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.
rchaud · 1h ago
> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.
But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future.
That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract with taxi medallion holders. It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation. In the same way, it was faster for Anthropic to load up their models with un-DRM'd PDFs and ePUBs from wherever instead of licensing them publisher by publisher.
greensoap · 9m ago
Anthropic literally did exactly this to train its models according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit found that Anthropic didn't even use the pirated books to train its model. So there is that
jayd16 · 20m ago
> But nobody was ever going to that
Didn't Google have a long standing project to do just that?
Sir. These were carpoolers, just sharing a ride to their new online friends' B&B.
Aeolun · 34m ago
Sure, but that’s mostly because the sheer convenience of the illegal way is so much higher, and carries zero startup cost.
alpinisme · 30m ago
The same could be said of grand larceny. The difference would seem to be a mix of social norms and, more notably for this conversation, very different consequences.
ReFruity · 1h ago
> But nobody was ever going to that
If this is a choice between risking to pay 1.5 billion or just paying 15 mil safely, they might.
To an investor, that just looks like a pretty good deal, I reckon. It's just the cost of doing business - which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these.
kingforaday · 29m ago
It's not about money. It's about time.
golem14 · 20m ago
Google did.
_heimdall · 32m ago
What you describe is in fact what Waymo has had, of chosen to, deal with. They didn't go for an end run around regulations related to vehicles on public roads. They committed to driverless vehicles and worked with local governments to roll it out as quickly as regulators were willing to allow.
Uber could have made the same decision and worked with regulators to be allowed into markets one at a time. It was an intentional choice to lean on the fact that Uber drivers blended into traffic and could hide in plain sight until Uber had enough market share and customer base to give them leverage.
gnabgib · 1h ago
To be even more clear - this is a settlement, it does not establish precedent, nor admit wrongdoing. This does not establish that training is fair use, nor that scanning books is fine. That's somebody else's battle.
djoldman · 1h ago
Right, the settlement doesn't.
However, the judge already ruled on the only important piece of this legal proceeding:
> Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work to train Claude...
The author, Vernor Vinge, is also responsible for popularizing the term 'singularity'.
Taylor_OD · 3h ago
RIP to the legend. He has a lot of really fun ideas spread across his books.
beambot · 1h ago
I didn't realize Vernor Vinge had passed away... Sad TIL
dekhn · 1h ago
I got to meet him and person and tell him that his books (along with The Coming Technological Singularity) had a huge influence on my decision to go into ML. He seemed pleased. I just wish he had wrapped up the Fire Upon the Deep series.
Cookie monster is his strongest work. It has a VIBE.
Reminds me of permutation city
aeon_ai · 1h ago
One of my favorites
mdp2021 · 2h ago
> Buying used copies of books
It remains deranged.
Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library.
(Edit: in fact initially I wrote 'is supposed to' in place of 'has more than a right to' - meaning that "knowledge is there, we made it available: you are supposed to access it, with the fullest encouragement").
mvdtnz · 2h ago
Huh?
riquito · 2h ago
I think he implies that because one can borrow hypothetically any book for free from a library, one could use them for legal training purposes, so the requirement of having your own copy should be moot
jazzyjackson · 2h ago
Libraries aren’t just anarchist free for alls they are operating under licensing terms. Google had a big squabble with the university of Illinois Urbana Champaign research library before finally getting permission to scan the books there. Guess what, Google has the full text but books.google.com only shows previews, why is an exercise to the reader literally
gpm · 2h ago
Libraries are neither anarchist free for alls nor are they operating under licensing terms with regards to physical books.
They're merely doing what anyone is allowed to with the books that they own, loaning them out, because copyright law doesn't prohibit that, so no license is needed.
lotsoweiners · 1h ago
Yup. And if Anthropic CEO or whoever wants to drive down to the library and check out 30 books (or whatever the limit is), scan them, and then return them that is their prerogative I guess.
mdp2021 · 1h ago
Scanning (copying) is¹ not allowed. Reading is.
What is in a library, you can freely read. Find the most appropriate way. You do not need to have bought the book.
¹(Edit: or /may/ not be allowed, see posts below.)
There are no terms and conditions attached to library books beyond copyright law (which says nothing about scanning) and the general premise of being a library (return the book in good condition on time or pay).
mdp2021 · 1h ago
Copyright law in the USA may be more liberal about scanning than other jurisdictions (see the parallel comment from gpm), which expressly regulate the amount of copying of material you do not own as an item.
gpm · 1h ago
The jurisdictions I'm familiar with all give vague fair use/fair dealing exceptions which would cover some but not all copying (including scanning) with less than clear boundaries.
I'd be interested to know if you knew of one with bright line rules delineating what is and isn't allowed.
kjkjadksj · 1h ago
Afaik to scan a book you need to destroy it by cutting the spine so it can feed cleanly into the scanner. Would incur a lot of fines.
wizzwizz4 · 1h ago
Nah, that's just if you want archival-quality scans. "Good enough for OCR" is a much lower bar.
ants_everywhere · 3h ago
I wonder what Aaron Swartz would think if he lived to see the era of libgen.
klntsky · 3h ago
He died (2013) after libgen was created (2008).
ants_everywhere · 2h ago
I had no idea libgen was that old, thanks!
arcanemachiner · 3h ago
Yeah but did he die before anybody actually knew about it?
edgineer · 40m ago
I knew about library genesis by 2012. It was at least 10 TiB large by then, IIRC. With the amount of Russian language content I got the impression it was more popular in that sphere, but an impressive collection for anyone and not especially secret.
jay_kyburz · 3h ago
Is lib still around anymore. I can't find any functioning urls
griffzhowl · 2h ago
Recent MEGATHREAD on status of libgen and alternatives
It's in the megathread linked in this comment, but I want to specifically point to https://open-slum.org/ which is basically a status page for different sites dedicated to this purpose, and which I've found helpful.
jychang · 1h ago
Lol. I opened that link and was like "hmmm, that UI looks familiar".
I believe that there's a reddit sub that keeps people up to date with what URLs are, or are not, functioning at any given point in time
r14c · 2h ago
Didn't he get in trouble for contributing to sci-hub before he died?
dekhn · 1h ago
He got into trouble for breaking into an unsecured network closet at MIT and using MIT credentials to download a bunch of copyrighted content.
The whole incident is written up in detail, https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ by Hal Abelson (who wrote SICP among other things). It is a well-researched document.
ants_everywhere · 31m ago
I think the parent may be getting at why he was downloading the content. I don't know the answer to this. Maybe someone here does. What was he intending to do with the articles?
The report speculates to his motivations on page 31, but it seems to be unknown with any certainty.
djoldman · 1h ago
Yes, the ruling was a massive win for generative AI companies.
The settlement was a smart decision by anthropic to remove a huge uncertainty. 1.5 is not small, but it won't stop them or slow them significantly.
jimmydoe · 3h ago
Google scanned many books quite a while ago, probably way more than LibGen. Are they good to use them for training?
johanyc · 3h ago
If they legally purchased them I dont think why not. IIRC they did borrow from libraries so probably not every book in Google Books
greensoap · 7m ago
Anthropic legally purchased the books it used to train its model according to the judge. And the judge said that was fine. Anthropic also downloaded books from a pirate site and the judge said that was bad -- even though the judge also said they didn't use those books for training....
ortusdux · 3h ago
They litigated this a while ago and my understanding was that they were able to claim fair use, but I'm no expert.
What I'm wondering is if they, or others, have trained models on pirated content that has flowed through their networks?
jazzyjackson · 2h ago
Books.Google.Com was deemed fair use because it only shows previews, not full downloads. Internet Archive is still under litigation iirc besides having owned a physical copy of every book they ever scanned (and keeping a copy in their warehouses) they let people read the whole thing.
I’m surprised Google hasn’t hit its competitors harder with the fact that they actually got permission to scan books from its partner libraries and Facebook and OpenAI just torrented books2/books3, but I guess they have aligned incentive to benefit from a legal framework that doesn’t look to closely at how you went about collecting source material
mips_avatar · 3h ago
I imagine the problem there is they primarily scanned library books so I doubt they have the same copyright protections here as if they bought them
xnx · 3h ago
All those books were loaned by a library or purchased.
dtagames · 1h ago
This is excellent news because it means that folks who pay for printed books and scan them also can train with their content. It's been said already that we've already trained on "the entire (public) internet." Printed books still hold a wealth of knowledge that could be useful in training models. And cheap, otherwise unwanted copies make great fodder for "destructive" scanning where you cut the spine off and feed it to a page scanner. There are online services that offer just that.
