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Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
- neo__ 1y agoHopefully they were all good books at least.
- pyman 1y agothey pirated the best ones, according to the authors
- neonate 1y agohttps://archive.md/YLyPg https://archive.md/YLyPg
- pyman 1y agoAnthropic's cofounder, Ben Mann, downloaded million copies of books from Library Genesis in 2021, fully aware that the material was pirated. Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.
- damnesian 1y agooh well, the product has a cute name and will make someone a billionaire, let's just give it the green light. who cares about copyright in the age of AI?
- originalvichy 1y agoAt least most pirates just consume for personal use. Profiting from piracy is a whole other level beyond just pirating a book.
- pyman 1y agoSomeone on Twitter said: "Oh well, P2P mp3 downloads, although illegal, made contributions to the music industry" That's not what's happening here. People weren't downloading music illegally and reselling it on Claude.ai. And while P2P networks led to some great tech, there's no solid proof they actually improved the music industry.
- drcursor 1y agoLet's not forget Spotify ;) https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-files-new-book-1795109991 https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-f...
- pyman 1y agoThose claims were never proved.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoI really feel as if Youtube is the best sort of convenience for music videos where most people watch ads whereas some people can use an ad blocker. I use an adblocker and tbh I think so many people on HN are okay with ad blocking and not piracy when basically both just block the end user from earning money. I kind of believe that if you really like a software, you really like something. Just ask them what their favourite charity is and donate their or join their patreon/a direct way to support them.
- Workaccount2 1y agoIf you are someone who can think clearly, it's extremely obvious that the conversation around copyright, LLMs, piracy, and ad-blocking is "What serves me personally the best for any given situation" for 95% of people.
- timeon 1y agoI think that critique of this case is not about piracy in itself but how these companies are treated by courts vs. how individuals are treated.
- x187463 1y agoAnd somehow actually paying for youtube which fully removes advertising and provides revenue to the service/creators is seen as an utterly absurd proposition by a staggering number of people.
- mnky9800n 1y agoI feel like profit was always a central motive of pirates. At least from the historical documents known as, "The Pirates of the Caribbean".
- KoolKat23 1y agoThis isn't really profiting from piracy. They don't make money off the raw input data. It's no different to consuming for personal use. They make money off the model weights, which is fair use (as confirmed by recent case law).
- j_w 1y agoThis is absurd. Remove all of the content from the training data that was pirated and what is the quality of the end product now?
- pyman 1y agoWith Claude, people are paying Anthropic to access answers that are generated from pirated books, without the authors permission, credit, or compensation.
- KoolKat23 1y agoThere is no copyright on knowledge. If it outputs parts of the book verbatim then that's a different story.
- pyman 1y agoLet's don't change the focus of the debate. Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to power Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your personal website. The original creators don't get credit or payment, and someone’s profiting off their work. All this happens while authors, many of them teachers, are left scratching their heads with four kids to feed
- KoolKat23 1y agoThat may be the case, but you'd have to have laws changed.
- SirMaster 1y ago
- mrcwinn 1y ago> At least most pirates just consume for personal use. Easy for the pirate to say. Artists might argue their intent was to trade compensation for one's personal enjoyment of the work.
- Workaccount2 1y agoThe gut punch of being a photographer selling your work on display, someone walks by and lines up their phone to take a perfect picture of your photograph, and then exclaims to you "Your work is beautiful! I can't wait to print this out and put it on my wall!"
- jobs_throwaway 1y ago[flagged]
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoThe way you've presented this, the evidence is just "common sense", which isn't much evidence at all.
- jobs_throwaway 1y agowrong https://news.iu.edu/live/news/25720-the-hidden-treasure-of-digital-piracy-it-can-boost https://news.iu.edu/live/news/25720-the-hidden-treasure-of-d...
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago"Wrong" would imply somehow the first post was better that it was. What you mean to say is "You're right, here's a link with some details". That article also focuses on larger media and "moderate" amounts of piracy, so there's absolutely caveats in your claim. "As with other studies, Kim and his colleagues found that when enforcement is low and piracy is rampant, both manufacturers and retailers suffer." “'The implication is simply that, situated in a real-world context, our manufacturer and retailer should recognize that a certain level of piracy or its threat might actually be beneficial'..."
