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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

#711

Post by Joel_Mckay »

tpmoney wrote: post #664
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You may be confused, but a business loss deduction usually reduces a taxable income. In general, most systems only require the cost/loss was incurred during gaining or producing income from a business or property.

For a significant sum, we should assume their team consulted a specialist firm on the subject at their location. People don't often YOLO this stuff at that scale, and businesses don't always settle every time they get shaken down for cash... some go to war, as it can be cheaper to sandbag/delay till opponents go bankrupt.

Have a great day. =3

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

#713

Post by tpmoney »

florbnit wrote: post #164
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.

> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and printing them and selling them: not fair use Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and making merchandise and selling it: not fair use The idea that training models is considered fair use just because you bought the work is naive. Fair use is not a law to leave open usage as long as it doesn…

Are "fantasy name generators" of the sort you find all over the place online fair use if the weighting of their generators is based on statistical information about names in fantasy novels? I would think most people would agree they're fair use, or if not in so many words, I think those people would find it pretty unfair for WotC to go around suing sites for running D&D character name generators.

Or let's talk about another form of buying copyrighted / protected content and selling the results of transforming it: emulators. The Connectix Virtual Game Station was the impetus for one of the most important lawsuits about emulation, and the ruling held that even though writing an emulator inherently involves copying copyrighted code, the result is sufficiently transformative and falls under fair use.

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

#714

Post by beowulfey »

almosthere wrote: post #401
beowulfey wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's actually wrong with this? It's because they did not choose to pay for the books; they were forced to pay and they would not have done so if the lawsuit had not fallen this way. If you are not sure why this is different from "they paid for pirated books (as if it were a transaction)", then this may reflect a lack of awareness of how fair exchange and trust both function in a society.

Settling is not forced

You think they would have done it if they didn't get taken to court?

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

#715

Post by tpmoney »

privatelypublic wrote: post #64
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…

Don't forget: NO LEGAL PRECEDENT! which means, anybody suing has to start all over. You only settle in this scenario/point if you think you'll lose. Edit: I'll get ratio'd for this- but its the exact same thing google did in it's lawsuit with Epic. They delayed while the public and courts focused in apple (oohh, EVIL apple)- apple lost, and google settled at a disadvantage before they had a legal judgment that couldn…

> You only settle in this scenario/point if you think you'll lose.

Or because you already got the judgement you wanted. Remember Athropic's training of the AI was determined to be fair use for all the legally acquired items, which Anthropic claims is their current acquisition model anyway. If we assume that's true for the sake of argument, there's no point in fighting a battle on the remaining part unless they have something to gain by it. Since they're not doing that anymore, they don't gain, and run a very high risk of losing more. From a purely PR perspective, this is the right move.

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

#716

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

0dte wrote: post #441
Taek wrote: post #248

I can't help but feel like this is a huge win for Chinese AI. Western companies are going to be limited in the amount of data they can collect and train on, and Chinese (or any foreign AI) is going to have access to much more and much better data.

I think western companies will be just fine -- Anthropic is settling because they illegally pirated books from LibGen back in 2021 and subsequently trained models on them. They realized this was an issue internally and pivoted to buying books en masse and scanning them into digital formats, destroying the original copies in the process (they actually hired a former lead in the Google Books project to help them in thi…

>And a federal judge ruled a couple months ago that training on these legally-acquired scanned copies does not constitute fair use -- that the LLM training process is sufficiently transformative.

You mean does constitute fair use?

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

#717

Post by lazide »

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.

In India, most taxis I ran across at the airport were 50% more expensive - after haggling!

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

#718

Post by mkagenius »

xp84 wrote: post #707
mkagenius wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alread…

> Nothing of value was lost here

But then they shouldn't have done that in the first place. It seems like a crime to destroy so many books.

Imagine, 10 more companies come to join the AI race and decide to do the same.

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

#719

Post by BLACKCRAB »

kelnos wrote: post #542
mantas wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it’s still shitty. Uber/Bolt is like on par with 90s taxis. At least here there was a short attempt to make things better in early 2010s with nicer cars and trying to force drivers to be nicer. But then it was „disrupted“.

I far, far, far prefer Uber (or Lyft, in the US) wherever I am, over whatever local taxi service there is. Yes, the quality of cars varies a lot. Yes, you never know if you're going to get a quiet driver or a way-too-talkative one. But I know what I'm going to pay up-front, can always pay with a credit card (which happens automatically without annoying post-trip payment), the ride is fully tracked, and I can report i…

[dead]

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

#720

Post by petralithic »

dbalatero wrote: post #641
vessenes wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: are you trolling? Or do you really think doing math shouldn’t be a priori allowed to humans?

Do you seriously think it's a matter of doing math in a vacuum? The issue is pirating books, using them as inputs to math which is then resold as an LLM without compensation to the authors who have clearly copyrighted material. I can't tell if _you're_ trolling.

> The issue is pirating books, using them as inputs to math which is then resold as an LLM without compensation to the authors who have clearly copyrighted material.

No one seems to be able to explain what exactly the issue is here. How are authors harmed by LLMs (where such harm is often used to understand the range of copyright in lawsuits)? I don't see anyone replacing authors and their works, such as JK Rowling being harmed just because people can output Harry Potter esque texts. And if that's the case, well, fan fiction has been around for a long time, with no LLMs in its writing.

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