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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

#701

Post by vkou »

nl wrote: post #320
vkou wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library. Every human has the right to read those books. And now, this is obvious, but it seems to be frequently missed - an LLM is not a human , and does not have such rights.

By US law, cccording to Author's Guild vs Google[1] on the Google book scanning project, scanning books for indexes is fair use. Additionally: > Every human has the right to read those books. Since when? I strongly disagree - knowledge should be free. I don't think the author's arrangement of the words should be free to reproduce (ie, I think some degree of copyright protection is ethical) but if I want to use a tool…

> scanning books for indexes is fair use.

An LLM isn't an index.

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

#702

Post by JustExAWS »

DrillShopper wrote: post #695
JustExAWS wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to decide whether you want the society to provide safety nets through healthcare, strong labor protections etc. or not. My argument is simply that the only “labor protections” the government should enforce on private enterprise is that a company can’t actively harm employees - OSHA protections, discrimination etc. > And yes, it's the literal job of a taxi company to make sure its drivers work a healthy amo…

If that is the world you want, then boy are you going to love living in Somalia. You could even move today!

Now you are going to come up with an intelligent counter argument to my saying that the government should enforce laws where the employer can’t actively harm employees, where the government should respect the fact that adults have agency to make their own choices and the United States should offer universal healthcare like every other industrialized first world and second world country equates to living in Somalia…

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

#703

Post by downrightmike »

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.

The RIAA should step in and get the money that publishers deserve. Talking millions per book and extra to make sure the pirates learned their lesson. And prison for the management.

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

#704

Post by freejazz »

privatelypublic wrote: post #176
freejazz wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not even remotely true. Page 4 of the settlement describes released claims which only relate to the pirating of books. Again, the amount of misinformation and misunderstanding I see in copyright related threads here ASTOUNDS.

Did you miss the "also" how about "adjacent"? I won't pretend to understand the legal minutia, but reading the settlement doesn't mean you do either. In my experience&training in a fintech corp- Accepting a settlement in any suit weakens your defense- but prevents a judgement and future claims for the same claims from the same claimants (a la double jeopardy). So, again- at minimum- this prevents an actual judgement.…

I'm not sure how your confusion about what's going on is being projected to me. What about "also" what about "adjacent"?

>In my experience&training in a fintech corp- Accepting a settlement in any suit weakens your defense- but prevents a judgement and future claims for the same claims from the same claimants (a la double jeopardy). So, again- at minimum- this prevents an actual judgement. Which, likely would be positive for the NYT (and adjacent) cases.

Okay? I'm an IP litigator and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. The only thing left to try in this case was the book library piracy. Alsup's fair use decision is just as relevant and is not mooted by the settlement and will be cited by anyone that thinks its favorable to them.

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

#705

Post by freejazz »

kelnos wrote: post #547
silisili wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mean, that seems pretty unfair, no, giving one set of transportation companies an arbitrary advantage over another? This sort of thing is exactly why Uber started in the first place: because taxis had unfair monopolistic advantages for no particular reason, and gave customers a poor experience, because they knew they didn't have to do better to keep their jobs. I have no idea what I'm going to get with those taxis…

> unfair monopolistic advantages for no particular reason

Is that true?

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

#706

Post by heavyset_go »

flir wrote: post #691
heavyset_go wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like that would bounce hard off first sale doctrine. But what do I know.

You still have to adhere to license and copyright terms after first sale.

You can't sell a Bluray disk to a movie theater and give them the right to charge an audience to watch it in the theater later.

If rightsholders are worried about certain uses of their IP being found to be fair use, they might then change the terms of release contractually to stop or at least partially prevent training.

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

#707

Post by xp84 »

mkagenius wrote: post #298
kjkjadksj wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik to scan a book you need to destroy it by cutting the spine so it can feed cleanly into the scanner. Would incur a lot of fines.

That's what they did. They also destroyed books worth millions in the process. They didn't think it would be a good idea to re-bind them and distribute it to the library or someone in need.

I really don’t think there’s any demand out there for re-bound used paper books when most books can be had in their real binding for $3 or less. It would cost at least $3 to re-bind, then they’d have to be listed on Amazon marketplace in “Poor condition” where they’d be valued at maybe $0.50 and cost $3 to ship, and they’d take years of warehousing at great expense waiting to be sold.

As for needy people, they already have libraries and an endless stream of books being donated to thrift stores. Nothing of value was lost here.

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

#708

Post by sahila »

starttoaster wrote: post #671
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.

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.

That's a little reductive. I grew up in San Diego and went to school in LA and had the same experience with taxis - never took them. But now I use ubers in those cities whenever I'm there.

The US has tons of cities like this that I imagine would have issues with taxis - all parts of the bay area peninsula / east bay, cities in Texas, Denver, etc. Most cities are not like the NYC/Boston and even in places in Chicago, unless you lived downtown likely didn't see taxis driving around.

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

#710

Post by prewett »

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 find the LLM on Google's search regularly regurgitates StackOverflow and Quora answers practically verbatim.
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