- x3n0ph3n3 1y agoCopyright infringement is not stealing.
- 1oooqooq 1y agoactually, the Only time it's a (ethical) crime is when a corporation does it at scale for profit.
- pyman 1y ago[flagged]
- zb3 1y agoWho got robbed? Just because I'd pay for AI it doesn't mean I'd buy these books.
- pyman 1y agoYou should ask the teachers who spent years writing those books.
- azangru 1y agoYou keep saying the word "teachers"; but that word does not appear in the text of the article. Why focus on the teachers in particular? Also, there are various incentives for teachers to publish books. Money is just one of them (I wonder how much revenue books bring to the teachers). Prestige and academic recognition is another. There are probably others still. How realistic is the depiction of a deprived teacher whose livelihood depended on the books he published once every several years?
- pyman 1y agoI can only speak for myself, my family, and colleagues, but it's not just teachers. Plenty of other professionals are being affected too.
- 1y ago
- Der_Einzige 1y agoInformation wants to be free.
- troyvit 1y agoThen why does Claude cost money?
- akimbostrawman 1y agoBecause regurgitated information is not the same
- dathinab 1y agostealing with the intent to gain a unfair marked advantage so that you can effectively kill any ethically legally correctly acting company in a way which is very likely going to hurt many authors through the products you create is far worse then just stealing for personal use that isn't "just" stealing, it's organized crime
- 1970-01-01 1y agoLet's get actual definitions of 'theft' before we leap into double standards.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago[flagged]
- kube-system 1y ago> Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards. I get the sentiment, but that statement as is, is absurdly reductive. Details matter. Even if someone takes merchandise from a store without paying, their sentence will vary depending on the details.
- pyman 1y agoThese are the people shaping the future of AI? What happened to all the ethical values they love to preach about? We've held China accountable for counterfeiting products for decades and regulated their exports. So why should Anthropic be allowed to export their products and services after engaging in the same illegal activity?
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoThis is the underlying caste system coming to life right before your eyes :D.
- stephenitis 1y agoI think caste system is the wrong analogy here. Comment is more about the pseudo ethical high ground
- MangoToupe 1y agoCompanies being above the law does create a stratified system in this country for those who can benefit from said companies and those who cannot. Call it what you like.
- seydor 1y agobreak things and move fast
- benjiro 1y agoOne rule for you, one rule for me ... You never noticed the hypocrite behavior all over society? * O, you drunk drive, big fine, lots of trouble. * O, you drunk drive and are a senator, cop, mayor, ... Well, lets look the other way. * You have anger management issues and slam somebody to the ground. Jail time. * You as a cop have anger management issues and slams somebody to the ground. Well, paid time off while we investigate and maybe a reprimand. Qualified immunity boy! * You tax fraud for 10k, felony record, maybe jail time. * You as a exec of a company do tax fraud for 100 million. After 10 years lawyering around, maybe you get something, maybe, ... o, here is a fine of 5 million. I am sorry but the idea of everybody being equal under the law has always been a illusion. We are holding China accountable for counterfeiting products because it hurts OUR companies, and their income. But when its "us vs us", well, then it becomes a bit more messy and in general, those with the biggest backing (as in $$$, economic value, and lawyers), tends to win. Wait, if somebody steal my book, i can sue that person in court, and get a payout (lawyers will cost me more but that is not the point). If some AI company steals my book, well, the chance you win is close to 1%, simply because lots of well paid lawyers will make your winning hard to impossible. Our society has always been based upon power, wealth and influence. The more you have of it, the more you get away (or reduced) with things, that gets other fined or jailed.
- aaron695 1y agoGood, this is what Aaron Swartz was fighting for. Against companies like Elsevier locking up the worlds knowledge. Authors are no different to scientists, many had government funding at one point, and it's the publishing companies that got most of the sales. You can disagree and think Aaron Swartz was evil, but you can't have both. You can take what Anthropic have show you is possible and do this yourself now. isohunt: freedom of information
- ramon156 1y agoPirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?
- kevingadd 1y agoGoogle did it the legal way with Google Books, didn't they?
