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Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

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Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#91

Post by CamperBob2 »

bayindirh wrote: post #88
tliltocatl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think I have worded my question wrong. I asked about not about how AI affects the financials of these smaller artists, but their wellbeing in general. There are many small artists who do this not for money, but for fun and have their renowned styles. Even their styles are ripped off by these generative AI companies and turned into a slot machine to earn money for themselves. These artists didn't consent to that, an…

(Shrug) If you want things to stay the same, both art and technology are bad career choices.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#92

Post by seydor »

pyman wrote: post #7

These are the people shaping the future of AI? What happened to all the ethical values they love to preach about? We've held China accountable for counterfeiting products for decades and regulated their exports. So why should Anthropic be allowed to export their products and services after engaging in the same illegal activity?

break things and move fast

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#93

Post by bayindirh »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #91
bayindirh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I have worded my question wrong. I asked about not about how AI affects the financials of these smaller artists, but their wellbeing in general. There are many small artists who do this not for money, but for fun and have their renowned styles. Even their styles are ripped off by these generative AI companies and turned into a slot machine to earn money for themselves. These artists didn't consent to that, an…

(Shrug) If you want things to stay the same, both art and technology are bad career choices.

(Huh) What if you are in the field to advance it, and somebody steals your work and claims it as their own?

e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44460552

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#94

Post by seydor »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #11
pyman wrote: post #2

Anthropic's cofounder, Ben Mann, downloaded million copies of books from Library Genesis in 2021, fully aware that the material was pirated. Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.

Copyright infringement is not stealing.

property infringement isn't either?

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#95

Post by voxic11 »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #15
ramon156 wrote: post #10

Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

150K per work is the maximum fine for willful infringement (which this is). 105B+ is more than Anthropic is worth on paper. Of course they’re not going to be charged to the fullest extent of the law, they’re not a teenager running Napster in the early 2000s.

Even if they don't qualify for willful infringement damages (lets say they have a good faith belief their infringement was covered by fair use) the standard statutory damages for copyright infringement are $750-$30,000 per work.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#96

Post by tmaly »

ramon156 wrote: post #10

Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

At minimum they should have to buy the book they are deriving weights from.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#97

Post by voxic11 »

glimshe wrote: post #22
ramon156 wrote: post #10

Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

Isn't "pirating" a felony with jail time, though? That's what I remember from the FBI warning I had to see at the beginning of every DVD I bought (but not "pirated" ones).

Yes criminal copyright infringement (willful copyright infringement done for commercial gain or at a large scale) is a felony.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#99

Post by flaptrap »

suyjuris wrote: post #70
pyman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The judge appears to disagree with you on this. They found that training and selling an LLM are fair use, based on the fact that it is exceedingly transformative, and that the copyright holders are not entitled to any profits thereof due to copyright. (They also did get paid — Anthropic acquired millions of books legally, including all of the authors in this complaint. This would not retroactively absolve them of leg…

The fallacy in the 'fair use' logic is that a person acquires a book and learns from it, but a machine incorporates the text. Copyright does not allow one to create a derivative work without permission. Only when the result of the transformation resembles the original work could it be said that it is subject to copyright. Do not regard either of those legal issues are set in concrete yet.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#100

Post by impossiblefork »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #11
pyman wrote: post #2

Anthropic's cofounder, Ben Mann, downloaded million copies of books from Library Genesis in 2021, fully aware that the material was pirated. Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.

Copyright infringement is not stealing.

It's very similar to theft of service.

There's so many texts, and they're so sparse that if I could copyright a work and never publish it, the restriction would be irrelevant. The probability that you would accidentally come upon something close enough that copyright was relevant is almost infinitesimal.

Because of this copyright is an incredibly weak restriction, and that it is as weak as it is shows clearly that any use of a copyrighted work is due to the convenience that it is available.

That is, it's about making use of the work somebody else has done, not about that restricting you somehow.

Therefore copyright is much more legitimate than ordinary property. Ordinary property, especially ownership of land, can actually limit other people. But since copyright is so sparse infringing on it is like going to world with near-infinite space and picking the precise place where somebody has planted a field and deciding to harvest from that particular field.

Consequently I think copyright infringement might actually be worse than stealing.

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