GabeIsko · 1h ago
Yes, but the cat is out of the bag now. Welcome to the era of every piece of creative work coming with an EULA that you cannot train on it. It will be like clearing samples.
wmf · 3h ago
Paying $3,000 for pirating a ~$30 book seems disproportionate.
vineyardmike · 3h ago
I feel like proportionality is related also to the scale. If a student pirates a textbook, I’d agree that 100x is excessive, but this is a corporation handsomely profiting off of mass piracy.
It’s crazy to imagine, but there was surely a document or slack message thread discussing where to get thousands of books, and they just decided to pirate them and that was OK. This was entirely a decision based on ease or cost, not based on the assumption it was legal. Piracy can result in jail time IIRC, so honestly it’s lucky the employee who suggested this, or took the action avoided direct legal liability.
Oh and I’m pretty sure other companies (meta) are in litigation over this issue, and the publishers knew that settlement below the full legal limit would limit future revenue.
imron · 2h ago
> handsomely profiting
Well actively generating revenue at least.
Profits are still hard to come by.
griffzhowl · 2h ago
Operating profits certainly but if you include investments the big players are raking it in aren't they?
soks86 · 3h ago
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.
vlovich123 · 3h ago
If in most cases damages cannot be recovered or the criminal will never be caught in the first place, then what is the lesson being taught? Doesn't that just create a moral hazard where you "randomly" choose who to penalize?
jdkee · 2h ago
It's about sending a message.
vlovich123 · 2h ago
The message being you’ll likely get away with it?
npunt · 2h ago
They're setting up a pretty simple EV calc:
(Probability of not getting away with it) 0.01 * (Cost if caught) 1000 = 10x (Expected Cost) = not worth it
wizzwizz4 · 1h ago
The EV calculation completely goes away if you add a layer of limited liability corporation.
robterrell · 3h ago
With the per-item limit for "willful infringement" being $150,000, it's a bargain.
gpm · 2h ago
And a low end of $750/item.
johnnyanmac · 2h ago
Fines should be disproportionate at this scale. So it discourages other businesses from doing the same thing.
Aeolun · 29m ago
So they’re creating monopolies? The existing players were allowed to do it, but anyone that tries to do it now will be hit with a 1.5B fine?
_Algernon_ · 2h ago
As long as they haven't been bullied into the corporate equivalent of suicide by the "justice" system it's not disproportionate considering what happened to Aaron Schwartz.
If anything it's too little based on precedent.
freejazz · 2h ago
Well it's willful infringement so a court would be entitled to add a punitive multiplier anyway. But this is something Anthropic agreed to, if that wasn't clear.
IncreasePosts · 2h ago
Realistically it will be $30 per book and $2,970 for the lawyers
gpm · 2h ago
That's not how class actions work. Ever.
In this specific case the settlement caps the lawyer fees at 25%, and even that is subject to the courts approval. In addition they will ask for $250k total ($50k / plaintiff) for the lead plaintiffs, also subject to the courts approval.
therobots927 · 3h ago
It is related to scalable mode training, however. Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. And don't forget about the cost of 1) finding 2) purchasing 3) processing and 4) recycling that volume of books.
debugnik · 3h ago
I guess companies will pay for the cheapest copies for liability and then use the pirated dumps. Or just pretend that someone lent the books to them.
Onavo · 3h ago
> Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable.
That's how Google Books, the Internet Archive, and Amazon (their book preview feature) operated before ebooks were common. It's not scalable-in-a-garage but perfectly scalable for a commercial operation.
dekhn · 1h ago
I don't think Google Books scanner chopped off the spine.
https://linearbookscanner.org/ is the open design they released.
hamdingers · 3h ago
We hem and haw about metaphorical "book burning" so much we forget that books themselves are not actually precious.
The books that are destroyed in scanning are a small minority compared to the millions discarded by libraries every year for simply being too old or unpopular.
johnnyanmac · 2h ago
>we forget that books themselves are not actually precious.
Book burnings are symbolic (Unless you're in the world of Fareinheit 451). The real power comes from the political threat, not the fact that paper with words on them is now unreadable.
wizzwizz4 · 1h ago
Well, the famous 1933-05-10 book burning did destroy the only copies of a lot of LGBT medical research, and destroying the last copy of various works was a stated intent of Nazi book burnings.
knome · 3h ago
I remember them having a 3D page unwarping tech they built as well so they could photograph rare and antique books without hacking them apart.
therobots927 · 3h ago
Oh I didn't know that. That's wild
Onavo · 3h ago
Wdym Rainbows End was prescient?
ceejayoz · 3h ago
There's a scene early on where libraries are being destructively shredded, with the shreds scanned and reconstructed as digital versions.
shortformblog · 2h ago
Thanks for the reminder that what the Internet Archive did in its case would have been legal if it was in service of an LLM.
yoyohello13 · 2h ago
Many things become legal when the perpetrator has money.
mountainriver · 1h ago
The golden rule:
He who has the gold makes the rules
kennywinker · 2h ago
LLM’s are turning out to be a real get-out-of-legal-responsibilities card, hey?
zer00eyz · 3h ago
> It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use,
I think that this is a distinction many people miss.
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? It is the latter, and as much as organizations like the MLB might want to be able to copyright a fact you simply cannot do that.
Take this one step further. IF you buy the work, and vectorize it, thats fine. But if you feed it in the vectors for Harry Potter so many times that it can reproduce half of the book, it becomes a problem when it spits out that copy.
And what about all the other stuff that LLM's spit out? Who owns that. Well at present, no one. If you train a monkey or an elephant to paint, you cant copyright that work because they aren't human, and neither is an LLM.
If you use an LLM to generate your code at work, can you leave with that code when you quit? Does GPL3 or something like the Elastic Search license even apply if there is no copyright?
I suspect we're going to be talking about court cases a lot for the next few years.
Imustaskforhelp · 2h ago
Yes. Someone on this post mentioned that switzerland allows downloading copyrightable material but not distributing them.
So things get even more dark because what becomes distribution can have a really vague definition and maybe the AI companies will only follow the law just barely, just for the sake of not getting hit with a lawsuit like this again. But I wonder if all this case did was maybe compensate the authors this one time. I doubt if we can see a meaningful change towards AI companies attitude's towards fair use/ essentially exploiting authors.
I feel like that they would try to use as much legalspeak as possible to extract as much from authors (legally) without compensating them which I feel is unethical but sadly the law doesn't work on ethics.
sureglymop · 2h ago
Switzerland has five main collecting societies: ProLitteris for literature and visual arts, the SSA (Société Suisse des Auteurs) for dramatic works, the SUISA for music, Suissimage for audiovisual works, and SWISSPERFORM for related rights like those of performers and broadcasters. These non-profit societies manage copyright and related rights on behalf of their members, collecting and distributing royalties from users of their works.
Note that the law specifically regulates software differently, so what you cannot do is just willy nilly pirate games and software.
What distribution means in this case is defined in the swiss law. However swiss law as a whole is in some ways vague, to leave a lot up to interpretation by the judiciary.
p_ing · 1h ago
> compensate the authors this one time.
I would assume it would compensate the publisher. Authors often hand ownership to the publisher; there would be obvious exceptions for authors who do well.
arcticfox · 3h ago
> And what about all the other stuff that LLM's spit out? Who owns that. Well at present, no one. If you train a monkey or an elephant to paint, you cant copyright that work because they aren't human, and neither is an LLM.
This seems too cute by half, courts are generally far more common sense than that in applying the law.
This is like saying using `rails generate model:example` results in a bunch of code that isn't yours, because the tool generated it according to your specifications.
kennywinker · 2h ago
The example is a real legal case afaik, or perhaps paraphrased from one (don’t think it was a monkey - an ape? An elephant?).
I’d guess the legal scenario for `rails generate` is that you have a license to the template code (by way of how the tool is licensed) and the template code was written by a human so licensable by them and then minimally modified by the tool.
gpm · 33m ago
I think you're thinking of this case [1], it was a monkey, it wasn't a painting but a selfie. A painting would have only made the no-copyright argument stronger.
I don’t think the code you get from rails generate is yours. Certainly not by way of copyright, which protects original works of authorship and so if it’s not original, it’s not copyrightable, and yes it’s been decided in US courts that non-human-authorship doesn’t count as creative.
zer00eyz · 1h ago
> courts are generally far more common sense than that in applying the law.
'The Board’s decision was later upheld by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which rejected the applicant’s contention that the AI system itself should be acknowledged as the author, with any copyrights vesting in the AI’s owner. The court further held that the CO did not act arbitrarily or capriciously in denying the application, reiterating the requirement that copyright law requires human authorship and that copyright protection does not extend to works “generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand, as plaintiff urges here.”' From: https://www.whitefordlaw.com/news-events/client-alert-can-wo...