- pyman 1y ago[flagged]
- suyjuris 1y agoThe judge appears to disagree with you on this. They found that training and selling an LLM are fair use, based on the fact that it is exceedingly transformative, and that the copyright holders are not entitled to any profits thereof due to copyright. (They also did get paid — Anthropic acquired millions of books legally, including all of the authors in this complaint. This would not retroactively absolve them of legal fault for past infringements, of course.)
- pyman 1y agoThe trial is scheduled for December 2025. That's when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing over seven million pirated books
- suyjuris 1y agoYes, that would by an interesting trial. But it is only about six books, and all claims regarding Claude have been dismissed already. So only the internal copies remain, and there the theory for them being infringing is somewhat convoluted: you have to argue that they are not just for purposes of training (which was ruled fair use), and award damages even though these other purposes never materialised (since by now, they have legal copies of those books). I can see it, but I would not count on there being a trial.
- tliltocatl 1y agoIf the AI movement will manage to undermine Imaginary Property, it would redeem it's externalities threefold.
- 57473m3n7Fur7h3 1y agoI don’t think that’s gonna happen. I think they will manage to get themselves out of trouble for it, while the rest of us will still face serious problems if we are caught torrenting even one singular little book.
- tliltocatl 1y agoEven so, would be hard to prove that this particular little book wasn't generated by Claude (oopsie, it happens to be a verbatim copy of a copyrighted work, that happens sometimes, those pesky LLMs).
- pyman 1y agoYou just need to audit their system. Shouldn't take more than a couple of hours.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoThe Ocean Full of Bowling Balls
- CaptainFever 1y agoIt's already quite widespread and likely legal for average people to train AI models on copyrighted material, in the open weight AI communities like SD and LocalLLaMa. Please, please differentiate between pirating books (which Anthrophic is liable for, and is still illegal) and training on copyrighted material (which was found to be legal, for both corporations and average people).
- ttoinou 1y agoIt would be great, but I think some are worried that new AI BigTech will find a way to continue enforcing IP on the rest of society while it won't exist for them
- Lionga 1y agoBased on the fact people went to jail for downloading some music or movies, this guy will face a lifetime in prison for 7 million books that he then used for commercial profit right? Right guys we don't have rules for thee but not for me in the land of the free?
- 1oooqooq 1y ago[flagged]
- pyman 1y agoHe downloaded millions of academic articles and the government charged him with multiple felonies. The difference is, Aaron Swartz wasn't planning to build massive datacenters with expensive Nvidia servers all over the world.
- mikewarot 1y ago>the government charged him with multiple felonies. This was the result of a cruel and zealous overreach by the prosecutor to try to advance her political career. It should never have gone that far. The failure of MIT to rally in support of Aaron will never be forgiven.
- pyman 1y agoI agree
- omnimus 1y agoIt's even worse considering all he downloaded was in public domain so it was much less problematic considering copyright. Lesson is simple. If you want to break a law make sure it is very profitable because then you can find investors and get away with it. If you play robin hood you will be met with a hammer.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dandanua 1y agoSame did Meta and probably other big companies. People who praise AGI are very short sighted. It will ruin the world with our current morals and ethics. It's like a nuclear weapon in the hands of barbarians (shit, we have that too, actually).
- Nasrudith 1y agoThe main problem I have with that argument is when have we ever been "ready" for any technology ahead of times? Its impact is always unknown not only on society but in the technology itself. What sort of 'preparatory' work can a society do to satisfy this? If we were to apply such 'precautionary' logic to automobiles it would at very best be starting out with a large public works project to create separated grades for all vehicles, before building a single vehicle (where they have no idea how tight the constraints will truly be, thinking they will go only as fast as a horse at a gallop). It is far more likely to wind up a silly waste of time or pretext for Luddism to try to delay the inevitable. Like it or not, being capable of doing something is the only true deciding standard of being ready for something. Not to mention the whole notion of being able to judge others as 'not ready for it' is an insult to the very notion of individual self-determination. Imagine for instance if the western world in the past had took after Starfleet in the worst of ways and banned supplying medical aid to sub-Saharan Africa as they judged their society as not ready for it. They would rightfully be called callous, arrogant racist imperialists for thinking it is their right to impose suffering upon others and deny others opportunities and self-determination because of their own parochial judgement and thinking they knew better! Putting oneself in the position to be able to judge for the world is an act of hubris far greater than that they project upon the attempted inventors of AGI.
