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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

#721

Post by petralithic »

josh-sematic wrote: post #580
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.

Setting aside whether or not I think it should be fair use, you’re only going to be training a new foundation model these days if you have billions of dollars to spend on the endeavor anyway. Nobody is training Llama 5 in their garage.

Millions, not billions, as DeepSeek and others have shown.

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

#722

Post by godelski »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #630
godelski wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to make sure I understand this correctly. Your argument is that this is all fine because it wasn't done by people who were super rich but instead done by people who became super rich and were funded by the super rich? I just want to check that I have that right. You are arguing that if I'm a successful enough bank robber that this is fine because I pay some fine that is a small portion of what I heisted?…

You're asking me if straight up stealing money from a bank is comparable to stealing books in 2025 to train an AI which will generate untold value for people?

Look, I don't care if you pirate books. But we'd agree that it would be different if you downloaded millions of books and sold them, right?

Now they weren't selling and if it is transformative is still in question. But let's not worry about that. Let's say that you just made billions off of having illegally downloaded all those books.

I hope we can agree that this is a very different thing than a student pirating their school books. The big reason why this leaves a bunch of people with a bad taste in their mouth (even those who believe it is a transformative use) is because the result was dependent on access to those works. Billions were made and nothing was shared with those who built the foundation.

In fact, let's look at this from a very different lens. Do you not think it is a bit upsetting that there are trillion dollar companies that are highly dependent on open source software where there's a single developer who is making no money off of their work? Their work has clear monetary value, but they allowed it to be used for free. Is someone who makes millions, billions, or trillions off of that work obligated to give some back? Not legally, morally. What is fair? Would you give back? Why or why not? Are you grateful? Is it just their loss? What are your thoughts about this?

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

#723

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

redthrow wrote: post #407
okanat wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The West can end the endless pain and legal hurdles to innovation by limiting the copyright. They can do it if there is will to open up the gates of information to everyone. The duration of 70 years after death of the author or 90 years for companies is excessively long. It should be ~25 years. For software it should be 10 years. And if AI companies want recent stuff, they need to pay the owners. However, the West wa…

The vast majority of books don't generate any profits past the first few years, so I prefer Lawrence Lessig's proposal of copyright renewal at five-year intervals with a fee. Under this scheme, most books would enter the public domain after five years https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2003/Lessigcopyrigh... Lessig: Not for this length of time, no. Copyright shouldn’t be anywhere close to what it is right now.…

Won't people just wait 5 years to buy the book?

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

#724

Post by tpmoney »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #711
tpmoney wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ti…

> You may be confused, but a business loss deduction usually reduces a taxable income.

Yes, I know, which is why in option B the taxes required was $9M instead of $10M. The 10k payment reduced taxable income from $100M to $90M. Business taxes are notoriously complex, but I am aware of no IRS rules that would allow a 10M legal settlement to reduce the taxes owed by >= $10M. If you believe I remain confused, please by all means provide an example scenario and/or citations to the relevant tax statutes.

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

#725

Post by safety1st »

JustExAWS wrote: post #655
safety1st wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bad but I think it's important to recognize how much worse it can get. Otherwise why would you work to save anything? I'm "positive" because I come from the US and I now live in an actual banana republic and I see firsthand how much worse things will get in America if the trajectory doesn't change. Imagine a future where election results are casually and publicly nullified if the people with the guns don't like…

You realize that 1500 people were just pardoned for storming federal buildings, trying to kill elected official and trying to overturn an election? Right now, the President is sending federal troops and occupying cities and just bombed a ship in Venezuela

Please see this comment and don't respond to me in the future. Since you people are all exactly the same, and can only talk about one idea, until you become capable of other thoughts, you're not worth engaging with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149981

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

#726

Post by JustExAWS »

safety1st wrote: post #725
JustExAWS wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that 1500 people were just pardoned for storming federal buildings, trying to kill elected official and trying to overturn an election? Right now, the President is sending federal troops and occupying cities and just bombed a ship in Venezuela

Please see this comment and don't respond to me in the future. Since you people are all exactly the same, and can only talk about one idea, until you become capable of other thoughts, you're not worth engaging with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149981

I asked you the question before that you didn’t answer. By what objective measure is the median US citizen better off than any 1st world country?

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

#727

Post by 1gn15 »

novok wrote: post #402
1gn15 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already a thing in several places. EU has copyright exemptions for AI training. You don't need to respect opt outs if you are doing research. South Korea, Japan has some exemptions too I think? Singapore has very strong copyright exemptions for AI training. You can completely ignore opt-outs legally, even if doing it commercially. Just search up "TDM laws globally".

So could they have library genesis on a local server and other pirate sources and use that for training data then? That is the level I'm speaking of, much like common crawl and the reddit archive

Oh, yeah no you can't. The data has to be obtained legally. Common crawl and the Reddit archives should be fine though. TOSes don't count.

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

#728

Post by Thorrez »

godelski wrote: post #466
jayd16 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But nobody was ever going to that Didn't Google have a long standing project to do just that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

From TFA The Google Books project also faced a copyright lawsuit, which was eventually decided in favor of Google. After contacting major publishers about possibly licensing their books, [former head of the Google Books project] bought physical books in bulk from distributors and retailers, according to court documents. He then hired outside organizations to dissemble the books, scan them and create digital copies th…

Yeah. Weird that rchaud said "But nobody was ever going to that" when the article talks about someone doing it.

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

#729

Post by nextworddev »

TimByte wrote: post #563
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.

It's naive to think Chinese models have a free pass. Local censorship, language/data biases, and export restrictions cut both ways.

No, it’s naive to actually assume they don’t have a free pass. The other way.

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

#730

Post by troupo »

JustExAWS wrote: post #685
troupo wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Ube…

> 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…

> Uber never put a gun to anyone’s head to force them to drive for Uber.

Oh no. Uber only spent 20 billion dollars on price dumping, driving competing companies out of business, and was the poster child for gig economy.

> If anything the government should enforce how long someone can drive because it puts others in danger.

Once again, the wages Uber was paying were below substinence if you were to drive just within the safe margin of hours. Oh, I forgot, it's ridiculously easy to become a writer and sustain living from a podcast. Those ~400 000 people could've easily found a different job.

---

However, the actual insane thing is this worldview that companies are not responsible for anything, and can do whatever they want; that people have to be punished for working because it's easy to not just switch jobs but to go and start supporting yourself with books and podcasts; and that there should be some magical government that provides some safety net, but still actively punishes people if they end up at a wrong job.

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