The court is using common sense when it comes to the law. It is very explicit and always has been... That word "human" has some long standing sticky legal meaning (as opposed to things that were "property").
tomrod · 3h ago
I mean, sort of. The issue is that the compression is novel. So anything post tokenization could arguably be considered value add and not necessarily derivative work.
nicce · 3h ago
I guess they must delete all models since they acquired the source illegally and benefitted from it, right? Otherwise it just encourages others to keep going and pay the fines later.
greensoap · 3h ago
In a prior ruling, the court stated that Anthropic didn't train on the books subject to this settlement. The record is that Anthropic scanned physical books and used those for training. The pirated books were being held in a general purpose library and were not, according to the record, used in training.
reassess_blind · 2h ago
So how did they profit off the pirated books?
greensoap · 6m ago
According to the judge, they didn't. The judge said they stored those books in a general purpose library for future use just in case they decided to use them later. It appears the judge took much issue with the downloading of "pirated content." And Anthropic decided to settle rather than let it all play out more.
nicce · 3h ago
That is something which is extremely difficult to prove from either side.
It is 500,000 books in total so did they really scan all those books instead of using the pirated versions? Even when they did not have much money in the early phases of the model race?
greensoap · 2m ago
The 500,000 number is the number of books that are part of the settlement. If they downloaded all of Libgen and the other sources it was more like >7Million. But it is a lot of work to determine which books can legitimately be part of the lawsuit. For example, if any of the books in the download weren't copyright (think self published) or not protected under US copyright law (maybe a book only published in Venezula) or it isn't clear who own the copyright then that copyright owner cannot be part of the class. So it seems like the 500,000 number is basically the smaller number of books for which the lawyers for the plaintiff felt they could most easily prove standing.
florbnit · 2h ago
> 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’t fit a given description. It’s a law that specifically allows certain usages like criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.
Training AI models for purposes other than purely academic fits into none of these.
bigmadshoe · 2h ago
Buying used copies of books, scanning them, training an employee with the scans: fair use.
Unless legislation changes, model training is pretty much analogous to that. Now of course if the employee in question - or the LLM - regurgitates a copyrighted piece verbatim, that is a violation and would be treated accordingly in either case.
bink · 2h ago
> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, training an employee with the scans: fair use.
Does this still hold true if multiple employees are "trained" from scanned copies at the same time?
bigmadshoe · 2h ago
Simultaneously I guess that would violate copyright, which is an interesting point. Maybe there's a case to be made there with model training.
Regardless, the issue could be resolved by buying as many copies as you have concurrent model training instances. It isn't really an issue with training on copyrighted work, just a matter of how you do so.
mdp2021 · 2h ago
It fits the basicmost fair use: reading them. Current "training" can be considered as a gross form of reading.
derektank · 2h ago
The purpose and character of AI models is transformative, and the effect of the model on the copyrighted works used in the model is largely negligible. That's what makes the use of copyrighted works in creating them fair use.
GodelNumbering · 3h ago
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. Destruction of Datasets: Anthropic has committed to destroying the datasets it acquired from LibGen and PiLiMi, subject to any legal preservation requirements.
3. Limited Release of Claims: The settlement releases Anthropic only from past claims of infringement related to the works on the official "Works List" up to August 25, 2025. It does not cover any potential future infringements or any claims, past or future, related to infringing outputs generated by Anthropic's AI models.
privatelypublic · 3h ago
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't be challenged latter.
daedrdev · 53m ago
A full case is many more years of suits and appeals with high risks, so its natural to settle which obviously means no precedent
ignoramous · 3h ago
Or, if you think your competition, also caught up in the same quagmire, stands to lose more by battling for longer than you did?
privatelypublic · 2h ago
A valid touche! I still think google went with delaying tactics as public and other pressures forced Apple's case forward at greater velocity. (Edit: implicit "and then caved when apple lost"... because they're the same case)
manbash · 3h ago
Thank you. I assumed it would be quicker to find the link to the case PDF here, but your summary is appreciated!
Indeed, it is not only payout, but the destruction of the datasets. Although the article does quote:
> “Anthropic says it did not even use these pirated works,” he said. “If some other generative A.I. company took data from pirated source and used it to train on and commercialized it, the potential liability is enormous. It will shake the industry — no doubt in my mind.”
Even if true, I wonder how many cases we will see in the near future.
gooosle · 3h ago
So... it would be a lot cheaper to just buy all of the books?
gpm · 2h ago
Yes, much.
And they actually went and did that afterwards. They just pirated them first.
rise_before_sun · 1h ago
Where can I find source that says Anthropic bought the pirated books afterwards? I haven't seen this in any official document.
Also, do we know if the newer models were trained without the pirated books?
gpm · 54m ago
> Where can I find source that says Anthropic bought the pirated books afterwards? I haven't seen this in any official document.
> Also, do we know if the newer models were trained without the pirated books?
I'm pretty sure we do but I couldn't swear to it or quickly locate a source.
dude250711 · 1h ago
What is the HN term for this? "Bootstrapping" your start up? Or is it "growth-hacking" it?
gpm · 1h ago
The latter (I know you're joking, but...)
Bootstrapping in the startup world refers to starting a startup using only personal resources instead of using investors. Anthropic definitely had investors.
chrisvenum · 27m ago
Bookstrapping
privatelypublic · 2h ago
The permission to buy them was already settled by Google Books in the 00's.
_alternator_ · 3h ago
They did, but only after they pirated the books to begin with.
privatelypublic · 3h ago
Few. This settlement potentially weakens all challenges to the use of copyrighted works in training LLM's. I'd be shocked if behind closed doors there wasn't some give and take on the matter between Executives/investors.
A settlement means the claimants no longer have a claim, which means if they're also part of- say, the New York Times affiliated lawsuit- they have to withdraw. A neat way of kneecapping a country wide decision that LLM training on copy written material is subject to punitive measures don't you think?
freejazz · 2h ago
That's not even remotely true. Page 4 of the settlement describes released claims which only relate to the pirating of books. Again, the amount of misinformation and misunderstanding I see in copyright related threads here ASTOUNDS.
privatelypublic · 2h ago
Did you miss the "also" how about "adjacent"? I won't pretend to understand the legal minutia, but reading the settlement doesn't mean you do either.
In my experience&training in a fintech corp- Accepting a settlement in any suit weakens your defense- but prevents a judgement and future claims for the same claims from the same claimants (a la double jeopardy). So, again- at minimum- this prevents an actual judgement. Which, likely would be positive for the NYT (and adjacent) cases.
pier25 · 1h ago
Only 500,000 copyrighted works?
I was under the impression they had downloaded millions of books.
testing22321 · 2h ago
I’m an author, can I get in on this?
A_D_E_P_T · 2h ago
I had the same question.
It looks like you'll be able to search this site if the settlement is approved:
If your work is there, you qualify for a slice of the settlement. If not, you're outta luck.
arjunchint · 3h ago
Wait so they raised all that money just to give it to publishers?
Can only imagine the pitch, yes please give us billions of dollars. We are going to make a huge investment like paying of our lawsuits.
Wowfunhappy · 3h ago
From the article:
> Although the payment is enormous, it is small compared with the amount of money that Anthropic has raised in recent years. This month, the start-up announced that it had agreed to a deal that brings an additional $13 billion into Anthropic’s coffers. The start-up has raised a total of more than $27 billion since its founding in 2021.
slg · 3h ago
Maybe small compared to the money raised, but it is in fact enormous compared to the money earned. Their revenue was under $1b last year and they projected themselves as likely to make $2b this year. This payout equals their average yearly revenue of the last two years.
masterjack · 3h ago
I thought they were projecting 10B and said a few months ago they have already grown from a 1B to 4B run rate
slg · 1h ago
Here is an article that discusses why those numbers are misleading[1]. From a high level, "run rate" numbers are typically taking a monthly revenue number and multiplying it by 12 and that just isn't an accurate way to report revenue for reasons outlined in that article. When it comes to actual projections for annual revenue, they have said $2b is the most likely outcome for their 2025 annual revenue.
It doesn't matter if they end up in chapter 11... If it kneecaps all the other copyright lawsuits. I won't pretend to know the exact legal details. But I am (unfortunately) old enough that this isn't my first "giant corporation benefits from legally and ethically dubious copyright adjacent activities, gets sued, settles/wins." (Cough, google books)
utyop22 · 26m ago
Personally I believe in the ideal scenario (for the fed govt.) these firms will develop the tech. The fed will then turn around and want those law suits to win - effectively gutting the firms financially and putting the tech in the hands of the public sector.