- booleandilemma 1y ago[flagged]
- famahar 1y agoMake sure you have a few billion dollars ready so you can pay a few million on the lawsuits. A volcano getting a cup of water poured into it.
- marapuru 1y agoApparently it's a common business practice. Spotify (even though I can't find any proof) seems to have build their software and business on pirated music. There is some more in this Article [0]. https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files-some-from-pirate-bay-170509/ https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files... Funky quote: > Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.
- motbus3 1y agoThey had a second company (which I don't remember the name) that allowed users to backup and share their music. When they were exposed they dug that as deep as they could
- pyman 1y agoNo. There's no credible evidence Spotify had any secret second company that allowed users to back up and share music without authorisation
- pyman 1y agoIt was the opposite. Their mission was to combat music piracy by offering a better, legal alternative. Daniel Ek said: "my mission is to make music accessible and legal to everyone, while ensuring artists and rights holders got paid" Also, the Swedish government has zero tolerance for piracy.
- motbus3 1y agoIt is shocking how courts have being ruling towards the benefits of ai companies despite the obvious problem of allowing automatic plagiarism
- jobs_throwaway 1y agoInformation wants to be free
- NoOn3 1y agoThen why do they sell their services instead of putting the model in open source?
- kristofferR 1y agoNot really, plagiarism is not a legal concept.
- Kim_Bruning 1y agoactual title: "Anthropic cut up millions of used books to train Claude — and downloaded over 7 million pirated ones too, a judge said." A not-so-subtle difference. That said, in a sane world, they shouldn't have needed to cut up all those used books yet again when there's obviously already an existing file that does all the work.
- kube-system 1y agoThe importance of acquiring the physical book was the transfer of compensation to the author.
- Kim_Bruning 1y agoYou're not wrong, but that's one heck of a way to do it. It involves the destruction of 7 million books, which ... I really don't quite see the "promotion of Progress of Science and useful Arts" in that.
- CaptainFever 1y agoYeah, I'm not sure if people realize that the whole reason they had to cut up the books was because they wanted to comply with copyright law. Artificial scarcity.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- greenavocado 1y agoShould have listened to those NordVPN ads on YouTube
- sidewndr46 1y agoSo using the standard industry metrics for calculating the financial impact of piracy, this would equate to something like trillions of damages to the book publishing industry?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoI've begun to wonder if this is why some large torrent sites haven't been taken down. They are essentially able to crowdsource all the work. There are some users who spend ungodly amounts of time and money on these sites that I suspect are rich industry benefactors.
- bgwalter 1y agoHere is how individuals are treated for massive copyright infringement: https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-details/california-man-sentenced-more-seven-years-software-copyright https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-de...
- piker 1y agoI thought you'd go with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
- dialup_sounds 1y agoSwartz wasn't charged with copyright infringement.
- natch 1y ago*technically
- kube-system 1y agoIf you're discussing law, an entirely different law in a different title of US code is more than a technicality.
- piker 1y agoNo, the parent was referring to how someone “was treated”, and it would have been perfectly valid to reference that case to make the same point. What you’re saying is like calling Al Capone a tax cheat. Nonsense. They went after Aaron over copyright.
- dialup_sounds 1y agoUnlike much of the post hoc hagiography around Swartz, it's literally true.
- 1y ago
- dathinab 1y agoas far as I understand while training on books is clearly not fair use (as the result will likely hurt the lively hood of authors, especially not "best of the best" authors). as long as you buy the book it still should be legal, that is if you actually buy the book and not a "read only" eBook but the 7_000_000 pirated books are a huge issue, and one from which we have a lot of reason to believe isn't just specific to Anthropic
- asadotzler 1y agoBuying a copy of a book does not give you license to take the exact content of that book, repackage it as a web service, and sell it to millions of others. That's called theft.
- russell_h 1y agoThe title is clearly meant to generate outrage, but what is wrong with cutting up a book that you own?
