Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 761 posts

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

#81

Post by ignoramous »

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…

Or, if you think your competition, also caught up in the same quagmire, stands to lose more by battling for longer than you did?

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

#82

Post by Wowfunhappy »

r_lee wrote: post #67

One thing that comes to mind is... Is there a way to make your content on the web "licensed" in a way where it is only free for human consumption? I.e. effectively making the use of AI crawlers pirating, thus subject to the same kind of penalties here?

I'd argue you don't actually want this! You're suggesting companies should be able to make web scraping illegal.

That curl script you use to automate some task could become infringing.

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

#83

Post by _alternator_ »

gooosle wrote: post #77
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?

They did, but only after they pirated the books to begin with.

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

#85

Post by jay_kyburz »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #60
klntsky wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He died (2013) after libgen was created (2008).

Yeah but did he die before anybody actually knew about it?

Is lib still around anymore. I can't find any functioning urls

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

#87

Post by robterrell »

wmf wrote: post #68
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.

Paying $3,000 for pirating a ~$30 book seems disproportionate.

With the per-item limit for "willful infringement" being $150,000, it's a bargain.

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

#89

Post by soks86 »

wmf wrote: post #68
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.

Paying $3,000 for pirating a ~$30 book seems disproportionate.

Not if 100 companies did it and they all got away.

This is to teach a lesson because you cannot prosecute all thieves.

Yale Law Journal actually writes about this, the goal is to deter crime because in most cases damages cannot be recovered or the criminal will never be caught in the first place.

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

#90

Post by ascorbic »

non_aligned wrote: post #31

I'm gonna say one thing. If you agree that something was unfairly taken from book authors, then the same thing was taken from people publishing on the web, and on a larger scale. Book authors may see some settlement checks down the line. So might newspapers and other parties that can organize and throw enough $$$ at the problem. But I'll eat my hat if your average blogger ever sees a single cent.

The settlement was for downloading the pirated books, not training from them. Unless they're paywalled it would be hard to argue the same for a blog.
Post reply on HN