You never know, its a game of interests and incentives - one thing for sure - does does the fed want the private sector to own and control a technology of this kind? Nope.
dkdcio · 3h ago
maybe I’m bad at math but paying >5% of your capital raised for a single fine doesn’t seem great from a business perspective
arrty88 · 1h ago
If they are going to be making Billions in net income every year going forward, as many years as analysts can make projections for, and using these works allowed them to GTM faster/quicker/gain advantage against competitors, then it is quite great from a business prospective.
ryao · 2h ago
If it allowed them to move faster than their completion, I imagine management would consider it money well spent. They are expected to spend absurd amounts of money to get ahead. They were never expected to spend money efficiently if it meant taking additional months/years to get results.
carstenhag · 2h ago
Someone here commented saying they claimed they did not even use it for training, so apparently it was useless.
siliconpotato · 3h ago
It's VC money, I don't think anyone believes it's real money
Aachen · 2h ago
If it weren't, why are we taking it as legal tender? I certainly wouldn't mind being paid in VC money
bongodongobob · 3h ago
Yeah it does, cost of materials is way more than that if they were building something physical like a new widget or something. Same idea, they paid for their raw materials.
xnx · 2h ago
The money they don't pay out in settlements goes to Nvidia.
non_aligned · 3h ago
You're joking, but that's actually a good pitch. There was a significant legal issue hanging over their heads, with some risk of a potentially business-ending judgment down the line. This makes it go away, which makes the company a safer, more valuable investment. Both in absolute terms and compared to peers who didn't settle.
freejazz · 3h ago
It just resolves their liability with regards to books they purported they did not even train the models on, which is all that was left in this case after summary judgment. Sure the potential liability was company ending, but it's all a stupid business decision when it is ultimately for books they did not even train on.
It basically does nothing for them besides that. Given the split decisions so far, I'm not sure what value the Alsup decision is going to bring to the industry, moving forward, when it's in the context of books that Anthropic physically purchased. The other AI cases are generally not fact patterns where the LLM was trained with copyrighted materials that the AI company legally purchased copies of.
jongjong · 2h ago
Isn't that how the whole system operates? Everyone is a conduit to allow rich people to enrich themselves further. The amount and quality of opportunities any individual receives are proportional to how well it serves existing capital.
So long as there is an excuse to justify money flows, that's fine, big capital doesn't really care about the excuse; so long as the excuse is just persuasive enough to satisfy the regulators and the judges.
Money flows happen independently, then later, people try to come up with good narratives. This is exactly what happened in this case. They paid the authors a lot of money as a settlement and agreed on a narrative which works for both sets of people; that training was fine, it's the pirating which was a problem...
It's likely why they settled; they preferred to pay a lot of money and agree on some false narrative which works for both groups rather than setting a precedent that AI training on copyrighted material is illegal; that would be the biggest loss for them.
danans · 1h ago
> Isn't that how the whole system operates? Everyone is a conduit to allow rich people to enrich themselves further. The amount and quality of opportunities any individual receives are proportional to how well it serves existing capital.
Yes, and FWIW that's very succinctly stated.
utyop22 · 18m ago
Sort of.
Some individuals in society find a way through that and figure out a way to strategically achieve their goals. Rare though.
freejazz · 3h ago
They wanted to move fast and break things. No one made them.
egypturnash · 13m ago
Wooo, I sure could use $3k right now and I've got something in the pirate libraries they scraped. Nice.
GMoromisato · 2h ago
If you are an author here are a couple of relevant links:
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.
Aurornis · 53m ago
This is a settlement. It does not set a precedent nor even admit to wrongdoing.
> otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so
Only well funded companies can afford to hire a lot of expensive engineers and train AI models on hundreds of thousands of expensive GPUs, too.
Something tells me many the grassroots LLM training people are less concerned about legality of their source training set than the big companies anyway.
bcrosby95 · 3h ago
Fair use isn't about how you access the material, its about what you can do with it after you legally access it. If you don't legally access it, the question of fair use is moot.
petralithic · 1h ago
Hence, "should"
dbalatero · 3h ago
This implies training models is some sort of right.
542458 · 3h ago
No, it implies that having the power to train AI models exclusively consolidated into a handful of extremely powerful companies is bad.
johnnyanmac · 1h ago
It implies that people want everyone to do this when it's clear no one should do it. I'm not exactly a fan of "this isn't profitable for small businesses to steal from so we should make it so everyone should steal".
petralithic · 1h ago
Piracy is not stealing. I don't know why everyone on HN suddenly turned into a copyright hawk, only big companies benefit from our current copyright regime, like Disney and their lobbying for increasing its length.
Aurornis · 51m ago
> 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?
okanat · 6m ago
> Never worked for a company that sells something protected by copyright?
I.e. never created software in exchange of money.
petralithic · 12m ago
All my works are open source or in the public domain. I don't like copyright for a reason.
JoshTriplett · 2h ago
That's true. Those handful of companies shouldn't get to do it either.
johanyc · 3h ago
No. It means model training is transformative enough to be fair use. They should just be asked to pay them back plus reimbursement/punishment, say pay 10x the price of the pirated books
sefrost · 3h ago
I wonder how much it would cost to buy every book that you'd want to train a model.
GMoromisato · 2h ago
500,000 x $20 = $10 million
Obviously there would be handling costs + scanning costs, so that’s the floor.
Maybe $20 million total? Plus, of course, the time it would take to execute.
t0lo · 1h ago
I wish the hn rules were more flexible because I would write the best comment to you right now.
jbeard4 · 15m ago
"$3,000 per work" seems like an incredibly good deal to license a book.
r_lee · 3h ago
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?
gpm · 2h ago
Yes to the first part. Put your site behind a login wall that requires users to sign a contract to that effect before serving them the content... get a lawyer to write that contract. Don't rely on copyright.
I'm not sure to what extent you can specify damages like these in a contract, ask the lawyer who is writing it.
Aurornis · 48m ago
Contracts generally require an exchange of consideration (something of value, like money).
If you put a “contract” on your website that users click through without paying you or exchanging value with you and then you try to collect damages from them according to your contract, it’s not going to get you anywhere.
gpm · 44m ago
The consideration the viewer received was access to your private documents.
The consideration you received was a promise to refrain from using those documents to train AI.
I'm not a lawyer, but by my understanding of contract law consideration is trivially fulfilled here.
Wowfunhappy · 3h ago
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.
johnnyanmac · 2h ago
>I'd argue you don't actually want this! You're suggesting companies should be able to make web scraping illegal.
At this point, we do need some laws regulating excessive scraping. We can't have the ineternet grind to a halt over everyone trying to drain it of information.
7952 · 2h ago
Maybe some kind of captcha like system could be devised that could be considered a security measure under the DMCA and not allowed to be circumvented. Make the same content available under a licence fee through an API.
Cheer2171 · 3h ago
No. Neither legally or technically possible.
shadowgovt · 3h ago
I'm sure one can try, but copyright has all kinds of oddities and carve-outs that make this complicated. IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that, for example, if you tried putting in your content license "Free for all uses public and private, except academia, screw that ivory tower..." that's a sentiment you can express but universities are under no obligation legally to respect your wish to not have your work included in a course presentation on "wild things people put in licenses." Similarly, since the court has found that training an LLM on works is transformative, a license that says "You may use this for other things but not to train an LLM" couldn't be any more enforceable than a musician saying "You may listen to my work as a whole unit but God help you if I find out you sampled it into any of that awful 'rap music' I keep hearing about..."
The purpose of the copyright protections is to promote "sciences and useful arts," and the public utility of allowing academia to investigate all works(1) exceeds the benefits of letting authors declare their works unponderable to the academic community.
(1) And yet, textbooks are copyrighted and the copyright is honored; I'm not sure why the academic fair-use exception doesn't allow scholars to just copy around textbooks without paying their authors.
MaxikCZ · 3h ago
See kids? Its okay to steal if you steal more money than the fine costs.
ascorbic · 3h ago
They're paying $3000 per book. It would've been a lot cheaper to buy the books (which is what they actually did end up doing too).
ajross · 3h ago
That metaphor doesn't really work. It's a settlement, not a punishment, and this is payment, not a fine. Legally it's more like "The store wasn't open, so I took the items from the lot and paid them later".
It's not the way we expect people to do business under normal circumstances, but in new markets with new products? I guess I don't see much actually wrong with this. Authors still get paid a price they were willing to accept, and Anthropic didn't need to wait years to come to an agreement (again, publishers weren't actually selling what AI companies needed to buy!) before training their LLMs.
Taek · 1h ago
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.
dataflow · 28m ago
How do legal penalties and settlements work internationally? Are entities in other countries somehow barred from filing similar suits with more penalties?
on_meds · 4h ago
It will be interesting to see how this impacts the lawsuits against OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. Will they quickly try to settle for billions as well?
It’s not precedent setting but surely it’ll have an impact.
lewdwig · 3h ago
I’m sure this’ll be misreported and wilfully misinterpreted because of the current fractious state of the AI discourse, but given the lawsuit was to do with piracy, not the copyright-compliance of LLMs, and in any case, given they settled out of court, thus presumably admit no wrongdoing, conveniently no legal precedent is established either way.