- timewizard 1y ago[flagged]
- jobs_throwaway 1y agopoverty mindset. We can make more books, and now these copies contribute to a corpus of knowledge that far more people benefit from
- timewizard 1y agoPeople who pay Anthropic you mean. There is no benefit. And only the owner can make more books. Fake altruistic mindset. Super sociopathic.
- jobs_throwaway 1y agoI use Claude without paying, that's a benefit And "And only the owner can make more books" is trivially false Keep crying about this nothingburger
- justinrubek 1y agoWasteful mindset. They don't need the books, they need the data. They should never have been printed if they were going to he destroyed.
- kube-system 1y agoThey very clearly had a reason.
- nickpsecurity 1y agoBuying, scanning, and discarding was in my proposal to train under copyright restrictions. You are often allowed to nake a digital copy of a physical work you bought. There are tons of used, physical works thay would be good for training LLM's. They'd also be good for training OCR which could do many things, including improve book scanning for training. This could be reduced to a single act of book destruction per copyrighted work or made unnecessary if copyright law allowed us to share others' works digitally with their licensed customers. Ex: people who own a physical copy or a license to one. Obviously, the implementation could get complex but we wouldn't have to destroy books very often.
- asadotzler 1y ago[flagged]
- nickpsecurity 1y agoThat's true and was the distinction I was making. In my proposal, and maybe part of what Anthropic did, the digitized copies are used as training data for a new work, the model. That reduces the risk of legal rulings against using the copyrighted works. From there, the cases would likely focus on whether that fits in established criteria for digitized copies, whether they're allowed in the training process itself, and the copyright status of the resulting model. Some countries allow all of that if you legally obtained the material in the first place. Also, they might factor whether it's for commercial use or not.
- NHQ 1y agoThe farce of treating a corporation as an individual precludes common sense legal procedure to investigate people who are responsible for criminal action taken by the company. Its obviously premeditated and in all ways an illicit act knowingly perpetrated by persons. The only discourse should be about upending this penthouse legalism.
- NHQ 1y agoThe irony is that actually litigating copyright law would lead to the repeal of said copyright law. And so in all cases of backwaters laws that are used to "protect interests" of "corporations" yet criminalize petty individual cases. This of course cannot be allowed to happen, so the the legal system is just a limbo, a bar which regular individuals must strain to pass under but that corporations regularly overstep.
- tpmoney 1y agoThe “farce” of treating a corporation as a legal individual is the reason you can have this case in the first place. Otherwise the authors would have had to discover and individually sue each specific individual in the company for each specific claim. They would have to find the specific individual that downloaded their specific book and sue that person. Then they would need to find the specific individual that digitized their specific book and sue that person. Then they would need to find the specific person that loaded that digital copy into an AI model and sue that person. And on and on for each alleged act of infringement. Or we could recognize that’s silly when we’re talking about a group of people acting in concert and treat them as a single entity for the purpose of alleged crimes. Which is what we do when we treat a corporation as an individual for legal purposes.
- outside1234 1y agoSo if you incorporate you can do whatever you want without criminal charges?
- trinsic2 1y agoI'm not seeing how this is fair use in either case. Someone correct me if I am wrong but aren't these works being digitized and transformed in a way to make a profit off of the information that is included in these works? It would be one thing for an individual to make person use of one or more books, but you got to have some special blindness not to see that a for-profit company's use of this information to improve a for-profit model is clearly going against what copyright stands for.
- kristofferR 1y agoWhat do you think fair use is? The whole point of the fair use clauses is that if you transform copyrighted works enough you don't have to pay the original copyright holder.
- kube-system 1y agoFair use is not, at its core, about transformation. It's about many types of uses that do not interfere with the reasons for the rights we ascribe to authors. Fair use doesn't require transformation.
- jimbob21 1y agoThey clearly were being digitized, but I think its a more philosophical discussion that we're only banging our heads against for the first time to say whether or not it is fair use. Simply, if the models can think then it is no different than a person reading many books and building something new from their learnings. Digitization is just memory. If the models cannot think then it is meaningless digital regurgitation and plagiarism, not to mention breach of copyright. The quotes "consistent with copyright's purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress." and "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer" say, from what I can tell, that the judge has legally ruled the model can think as a human does, and therefore has the legal protections afforded to "creatives."
