Anthropic judge rejects $1.5B AI copyright settlement

> Statutory penalties are found at 18 U.S.C. § 2319. A defendant, convicted for the first time of violating 17 U.S.C. § 506(a) by the unauthorized reproduction or distribution, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, or 1 or more copyrighted works, with a retail value of more than $2,500 can be imprisoned for up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2319(b), 3571(b)(3).

If you broaden it to include DMCA violations you could spend a lot of time in jail. It's even worse in some other countries.

  | Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.[0]

  > because of Anthropic's stupidity in not buying the books.

What about Meta, who did the same thing?

What about Google, who did the same thing?

What about Nvidia, who did the same thing?

Clearly something should be done because it's not like these companies can't afford the cost of the books. I mean Meta recently hired people giving out >$100m packages and bought a data company for $15bn. Do you think they can't afford to buy the books, videos, or even the porn? We're talking about trillion dollar companies.

It's been what, a year since Eric Schmidt said to steal everything and let the lawyers figure it out if you become successful?[1] Personal I'm not a big fan of "the ends justify the means" arguments. It's led to a lot of unrest, theft, wars, and death.

Do you really not think it's possible to make useful products ethically?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220658/google-eric-schm...

This is what generative AI essentially is.

Maybe the payment should be $500/h (say $5k a page) to cover the cost of preparing a human verified dataset for anthropic.

The portion the court said was bad was not Anthropic getting books from pirated sites to train its model. The court opined that training the model was fair use and did not distinguish between getting the books from pirated sites or hard copy scans. The part the court said was bad, which was settled, was Anthropic getting books from a pirate site to store in a general purpose library.

--

  "To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude
  and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the
  Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was. 
  also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a
  fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central
  library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central
  library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.
  However, Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library. Creating a
  permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic’s piracy."

  "Because the legal issues differ between the *library copies* Anthropic purchased and
  pirated, this order takes them in turn."

Questions

As an author do you think it matters where the book was copied from? Presumably, a copyright gives the author the right to control when a text is reproduced and distributed. If the AI company buys a book and scans it, they are reproducing the book without a license, correct? And fair use is the argument that even though they violated the copyright, they are execused. In a pure sense, if the AI company copied (assuming they didn't torrent back the book) from a "pirate source" why is that copy worse then if they copied from a hard book?

However in most cases that money ultimately comes from being able to sell proprietary software and software-enhanced services. Many employers wouldn't pay for free software, if it wasn't helping their closed-source tech.

If bigger companies can enforce their "right"s as the owner of intellectual property, the smaller ones and individuals should be able to do so as well.

I discussed this rather recently in HN. The timelines for copyright is too long. They need to get shorter around 20-30 years for actual creative work.

I think software needs its own category of intellectual property. It should enjoy at most 10 years. Software is quite akin to machinery and mechanical designs can only get 20 years of patent protection. Considering the fast growing and changing nature, software should get even shorter IP protection. Similar to every other sector, trade secrets can continue to exist and employers can negotiate deals with software engineers for trade secret protection.

> What contradictions do you see? I don't see any.

I guess us seeing very different things is also what a settlement might be for :-).

But I think I was wrong.

I think others in the thread are debating the contradictions I saw. I tried typing them out when I made my earlier comment, but couldn't get them to fix to any kind of logic that made sense to me. They just seemed contradictory, at the time.

I think the same arguments have now been made much more clearly by others - specifically around whether a corporation downloading this work is the same as a human downloading it - and the responses have been very clear also.

The settlement figure was tied implicitly to Anthropic's valuation in the Ars article [0] where I think I originally posted my comment. Those comments were moved here, so I've linked below.

Specifically linking the settlement sum to the valuation of a corporation is what caught me in a loop - that valuation assumes that Anthropic will do certain things in the future. I was thinking too much, maybe, about things like:

"Would a teenager get the same treatment? What about a teenager with a private company? What about a teenager who seemed dumber than that teenager to the person deciding their company's valuation? What about a teenager who had not opened the files themselves, but had spun up a model from them? What about a teenager who had done both?"

Etc. I think I was getting fixated on the idea that the valuation assumes future performance, and downloading the files was possibly necessary for that performance, but I was missing the obvious answers to some of my questions because of that.

I do think that some of the more anthropomorphising language - "training data" is an example - trips people up a lot in the same way. And I think that if the settlement sum reflects anything to do with the valuation of that corporation, that does create some interesting questions, but maybe not contradictions.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/judge-anthropics...

People write fanfiction without being paid, however, Avatar 2 cost hundreds of millions to produce [1]. The studio didn't spend this money for the heck of it, they spent this money with the hope of recouping their investment.

If no one can make money off of intellectual property, people will continue writing fanfiction. But why would a studio spend hundreds of millions making a blockbuster movie?

[1] https://variety.com/2022/film/news/avatar-2-budget-expensive...

Author's could potentially get a couple months of sales by working with manufacturers themselves and being the first to sell their books. But as soon as untrusted parties can get their hands on the book, someone will start selling their own copies of it.

No it wouldn't. Making the machine is not making a copy of the book. Using the machine to make a copy of the book would be infringment because...you would be making a copy of the book.

> That's a far cry from the 7 million works that he initially certified as covered in the class. A breakdown from the Authors Guild—which consulted on the case and is part of a Working Group helping to allocate claims of $3,000 per work to authors and publishers—explained that "after accounting for the many duplicates," foreign editions, unregistered works, and books missing class criteria, "only approximately 500,000 titles meet the definition required to be part of the class."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/judge-anthropics...

I know little but perhaps the harm felt on future valuation is more than the settlement amount.