I would not be surprised if investors made their last round of funding contingent on settling this matter out of court precisely to ensure no precedents are set.
nerevarthelame · 3h ago
Anthropic certainly seems to be hoping that their competitors will have to face some consequences too:
>During a deposition, a founder of Anthropic, Ben Mann, testified that he also downloaded the Library Genesis data set when he was working for OpenAI in 2019 and assumed this was “fair use” of the material.
Per the NYT article, Anthropic started buying physical books in bulk and scanning them for their training data, and they assert that no pirated materials were ever used in public models. I wonder if OpenAI can say the same.
typs · 3h ago
Maybe, though this lawsuit is different in respect to the piracy issue. Anthropic is paying the settlement because they pirated the books, not because training on copyrighted books isn’t fair use which isn’t necessarily true with the other cases.
That was my first though. While not legal precedent, it does sort of open the flood gates for others.
DiabloD3 · 10m ago
(Everyone say it with me)
Thats a weird way for Anthropic to announce they're going out of business.
Aeolun · 33m ago
Why are they paying $3000 per book. Does anyone think these authors srll their books for that amount?
gpm · 21m ago
Copies of these books are for sale for much less than that - very very few books demand a price that high.
They're paying much more than the actual damages because US copyright law comes with statutory damages for infringement of registered works on top of actual damages, between $200 and $150,000 per work. And the two sides negotiated this as a fair settlement to reduce the risk of an unfavourable outcome.
KTaffer · 2h ago
This was a very tactical decision by Anthropic. They have just received Series F funding, and they can now afford to settle this lawsuit.
OpenAI and Google will follow soon now that the precedent has been set, and will likely pay more.
It will be a net win for Anthropic.
robterrell · 2h ago
As a published author who had works in the training data, can I take my settlement payout in the form of Claude Code API credits?
TBH I'm just going to plow all that money back into Anthropic... might was well cut out the middleman.
gpm · 2h ago
I wonder if Antrhopic's lawyers have enough of a sense of humor to take you up on that if you sent them an email asking...
mhh__ · 3h ago
Maybe I would think differently if I was a book author but I can't help but think that this is ugly but actually quite good for humanity in some perverse sense. I will never, ever, read 99.9% of these books presumably but I will use claude.
mdp2021 · 2h ago
(Sorry, meta question: how do we insert in submissions that "'Also' <link> <link>..." below the title and above the comment input? The text field in the "submit" page creates a user's post when the "url" field is also filled. I am missing something.)
amelius · 2h ago
It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.
Taken right from the VC's handbook.
flyingzucchini · 33m ago
“Agrees” is a funny old word
1-6 · 1h ago
$3000 per work isn't a bad price. It seems insulting to the copy write holder.
rise_before_sun · 1h ago
Does anyone know which models were trained on the pirated books? I would like to avoid using those models.
novok · 3h ago
I wonder who will be the first country to make an exception to copyright law for model training libraries to attract tax revenue like Ireland did for tech companies in the EU. Japan is part of the way there, but you couldn't do a common crawl type thing. You could even make it a library of congress type of setup.
tonfa · 3h ago
As long as you're not distributing, it's legal in Switzerland to download copyrighted material. (Switzerland was on the naughty US/MPAA list for a while, might still be)
Imustaskforhelp · 3h ago
Is it distribution though if someone trains a model in switzerland through downloading copyrighted material, training AI on it and then distributing it...
Or what if not even distributing it but rather distributing the outputs of the LLM (so closed source LLM like anthropic)
I am genuinely curious as to if there is some gray area that might be exploited by AI companies as I am pretty sure that they don't want to pay 1.5B dollars yet still want to exploit the works of authors. (let's call a spade a spade)
HDThoreaun · 2h ago
Using copyrighted material to train AI is a legal grey zone. The nyt vs openAI case is litigating this. The anthropic settlement here is about how the material is obtained. If openAI wins their case and switzerland rules the same way I dont think there would be a problem
Imustaskforhelp · 1h ago
This might go down (I think) to be one of the most influential court cases to happen then.
We really are getting at some metaphysical / philosophical questions and maybe we will one day arrive at a question that just can't be answered (I think this is pretty close, right?) and then AI companies would do things freely without being accountable since sure you could take to the courts but how would you come to the decision...?
Another question though
So lets say that the nyt vs openAI case is going on, so in the meantime while they are litigating (lets say), could OpenAI still continue doing the same thing while the case is going on?
golly_ned · 2h ago
> "The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes"
A judge making on a ruling based on his opinion of how transformative a technology will be doesn't inspire confidence. There's an equivocation on the word "transformative" here -- not just transformative in the fair use sense, but transformative as in world-changing, impactful, revolutionary. The latter shouldn't matter in a case like this.
> Companies and individuals who willfully infringe on copyright can face significantly higher damages — up to $150,000 per work
Settling for 2% is a steal.
> In June, the District Court issued a landmark ruling on A.I. development and copyright law, finding that Anthropic’s approach to training A.I. models constitutes fair use,” Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, said in a statement.
This is the highest-order bit, not the $1.5B in settlement. Anthropic's guilty of pirating.
Ekaros · 2h ago
Printing press, audio recording, movies, radio, television were also transformative. Did not get rid of copyright or actually brought them.
I feel it is insane that authors do not receive some sort of standard compensation for each training use. Say a few hundred to a few thousand depending on complexity of their work.
verdverm · 2h ago
Why would they earn more from models reading their works than I would pay to read it?
johnnyanmac · 1h ago
Same reason why the enterprise edition is more expensive than personal. Companies have more money to give and usually use it to generate profit. Individuals do not.
Ekaros · 2h ago
Because ones doing the training are profiting from it. Ai is not a human with limited time. And it is also owned by a company not a legal person.
I might find argument of comparing it to human when it is fully legal person and cutting power to it or deleting is treated as murder. Before that it is just bullshit.
And fundamentally reason for copy right to exist is to support creators and to promote them to create more. In world where massively funded companies can freely exploit their work and even in many case fully substitute that principle is failed.
verdverm · 2h ago
If I buy a book, learn something, and then profit from it, should I also be paying more than the original price to read the book?
> Ai is not a human with limited time
AI is also bound by time, physics, and limited capacity. It does certain things better or faster than us, it fails miserably at certain things we don't even think about being complex (like opening a door)
> And it is also owned by a company not a legal person.
For the purpose of legalities, companies and persons are relatively equivalent, regardless of the merits, it is how it is
> In world where massively funded companies can freely exploit their work and even in many case fully substitute that principle is failed.
They paid for the books after getting caught, the other companies are paying for the copyrighted training materials
Ekaros · 1h ago
>They paid for the books after getting caught, the other companies are paying for the copyrighted training materials
Are they paying reasonable compensation? Say like with streaming services, movie theatres, radio and tv stations. As a whole their model is much close to those than individuals buying books, cds or dvds...
You might even consider Theatrical License or Public Performance License. Paid even if you have memorized a thing...
LLMs are just bad technology that require massive amount of inputs so the authors cannot be compensated enough for it. And I fully believe they should be. And lot more than single copy of their work under entirely ill-fitting first-sale doctrine does.
johnnyanmac · 1h ago
> If I buy a book, learn something, and then profit from it, should I also be paying more than the original price to read the book?
Depends on how you do it. Clearly reading the book word from word is different from making a podcast talking about your interpretation of the book.
nottorp · 3h ago
I thought 1.5 B is the penalty for one torrent, not for a couple million torrents.
At least if you're a regular citizen.
taftster · 3h ago
Make sure to grab the mother-of-all-torrents I guess if you're going to go that path. That way you get more bang for your 1.5B penalty.
ipaddr · 2h ago
A million torrents would cost 1,500 each.
markasoftware · 3h ago
They also agreed to destroy the pirated books. I wonder how large of a portion of their training data comes from these shadow libraries, and if AI labs in countries that have made it clear they won't enforce anti-piracy laws against AI companies will get a substantial advantage by continuing to use shadow libraries.
gpm · 1h ago
They already, prior to this lawsuit, prior to serving public models, replaced this data set with one they made by scanning purchased books. Destroying the data set they aren't even using should have approximately zero effect.
somanyphotons · 3h ago
Perhaps they'll quickly rent the whole contents of a few physical libraries and then scan them all
qqbooks · 2h ago
So if a startup wants to buy book PDFs legally to use for AI purposes, any suggestions on how to do that?
JackSlateur · 48m ago
Reach the publishers or resellers (like amazon for instance)
Give them this order : "I want to buy all your books as epub"
Pay and fetch the stuff
That's all
mooreds · 3h ago
Anyone have a link to the class action? I published a book and would love to know if I'm in the class.