- palmotea 1y ago> Simply, if the models can think then it is no different than a person reading many books and building something new from their learnings. No, that's fallacious. Using anthropomorphic words to describe a machine does not give it the same kinds of rights and affordances we give real people.
- ruffrey 1y agoTwo of the top AI companies flouted ethics with regard to training data. In OpenAI's case, the whistleblower probably got whacked for exposing it. Can anyone make a compelling argument that any of these AI companies have the public's best interest in mind (alignment/superalignment)?
- letmetrymaybe 1y ago[dead]
- k__ 1y agoSo, how should we as a society handle this? Ensure the models are open source, so everyone can use them, as everyones data is in there? Close those companies and force them to delete the models, as they used copyright material?
- carlosjobim 1y agoIf ingesting books into an AI makes Anthropic criminals, then Google et al are also criminals alike for making search indexes of the Internet. Anything published online is equally copyrighted.
- kristofferR 1y agoYeah, we can all agree that ingesting books is fair use and transformative, but you gotta own what you ingest, you can't just pirate it. I can read 100 books and write a book based on the inspiration I got from the 100 books without any issue. However, if I pirate the 100 books I've still committed copyright infringement despite my new book being fully legal/fair use.
- carlosjobim 1y agoI disagree that it has anything to do with copyright. It is at most theft. If I steal a bunch of books from the library, I haven't committed any breach of copyright.
- riskable 1y agoExactly! If Anthropic is guilty of copyright infringement for the mere act of downloading copyrighted books then so is Google, Microsoft (Bing), DuckDuckGo, etc. Every search engine that exists downloads pirated material every day. They'd all be guilty. Not only that but all of us are guilty too because I'm positive we've all clicked on search results that contained copyrighted content that was copied without permission. You may not have even known it was such. Remember: Intent is irrelevant when it comes to copyright infringement! It's not that kind of law. Intent can guide a judge when they determine damages but that's about it.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoThe buried lede here is Antrhopic will need to attempt to explain to a judge that it is impossible to de-train 7M books from their models.
- nickpsecurity 1y agoI'm hoping they fail to incentivize using legal, open, and/or licensed data. Then, thry might have to attempt to train a Claude-class model on legal data. Then, I'll have a great, legal model to use. :)
- protocolture 1y agoOr they could be forced to settle a price for access to the books.
- ranguna 1y agoHow come? They just need to delete the model and train a new one without those books.
- dehrmann 1y agoThe important parts: > Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use > "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" It was always somewhat obvious that pirating a library would be copyright infringement. The interesting findings here are that scanning and digitizing a library for internal use is OK, and using it to train models is fair use.
- jpalawaga 1y agoI don't think that's new. google set precedent for that more than a decade ago. you're allowed to transform a book to digital.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 1y agoYou skipped quotes about the other important side: > But Alsup drew a firm line when it came to piracy. > "Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library," Alsup wrote. "Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic's piracy." That is, he ruled that - buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use - pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.
- throwawayffffas 1y agoSo all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated. They will have ceased and desisted.
- superfrank 1y agoI'm trying to find the quote, but I'm pretty sure the judge specifically said that going and buying the book after the fact won't absolve them of liability. He said that for the books they pirated they broke the law and should stand trial for that and they cannot go back and un-break in by buying a copy now. Found it: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/federal-judge-rules-copyrighted-books-are-fair-use-ai-training-rcna214766 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/federal-judge-rules-c... > “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft,” [Judge] Alsup wrote, “but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
- guywithahat 1y agoIf you own a book, it should be legal for your computer to take a picture of it. I honestly feel bad for some of these AI companies because the rules around copyright are changing just to target them. I don't owe copyright to every book I read because I may subconsciously incorporate their ideas into my future work.
- raincole 1y agoAre we reading the same article? The article explicitly states that it's okay to cut up and scan the books you own to train a model from them. > I honestly feel bad for some of these AI companies because the rules around copyright are changing just to target them The ruling would be a huge win for AI companies if held. It's really weird that you reached the opposite conclusion.
- rapind 1y agoEverything is different at scale. I'm not giving a specific opinion on copyright here, but it just doesn't make sense when we try to apply individual rights and rules to systems of massive scale. I really think we need to understand this as a society and also realize that moneyed interests will downplay this as much as possible. A lot of the problems we're having today are due to insufficient regulation differentiating between individuals and systems at scale.
