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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

#751

Post by JustExAWS »

jart wrote: post #744
JustExAWS wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s more likely - your company is going to get rid of you in the next five years or the government is going to take away your citizenship? Did you try to get insurance on the open market before 2012 with a pre-existing condition? Every other industrial country in the world has health insurance not tied to your employer. Even smaller countries like Costa Rica and Panama have better more affordable insurance. Yes I’…

I got my job because I had a life threatening illness at the time. My employer saved me when no one else would. After spending all that money saving my life, it'd be a shame if they got rid of me before I had the chance to fully repay their kindness. There are a lot of other good countries where you can go for care. For example, if you have an impressive looking GitHub then Audrey Tang will give you a gold card. That…

You know you’re arguing my point for me that universal health care provided by taxpayer funds is better than depending on your employer for health care?

And becoming a permanent resident of Costa Rica is just a matter of either proving you have $1000 a month in guaranteed income as a retiree or $2500 a month in passive income or put $60K in a local bank account and they will dispense $2500 a month to you. They don’t tax foreign income.

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

#752

Post by safety1st »

fragmede wrote: post #658
JustExAWS wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the BS “American exceptionalism” like this country was founded on “hard work” and the idea of “equality” when it was literally founded on slavery and enshrined in the constitution that an entire race of people were considered 3/5th of a person. Right this very second, the same Republican Party who fights tooth and nail for the right to bare arms is trying not to let transgender people carry guns. Which industria…

Womens suffrage was also not part of the deal in 1776.

Do you guys really not see "I hate slavery and suffrage matters" as a tangent to the original point which was the problem of Big Tech not following the law?

I mean we all hate slavery, there was a funny bit about that in Bad Teacher, but not every discussion has to be about it

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

#753

Post by fragmede »

safety1st wrote: post #752
fragmede wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Womens suffrage was also not part of the deal in 1776.

Do you guys really not see "I hate slavery and suffrage matters" as a tangent to the original point which was the problem of Big Tech not following the law? I mean we all hate slavery, there was a funny bit about that in Bad Teacher, but not every discussion has to be about it

I mean, it's a total derail, but this isn't Metafilter. Threading means we can have totally useless side conversations and anyone that doesn't like that particular sidebar can just click the [-] and move in.

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

#754

Post by simoncion »

tpmoney wrote: post #678
simoncion wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? To rephrase the question: Is a PDF of the complete works of Shakespeare Shakespeare, or is it factual information about Shakespeare? Reencoding human-readable information into a form that's difficult for humans to read without machine assistance is nothing new.

Like most things in law, the answers are going to come down to intent and outcome. If you distribute the PDF to other people with the intent that they can read the copyrighted works of an author, then you have distributed that author's content in violation of copyright. If on the other hand, you encrypted the entire contents of that PDF, threw away the encryption key and the published prints of the PDF as artwork of…

> Like most things in law, the answers are going to come down to intent and outcome. If you distribute the PDF...

I wasn't talking about distribution, and neither was the person whom I was replying to. But, thanks for wasting your time on publishing the rest of your comment, I guess.

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

#755

Post by scotty79 »

snapcaster wrote: post #749
thfuran wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP protections are in the US Constitution. Has the US been in decline since the late 1700s?

Look into how the US industrial economy started. It was "stealing IP" from the english and not respecting copyright. Would be interested if there are any cases in history of rising economies respecting IP and succeeding because in every case I know about they flagrantly disregard it while developing

And the British "stole" from Dutch before that.

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

#756

Post by kiitos »

petralithic wrote: post #282
Aurornis wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only big companies benefit from our current copyright regime You’ve never authored, created, or published something? Never worked for a company that sells something protected by copyright?

All my works are open source or in the public domain. I don't like copyright for a reason.

"open source" and "in the public domain" aren't like separate things from "copyright", they describe specific sub-sets of stuff underneath "copyright", which is a top-level category that establishes a meaningful definition of stuff like "your work(s)" in the first place

i.e. "copyright" describes a legal concept, "copyleft" describes a licensing concept

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

#757

Post by jart »

JustExAWS wrote: post #751
jart wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got my job because I had a life threatening illness at the time. My employer saved me when no one else would. After spending all that money saving my life, it'd be a shame if they got rid of me before I had the chance to fully repay their kindness. There are a lot of other good countries where you can go for care. For example, if you have an impressive looking GitHub then Audrey Tang will give you a gold card. That…

You know you’re arguing my point for me that universal health care provided by taxpayer funds is better than depending on your employer for health care? And becoming a permanent resident of Costa Rica is just a matter of either proving you have $1000 a month in guaranteed income as a retiree or $2500 a month in passive income or put $60K in a local bank account and they will dispense $2500 a month to you. They don’t…

The best thing about Costa Rica is the Sloth Sanctuary.

You and your wife should send me photos of yourselves with the sloths when you get there.

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

#758

Post by OhMeadhbh »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #387
GMoromisato wrote: post #149

If you are an author here are a couple of relevant links: You can search LibGen by author to see if your work is included. I believe this would make you a member of the class: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/searc... If you are a member of the class (or think you are) you can submit your contact information to the plaintiff's attorneys here: https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/

It’s pretty incredible that the vast majority of authors will make more money for their books from this settlement that they ever have from selling their books.

Here's the data from 2018.

https://authorsguild.org/news/six-takeaways-from-the-authors...

Median income was $3100 which is greater than the $3000 average award from the Anthropic settlement.

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...

But yes, one set of data is from 7-8 years ago, the other figure is from a few weeks ago. And median and average don't mean the same thing. And it's unclear how the population from the Author's Guild survey maps to the plaintiff class from the Anthropic settlement.

But it seems we're in the same ballpark.

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

#759

Post by petralithic »

kiitos wrote: post #756
petralithic wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All my works are open source or in the public domain. I don't like copyright for a reason.

"open source" and "in the public domain" aren't like separate things from "copyright", they describe specific sub-sets of stuff underneath "copyright", which is a top-level category that establishes a meaningful definition of stuff like "your work(s)" in the first place i.e. "copyright" describes a legal concept, "copyleft" describes a licensing concept

The point is the legal concept is a fiction, useful perhaps in the past, but increasingly not today, and like all fictions, it can be dispelled if people agree to do so.

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

#760

Post by krageon »

33MHz-i486 wrote: post #400
jimmaswell wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel. Now you don't even have to use Uber in many of these places because taxis had to compete - they otherwise never would have stopped pulling the "credit card reader is broken" scam, taking long routes on p…

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.

it's way cheaper here, it's more convenient and I won't get ignored due to how my voice sounds on the phone. It's just better
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