Deep research on Claude perhaps for some irony if you will.
bikeshaving · 3h ago
For legal observers, Judge William Haskell Alsup’s razor-sharp distinction between usage and acquisition is a landmark precedent: it secures fair use for transformative generative AI while preserving compensation for copyright holders. In a just world, this balance would elevate him to the highest court of the land, but we are far from a just world.
bhaktatejas922 · 2h ago
This weirdly seems like its the best mechanism to buy this much data.
Imagine going to 500k publishers to buy it individually. 3k per book is way cheaper. The copyright system is turning into a data marketplace in front of our eyes
daemonologist · 2h ago
I suspect you could acquire and scan every readily purchasable book for much less than $3k each. Scanhouse for instance charges $0.15 per page for regular unbound (disassembled) books, plus $0.25 for supervised OCR, plus another dollar if the formatting is especially complex; this comes out to maybe $200-300 for a typical book. Acquiring, shipping, and disposing of them all would of course cost more, but not thousands more.
The main cost of doing this would be the time - even if you bought up all the available scanning capacity it would probably take months. In the meantime your competition who just torrented everything would have more high-quality training data than you. There are probably also a fair number of books in libgen which are out of print and difficult to find used.
mgraczyk · 2h ago
It's a tiny amount of data relatively speaking. Much more expensive per token than almost any data source imaginable
nextworddev · 2h ago
Wait, I’m a published author, where’s my check
gpm · 2h ago
The court has to give preliminary approval to the settlement first. After that there should be a notice period during which the lawyers will attempt to reach out and tell you what you need to do to receive your money. (Not a lawyer, not legal advice).
... in one economy and for specific authors and publishers. But the offence is global in impact on authors worldwide, and the consequences for other IPR laws remains to be seen.
neilv · 2h ago
$1.5B is a nothing but a handslap for the big gold rush companies.
It's less than 1% Anthropic's valuation -- a valuation utterly dependent on all the hoovering up of others' copyrighted works.
AFAICT, if this settlement signals that the typical AI foundation model company's massive-scale commercial theft doesn't result in judgments that wipe out a company (and its execs), then we have confirmation that is a free-for-all for all the other AI gold rush companies.
Then making deals to license rights, in sell-it-to-us-or-we'll-just-take-it-anyway deals, becomes only a routine and optional corporate cost reduction exercise, but not anything the execs will lose sleep over if it's inconvenient.
xnx · 2h ago
> It's less than 1% Anthropic's valuation
The settlement is real money though. Valuation is imaginary.
ianks · 2h ago
There’s alternatives to wiping out the company that could be fair. For example, a judgement resulting in a shares of the company or revenue shares in the future rather than a one time pay off.
Writers were the true “foundational” piece of LLMs, anyway.
neilv · 2h ago
If this is an economist idea of fair, where is the market?
If someone breaks into my house and steals my valuables, without my consent, then giving me stock in their burglary business isn't much of a deterrent to them and other burglars.
Deterrence/prevention is my real goal, not the possibly of a token settlement from whatever bastard rips me off.
We need the analogue of laws and police, or the analogue of homeowner has a shotgun.
gpm · 2h ago
I don't much like the idea of settling in stock, but I also think you're looking for criminal law here. Civil law, and this is a civil suit, is far more concerned with making damaged parties whole than acting as a deterrent.
I understand that intentional copyright infringement is a crime in the US, you just need to convince the DOJ to prosecute Anthropic for it...
A terrible precedent that guarantees China a win in the AI race
cendyne · 3h ago
Now how about Meta and their questionable means of acquiring tons of content?
tomrod · 2h ago
Maybe it's time to get some Llama models copied before an overzealous court rules badly.
rvz · 4h ago
> A trial was scheduled to begin in December to determine how much Anthropic owed for the alleged piracy, with potential damages ranging into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
It has been admitted and Anthropic knew that this trial would totally bankrupt them had they said they were innocent and continued to fight the case.
But of course, there's too much money on the line, which means even though Anthropic settled (admitting guilt and profiting off of pirated books) they (Anthropic) knew there was no way they could win that case, and was not worth taking that risk.
> The pivotal fair-use question is still being debated in other AI copyright cases. Another San Francisco judge hearing a similar ongoing lawsuit against Meta ruled shortly after Alsup's decision that using copyrighted work without permission to train AI would be unlawful in "many circumstances."
The first of many.
f33d5173 · 3h ago
If it was a sure thing, then the rights holders wouldn't have accepted a settlement deal for a measly couple billion. Both sides are happier to avoid risking losing the suit.
Ekaros · 2h ago
Also knowing how pro corporate the legal system is piercing the veil and going after everyone holding the stock would have been unlikely. So getting 1,5 billion out of them likely could have been reasonable move. Otherwise they could have just burned all the money and flipped what was leftover to someone else, with uncertain price and horizon.
Robotbeat · 4h ago
Wait, DID they admit guilt? A lot of times companies settle without admitting guilt.
deafpolygon · 4h ago
Honestly, this is a steal for Anthropic.
jarjoura · 2h ago
I'm excited for the moment where these models are able to treat using copyrighted work in a fair-use way that pays out to authors the way Spotify does when you listen to a song. Why? Because authors recieving royalties for their works when they get used in some prompt would likely encourage them to become far more accepting towards LLMs.
Also passing on the cost to consumers of generated content since companies now would need to pay royalties on the back-end should also likely increase the cost of generating slop and hopefully push back against that trend.
This shouldn't just be books, but all written content, like scholarly journals and essays, news articles and blogs, etc.
I realize this is just wishful thinking, but there's got to be some nugget of aspirational desire to pay it forward.
thinkingtoilet · 3h ago
Great. Which rich person is going to jail for breaking the law?
missedthecue · 3h ago
This isn't a criminal case so zero people of any financial position would end up in prison.
emtel · 2h ago
No one, rich or poor, goes to jail for downloading books.
thinkingtoilet · 7m ago
If I walked into a store and stole $1000 of books I would go to jail. If a tech company steals countless thousands of dollars worth of books, someone should go to jail.
mdp2021 · 2h ago
Are you sure? I think in some jurisdictions they would, according to the law.
johnnyanmac · 1h ago
Tell that to Aaron schwartz
unaut · 3h ago
This settlement I guess could be a landmark moment. $1.5 billion is a staggering figure and I hope it sends a clear signal that AI companies can’t just treat creative work as free training data.
typs · 3h ago
I mean the ruling does in fact find that treating this particular kind of creative work qualifies as fair use.
HDThoreaun · 2h ago
All the ai companies are still using books as training data. Theyre just finding the cheapest scanned copies they can get their hands on to cover their ass
non_aligned · 3h ago
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.
taejavu · 3h ago
The blogger’s content was freely available, this fine is for piracy.
non_aligned · 3h ago
This is not a fine, it's a settlement to recompense authors.
More broadly, I think that's a goofy argument. The books were "freely available" too. Just because something is out there, doesn't necessarily mean you can use it however you want, and that's the crux of the debate.
ascorbic · 3h ago
It's not the crux of this case. This is a settlement based on the judge's ruling that they books had been illegally downloaded. The same judge said that the training itself was not the problem – it was downloading the pirated books. It will be tough to argue that loading a public website is an illegal download.
emtel · 2h ago
But you can use copyrighted works for transformative works under the fair-use doctrine, and training was ruled to be fair use in the previous ruling.
varenc · 2h ago
Books aren't hosted publicly online free for anyone to access. The court seems to think buying a book and scanning it is fair use. Just using pirated books is forbidden. Blogs weren't accessed via pirating.
ascorbic · 3h ago
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.
rise_before_sun · 1h ago
It seems weird that there was legal culpability for downloading pirated books but not for training on them. At the very least, there is a transitive dependency between the two acts.
Other people have said that Anthropic bought the books later on, but I haven't found any official records for that. Where would I find that?
Also, does anyone know which Anthropic models were NOT trained on the pirated books. I want to avoid such models.
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.
But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future.
That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract with taxi medallion holders. It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation. In the same way, it was faster for Anthropic to load up their models with un-DRM'd PDFs and ePUBs from wherever instead of licensing them publisher by publisher.
Didn't Google have a long standing project to do just that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books
If this is a choice between risking to pay 1.5 billion or just paying 15 mil safely, they might.
Option 2: near-$0 valuation, $15M purchasing cost.
To an investor, that just looks like a pretty good deal, I reckon. It's just the cost of doing business - which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these.
Uber could have made the same decision and worked with regulators to be allowed into markets one at a time. It was an intentional choice to lean on the fact that Uber drivers blended into traffic and could hide in plain sight until Uber had enough market share and customer base to give them leverage.
However, the judge already ruled on the only important piece of this legal proceeding:
> Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work to train Claude...
Agreed. Great book for those looking for a read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102439.Rainbows_End
The author, Vernor Vinge, is also responsible for popularizing the term 'singularity'.
Reminds me of permutation city
It remains deranged.
Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library.