- organsnyder 1y agoThe difference here is that an LLM is a mechanical process. It may not be deterministic (at least, in a way that my brain understands determinism), but it's still a machine. What you're proposing is considering LLMs to be equal to humans when considering how original works are created. You could make the argument that LLM training data is no different from a human "training" themself over a lifetime of consuming content, but that's a philosophical argument that is at odds with our current legal understanding of copyright law.
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- shrubble 1y agoLet’s say my AI company is training an AI on woodworking books and at the end, it will describe in text and wireframe drawings (but not the original or identical photos) how to do a particular task. If I didn’t license all the books I trained on, am I not depriving the publisher of revenue, given people will pay me for the AI instead of buying the book?
- mathiaspoint 1y agoThe same argument applies to someone who learned from the book and wrote an article explaining the idea to someone else.
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- mrkstu 1y agoIf you paid a human author to do the same you’d be breaking no law. Learning is the point of books existing in the first place.
- NoOn3 1y agoHumans learning, not machines learning is the point of books.
- tpmoney 1y agoCopyright doesn’t cover facts and methods. It specifically covers creative expressions. That’s why patents are different from copyright. If you read some woodworking books and then write your own online tutorial about building a chair using the methods and procedures described in that book, it doesn’t matter that you now compete with the books that you used, provided you didn’t copy the creative elements. How much of a chair design is creative and how much is function is an ambiguous question that might still land you in court, but it won’t be over your right to make the tutorial in the first place. As the judge noted in this ruling, copyright isn’t intended to protect authors from competition. Copyright doesn’t protect Rowling from other authors writing YA wizard books cutting into her revenue streams. Or from TV producers making YA wizard shows that reduce the demand for books. Copyright doesn’t protect the Tolkien estate from Terry Brooks, or Tracy Hickman or Margret Weiss reducing the demand for Tolkien fantasy by supplanting it with their own fantasies.
- hellohihello135 1y agoIt’s easy to point fingers at others. Meanwhile the top comment in this thread links to stolen content from Business Insider.
- fakeBeerDrinker 1y agoHow is it stolen from Business Insider? When I visit businessinsider.com/anthropic-cut-pirated-millions-used-books-train-claude-copyright-2025-6 I get the same story. My browser caches the story, and I save it for archival purposes. How is this theft?
- hellohihello135 1y agoBI decides who can access this content and who will get the paywall. The link to archive page allows people to access this content without permission. That’s called stealing.
- fakeBeerDrinker 1y agoWhen I hop on a VPN and enter ingconito mode from a clean browser session, bypassing their paywall, is that stealing? This doesn't meet the definition of stealing that I'm familiar with.
- jtrn 1y agoBest godamn comment in this whole thread. Now we can have fun reading the the mental gymnastics !
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- slantaclaus 1y agoWoah woah woah I just read it I didn’t sell it to anybody
- adolph 1y agoAlsup detailed Anthropic's training process with books: The OpenAI rival spent "many millions of dollars" buying used print books, which the company or its vendors then stripped of their bindings, cut the pages, and scanned into digital files. I've noticed an increase in used book prices in the recent past and now wonder if there is an LLM effect in the market.
- codedokode 1y agoIf AI companies are allowed to use pirated material to create their products, does it mean that everyone can use pirated software to create products? Where is the line? Also please don't use word "learning", use "creating software using copyrighted materials". Also let's think together how can we prevent AI companies from using our work using technical measures if the law doesn't work?
- rvnx 1y ago~1B USD in cash is the line where laws apply very differently
- wkat4242 1y agoEspecially in the US
- redcobra762 1y agoIt's abusive and wrong to try and prevent AI companies from using your works at all. The whole point of copyright is to ensure you're paid for your work. AI companies shouldn't pirate, but if they pay for your work, they should be able to use it however they please, including training an LLM on it. If that LLM reproduces your work, then the AI company is violating copyright, but if the LLM doesn't reproduce your work, then you have not been harmed. Trying to claim harm when you haven't been due to some philosophical difference in opinion with the AI company is an abuse of the courts.
