment, not a fine. Legally it's more like "The store wasn't open, so I took the items from the lot and paid them later".

It's not the way we expect people to do business under normal circumstances, but in new markets with new products? I guess I don't see much actually wrong with this. Authors still get paid a price they were willing to accept, and Anthropic didn't need to wait years to come to an agreement (again, publishers weren't actually selling what AI companies needed to buy!) before training their LLMs.

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

#75

Post by masterjack »

slg wrote: post #53
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Although the payment is enormous, it is small compared with the amount of money that Anthropic has raised in recent years. This month, the start-up announced that it had agreed to a deal that brings an additional $13 billion into Anthropic’s coffers. The start-up has raised a total of more than $27 billion since its founding in 2021.

Maybe small compared to the money raised, but it is in fact enormous compared to the money earned. Their revenue was under $1b last year and they projected themselves as likely to make $2b this year. This payout equals their average yearly revenue of the last two years.

I thought they were projecting 10B and said a few months ago they have already grown from a 1B to 4B run rate

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

#76

Post by bcrosby95 »

petralithic wrote: post #21

This is sad for open source AI, piracy for the purpose of model training should also be fair use because otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so. There is no way to buy billions of books just for model training, it simply can't happen.

Fair use isn't about how you access the material, its about what you can do with it after you legally access it. If you don't legally access it, the question of fair use is moot.

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

#77

Post by gooosle »

GodelNumbering wrote: post #58

Settlement Terms (from the case pdf) 1. A Settlement Fund of at least $1.5 Billion: Anthropic has agreed to pay a minimum of $1.5 billion into a non-reversionary fund for the class members. With an estimated 500,000 copyrighted works in the class, this would amount to an approximate gross payment of $3,000 per work. If the final list of works exceeds 500,000, Anthropic will add $3,000 for each additional work. 2. Des…

So... it would be a lot cheaper to just buy all of the books?
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