(Edit: in fact initially I wrote 'is supposed to' in place of 'has more than a right to' - meaning that "knowledge is there, we made it available: you are supposed to access it, with the fullest encouragement").
They're merely doing what anyone is allowed to with the books that they own, loaning them out, because copyright law doesn't prohibit that, so no license is needed.
What is in a library, you can freely read. Find the most appropriate way. You do not need to have bought the book.
¹(Edit: or /may/ not be allowed, see posts below.)
I'd be interested to know if you knew of one with bright line rules delineating what is and isn't allowed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/libgen/comments/1n4vjud/megathread_...
I'm pretty sure that's just a frontend for Uptime Kuma https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma
The whole incident is written up in detail, https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ by Hal Abelson (who wrote SICP among other things). It is a well-researched document.
The report speculates to his motivations on page 31, but it seems to be unknown with any certainty.
The settlement was a smart decision by anthropic to remove a huge uncertainty. 1.5 is not small, but it won't stop them or slow them significantly.
What I'm wondering is if they, or others, have trained models on pirated content that has flowed through their networks?
I’m surprised Google hasn’t hit its competitors harder with the fact that they actually got permission to scan books from its partner libraries and Facebook and OpenAI just torrented books2/books3, but I guess they have aligned incentive to benefit from a legal framework that doesn’t look to closely at how you went about collecting source material
It’s crazy to imagine, but there was surely a document or slack message thread discussing where to get thousands of books, and they just decided to pirate them and that was OK. This was entirely a decision based on ease or cost, not based on the assumption it was legal. Piracy can result in jail time IIRC, so honestly it’s lucky the employee who suggested this, or took the action avoided direct legal liability.
Oh and I’m pretty sure other companies (meta) are in litigation over this issue, and the publishers knew that settlement below the full legal limit would limit future revenue.
Well actively generating revenue at least.
Profits are still hard to come by.
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.
(Probability of not getting away with it) 0.01 * (Cost if caught) 1000 = 10x (Expected Cost) = not worth it
If anything it's too little based on precedent.
In this specific case the settlement caps the lawyer fees at 25%, and even that is subject to the courts approval. In addition they will ask for $250k total ($50k / plaintiff) for the lead plaintiffs, also subject to the courts approval.
That's how Google Books, the Internet Archive, and Amazon (their book preview feature) operated before ebooks were common. It's not scalable-in-a-garage but perfectly scalable for a commercial operation.
The books that are destroyed in scanning are a small minority compared to the millions discarded by libraries every year for simply being too old or unpopular.
Book burnings are symbolic (Unless you're in the world of Fareinheit 451). The real power comes from the political threat, not the fact that paper with words on them is now unreadable.
He who has the gold makes the rules
I think that this is a distinction many people miss.
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? It is the latter, and as much as organizations like the MLB might want to be able to copyright a fact you simply cannot do that.
Take this one step further. IF you buy the work, and vectorize it, thats fine. But if you feed it in the vectors for Harry Potter so many times that it can reproduce half of the book, it becomes a problem when it spits out that copy.
And what about all the other stuff that LLM's spit out? Who owns that. Well at present, no one. If you train a monkey or an elephant to paint, you cant copyright that work because they aren't human, and neither is an LLM.
If you use an LLM to generate your code at work, can you leave with that code when you quit? Does GPL3 or something like the Elastic Search license even apply if there is no copyright?
I suspect we're going to be talking about court cases a lot for the next few years.
So things get even more dark because what becomes distribution can have a really vague definition and maybe the AI companies will only follow the law just barely, just for the sake of not getting hit with a lawsuit like this again. But I wonder if all this case did was maybe compensate the authors this one time. I doubt if we can see a meaningful change towards AI companies attitude's towards fair use/ essentially exploiting authors.
I feel like that they would try to use as much legalspeak as possible to extract as much from authors (legally) without compensating them which I feel is unethical but sadly the law doesn't work on ethics.
Note that the law specifically regulates software differently, so what you cannot do is just willy nilly pirate games and software.
What distribution means in this case is defined in the swiss law. However swiss law as a whole is in some ways vague, to leave a lot up to interpretation by the judiciary.
I would assume it would compensate the publisher. Authors often hand ownership to the publisher; there would be obvious exceptions for authors who do well.
This seems too cute by half, courts are generally far more common sense than that in applying the law.
This is like saying using `rails generate model:example` results in a bunch of code that isn't yours, because the tool generated it according to your specifications.
I’d guess the legal scenario for `rails generate` is that you have a license to the template code (by way of how the tool is licensed) and the template code was written by a human so licensable by them and then minimally modified by the tool.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
'The Board’s decision was later upheld by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which rejected the applicant’s contention that the AI system itself should be acknowledged as the author, with any copyrights vesting in the AI’s owner. The court further held that the CO did not act arbitrarily or capriciously in denying the application, reiterating the requirement that copyright law requires human authorship and that copyright protection does not extend to works “generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand, as plaintiff urges here.”' From: https://www.whitefordlaw.com/news-events/client-alert-can-wo...
The court is using common sense when it comes to the law. It is very explicit and always has been... That word "human" has some long standing sticky legal meaning (as opposed to things that were "property").
It is 500,000 books in total so did they really scan all those books instead of using the pirated versions? Even when they did not have much money in the early phases of the model race?
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’t fit a given description. It’s a law that specifically allows certain usages like criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. Training AI models for purposes other than purely academic fits into none of these.
Unless legislation changes, model training is pretty much analogous to that. Now of course if the employee in question - or the LLM - regurgitates a copyrighted piece verbatim, that is a violation and would be treated accordingly in either case.
Does this still hold true if multiple employees are "trained" from scanned copies at the same time?
Regardless, the issue could be resolved by buying as many copies as you have concurrent model training instances. It isn't really an issue with training on copyrighted work, just a matter of how you do so.
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. Destruction of Datasets: Anthropic has committed to destroying the datasets it acquired from LibGen and PiLiMi, subject to any legal preservation requirements.
3. Limited Release of Claims: The settlement releases Anthropic only from past claims of infringement related to the works on the official "Works List" up to August 25, 2025. It does not cover any potential future infringements or any claims, past or future, related to infringing outputs generated by Anthropic's AI models.
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't be challenged latter.
Indeed, it is not only payout, but the destruction of the datasets. Although the article does quote:
> “Anthropic says it did not even use these pirated works,” he said. “If some other generative A.I. company took data from pirated source and used it to train on and commercialized it, the potential liability is enormous. It will shake the industry — no doubt in my mind.”
Even if true, I wonder how many cases we will see in the near future.
And they actually went and did that afterwards. They just pirated them first.
Also, do we know if the newer models were trained without the pirated books?
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
> Also, do we know if the newer models were trained without the pirated books?
I'm pretty sure we do but I couldn't swear to it or quickly locate a source.
Bootstrapping in the startup world refers to starting a startup using only personal resources instead of using investors. Anthropic definitely had investors.
A settlement means the claimants no longer have a claim, which means if they're also part of- say, the New York Times affiliated lawsuit- they have to withdraw. A neat way of kneecapping a country wide decision that LLM training on copy written material is subject to punitive measures don't you think?
In my experience&training in a fintech corp- Accepting a settlement in any suit weakens your defense- but prevents a judgement and future claims for the same claims from the same claimants (a la double jeopardy). So, again- at minimum- this prevents an actual judgement. Which, likely would be positive for the NYT (and adjacent) cases.
I was under the impression they had downloaded millions of books.
It looks like you'll be able to search this site if the settlement is approved:
> https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/
If your work is there, you qualify for a slice of the settlement. If not, you're outta luck.
Can only imagine the pitch, yes please give us billions of dollars. We are going to make a huge investment like paying of our lawsuits.
> Although the payment is enormous, it is small compared with the amount of money that Anthropic has raised in recent years. This month, the start-up announced that it had agreed to a deal that brings an additional $13 billion into Anthropic’s coffers. The start-up has raised a total of more than $27 billion since its founding in 2021.
[1] - https://www.wheresyoured.at/howmuchmoney/
You never know, its a game of interests and incentives - one thing for sure - does does the fed want the private sector to own and control a technology of this kind? Nope.
It basically does nothing for them besides that. Given the split decisions so far, I'm not sure what value the Alsup decision is going to bring to the industry, moving forward, when it's in the context of books that Anthropic physically purchased. The other AI cases are generally not fact patterns where the LLM was trained with copyrighted materials that the AI company legally purchased copies of.
So long as there is an excuse to justify money flows, that's fine, big capital doesn't really care about the excuse; so long as the excuse is just persuasive enough to satisfy the regulators and the judges.
Money flows happen independently, then later, people try to come up with good narratives. This is exactly what happened in this case. They paid the authors a lot of money as a settlement and agreed on a narrative which works for both sets of people; that training was fine, it's the pirating which was a problem...
It's likely why they settled; they preferred to pay a lot of money and agree on some false narrative which works for both groups rather than setting a precedent that AI training on copyrighted material is illegal; that would be the biggest loss for them.
Yes, and FWIW that's very succinctly stated.
Some individuals in society find a way through that and figure out a way to strategically achieve their goals. Rare though.
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/
> otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so
Only well funded companies can afford to hire a lot of expensive engineers and train AI models on hundreds of thousands of expensive GPUs, too.
Something tells me many the grassroots LLM training people are less concerned about legality of their source training set than the big companies anyway.
You’ve never authored, created, or published something? Never worked for a company that sells something protected by copyright?
I.e. never created software in exchange of money.
Obviously there would be handling costs + scanning costs, so that’s the floor.
Maybe $20 million total? Plus, of course, the time it would take to execute.
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'm not sure to what extent you can specify damages like these in a contract, ask the lawyer who is writing it.
If you put a “contract” on your website that users click through without paying you or exchanging value with you and then you try to collect damages from them according to your contract, it’s not going to get you anywhere.
The consideration you received was a promise to refrain from using those documents to train AI.
I'm not a lawyer, but by my understanding of contract law consideration is trivially fulfilled here.
That curl script you use to automate some task could become infringing.
At this point, we do need some laws regulating excessive scraping. We can't have the ineternet grind to a halt over everyone trying to drain it of information.
The purpose of the copyright protections is to promote "sciences and useful arts," and the public utility of allowing academia to investigate all works(1) exceeds the benefits of letting authors declare their works unponderable to the academic community.
(1) And yet, textbooks are copyrighted and the copyright is honored; I'm not sure why the academic fair-use exception doesn't allow scholars to just copy around textbooks without paying their authors.
It's not the way we expect people to do business under normal circumstances, but in new markets with new products? I guess I don't see much actually wrong with this. Authors still get paid a price they were willing to accept, and Anthropic didn't need to wait years to come to an agreement (again, publishers weren't actually selling what AI companies needed to buy!) before training their LLMs.
It’s not precedent setting but surely it’ll have an impact.
I would not be surprised if investors made their last round of funding contingent on settling this matter out of court precisely to ensure no precedents are set.
>During a deposition, a founder of Anthropic, Ben Mann, testified that he also downloaded the Library Genesis data set when he was working for OpenAI in 2019 and assumed this was “fair use” of the material.
Per the NYT article, Anthropic started buying physical books in bulk and scanning them for their training data, and they assert that no pirated materials were ever used in public models. I wonder if OpenAI can say the same.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Thats a weird way for Anthropic to announce they're going out of business.
They're paying much more than the actual damages because US copyright law comes with statutory damages for infringement of registered works on top of actual damages, between $200 and $150,000 per work. And the two sides negotiated this as a fair settlement to reduce the risk of an unfavourable outcome.
OpenAI and Google will follow soon now that the precedent has been set, and will likely pay more.
It will be a net win for Anthropic.
TBH I'm just going to plow all that money back into Anthropic... might was well cut out the middleman.
Taken right from the VC's handbook.
Or what if not even distributing it but rather distributing the outputs of the LLM (so closed source LLM like anthropic)
I am genuinely curious as to if there is some gray area that might be exploited by AI companies as I am pretty sure that they don't want to pay 1.5B dollars yet still want to exploit the works of authors. (let's call a spade a spade)
We really are getting at some metaphysical / philosophical questions and maybe we will one day arrive at a question that just can't be answered (I think this is pretty close, right?) and then AI companies would do things freely without being accountable since sure you could take to the courts but how would you come to the decision...?
Another question though
So lets say that the nyt vs openAI case is going on, so in the meantime while they are litigating (lets say), could OpenAI still continue doing the same thing while the case is going on?
A judge making on a ruling based on his opinion of how transformative a technology will be doesn't inspire confidence. There's an equivocation on the word "transformative" here -- not just transformative in the fair use sense, but transformative as in world-changing, impactful, revolutionary. The latter shouldn't matter in a case like this.
> Companies and individuals who willfully infringe on copyright can face significantly higher damages — up to $150,000 per work
Settling for 2% is a steal.
> In June, the District Court issued a landmark ruling on A.I. development and copyright law, finding that Anthropic’s approach to training A.I. models constitutes fair use,” Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, said in a statement.
This is the highest-order bit, not the $1.5B in settlement. Anthropic's guilty of pirating.
I feel it is insane that authors do not receive some sort of standard compensation for each training use. Say a few hundred to a few thousand depending on complexity of their work.
I might find argument of comparing it to human when it is fully legal person and cutting power to it or deleting is treated as murder. Before that it is just bullshit.
And fundamentally reason for copy right to exist is to support creators and to promote them to create more. In world where massively funded companies can freely exploit their work and even in many case fully substitute that principle is failed.
> Ai is not a human with limited time
AI is also bound by time, physics, and limited capacity. It does certain things better or faster than us, it fails miserably at certain things we don't even think about being complex (like opening a door)
> And it is also owned by a company not a legal person.
For the purpose of legalities, companies and persons are relatively equivalent, regardless of the merits, it is how it is
> In world where massively funded companies can freely exploit their work and even in many case fully substitute that principle is failed.
They paid for the books after getting caught, the other companies are paying for the copyrighted training materials
Are they paying reasonable compensation? Say like with streaming services, movie theatres, radio and tv stations. As a whole their model is much close to those than individuals buying books, cds or dvds...
You might even consider Theatrical License or Public Performance License. Paid even if you have memorized a thing...
LLMs are just bad technology that require massive amount of inputs so the authors cannot be compensated enough for it. And I fully believe they should be. And lot more than single copy of their work under entirely ill-fitting first-sale doctrine does.
Depends on how you do it. Clearly reading the book word from word is different from making a podcast talking about your interpretation of the book.
At least if you're a regular citizen.
Give them this order : "I want to buy all your books as epub"
Pay and fetch the stuff
That's all
Proposed settlement: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
Imagine going to 500k publishers to buy it individually. 3k per book is way cheaper. The copyright system is turning into a data marketplace in front of our eyes
The main cost of doing this would be the time - even if you bought up all the available scanning capacity it would probably take months. In the meantime your competition who just torrented everything would have more high-quality training data than you. There are probably also a fair number of books in libgen which are out of print and difficult to find used.
You can follow the case here: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/bartz-v-anthro...
You can see the motion for settlement (what the news article is about) here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-series-f-at-...
It's less than 1% Anthropic's valuation -- a valuation utterly dependent on all the hoovering up of others' copyrighted works.
AFAICT, if this settlement signals that the typical AI foundation model company's massive-scale commercial theft doesn't result in judgments that wipe out a company (and its execs), then we have confirmation that is a free-for-all for all the other AI gold rush companies.
Then making deals to license rights, in sell-it-to-us-or-we'll-just-take-it-anyway deals, becomes only a routine and optional corporate cost reduction exercise, but not anything the execs will lose sleep over if it's inconvenient.
The settlement is real money though. Valuation is imaginary.
Writers were the true “foundational” piece of LLMs, anyway.
If someone breaks into my house and steals my valuables, without my consent, then giving me stock in their burglary business isn't much of a deterrent to them and other burglars.
Deterrence/prevention is my real goal, not the possibly of a token settlement from whatever bastard rips me off.
We need the analogue of laws and police, or the analogue of homeowner has a shotgun.
I understand that intentional copyright infringement is a crime in the US, you just need to convince the DOJ to prosecute Anthropic for it...
It has been admitted and Anthropic knew that this trial would totally bankrupt them had they said they were innocent and continued to fight the case.
But of course, there's too much money on the line, which means even though Anthropic settled (admitting guilt and profiting off of pirated books) they (Anthropic) knew there was no way they could win that case, and was not worth taking that risk.
> The pivotal fair-use question is still being debated in other AI copyright cases. Another San Francisco judge hearing a similar ongoing lawsuit against Meta ruled shortly after Alsup's decision that using copyrighted work without permission to train AI would be unlawful in "many circumstances."
The first of many.
Also passing on the cost to consumers of generated content since companies now would need to pay royalties on the back-end should also likely increase the cost of generating slop and hopefully push back against that trend.
This shouldn't just be books, but all written content, like scholarly journals and essays, news articles and blogs, etc.
I realize this is just wishful thinking, but there's got to be some nugget of aspirational desire to pay it forward.
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.
More broadly, I think that's a goofy argument. The books were "freely available" too. Just because something is out there, doesn't necessarily mean you can use it however you want, and that's the crux of the debate.
Other people have said that Anthropic bought the books later on, but I haven't found any official records for that. Where would I find that?
Also, does anyone know which Anthropic models were NOT trained on the pirated books. I want to avoid such models.