- codedokode 1y agoIt is not wrong at all. The author decides what to do with their work. AI companies are rich and can simply buy the rights or hire people to create works. I could agree with exceptions for non-commercial activity like scientific research, but AI companies are made for extracting profits and not for doing research. > AI companies shouldn't pirate, but if they pay for your work, they should be able to use it however they please, including training an LLM on it. It doesn't work this way. If you buy a movie it doesn't mean you can sell goods with movie characters. > then you have not been harmed. I am harmed because less people will buy the book if they can simply get an answer from LLM. Less people will hire me to write code if an LLM trained on my code can do it. Maybe instead of books we should start making applications that protect the content and do not allow copying text or making screenshots. ANd instead of open-source code we should provide binary WASM modules.
- koolala 1y agoAnyone read the 2006 sci-fi book Rainbow's End that has this? It was set in 2025.
- solfox 1y agoI was 100% thinking this. GREAT book. And they, too, shredded books to ingest them into the digital library! I don't recall if it was an attempt to bypass copyright though; in Rainbow's End, it was more technical, as it was easier to shred, scan the pieces, and reassemble them in software, rather than scanning each page.
- Uhhrrr 1y agoFrom Vinge's "Rainbow's End": > In fact this business was the ultimate in deconstruction: First one and then the other would pull books off the racks and toss them into the shredder's maw. The maintenance labels made calm phrases of the horror: The raging maw was a "NaviCloud custom debinder." The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel...." The shredded fragments of books and magazine flew down the tunnel like leaves in tornado, twisting and tumbling. The inside of the fabric was stitched with thousands of tiny cameras. The shreds were being photographed again and again, from every angle and orientation, till finally the torn leaves dropped into a bin just in front of Robert. Rescued data. BRRRRAP! The monster advanced another foot into the stacks, leaving another foot of empty shelves behind it.
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- microtherion 1y agoYes, I was thinking of this passage as well. The technology does not seem to have advanced to this particular point yet.
- codedokode 1y ago> "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic's LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different," he wrote. But this analogy seems wrong. First, LLM is not a human and cannot "learn" or "train" - only human can do it. And LLM developers are not aspiring to become writers and do not learn anything, they just want to profit by making software using copyrighted material. Also people do not read millions of books to become a writer.
- CaptainFever 1y ago> But this analogy seems wrong. First, LLM is not a human and cannot "learn" or "train" - only human can do it. The analogy refers to humans using machines to do what would already be legally if they did it manually. > And LLM developers are not aspiring to become writers and do not learn anything, they just want to profit by making software using copyrighted material. [Citation needed], and not a legal argument. > Also people do not read millions of books to become a writer. But people do hear millions of words as children.
- codedokode 1y ago> But people do hear millions of words as children. At a rate 1000 words/day it takes 3 years to hear a million words. Also "million words" is not equal to "million books". Humans are ridiculously efficient in learning compared to LLMs.
- m4rtink 1y agoAnyone else thinks destroying books for any reason is wrong ? Or is it perhaps not an universal cultural/moral aspect ? I guess for example in Europe people could be more sensitive to it.
- lawlessone 1y agoIf they aren't one of a kind and they digitally preserved them in some way i think i would be ok with it. Saying that though there are tools for digitizing books that don't require destroying them
- stackedinserter 1y agoThere's nothing sacred about books. There are plenty of books that won't be missed if destroyed.
- kbelder 1y agoI have purposefully destroyed one book in my life, in order to prevent anyone from reading it: Man of Two Worlds by Brian Herbert. ...and I did the world a favor.
- fivestones 1y agoJust looked this up and now I might read it, ostensibly because of the fact that you destroyed it.
- kbelder 1y agoI'm sorry to do that to you, and may God have mercy on your soul.
- codedokode 1y agoBy the way I wonder if recent advancement in protecting Youtube videos from downloaders like yt-d*p are caused by unwillingness to help rival AI companies gather the datasets.
- lvl155 1y agoIt’s marginally better than Meta torrenting z-lib.
- randomNumber7 1y agoI will never feel bad again for learning from copied books /S
- jimnotgym 1y agoHang on, it is OK under copyright law to scan a book I bought second hand, destroy the hard copy and keep the scan in my online library? That doesn't seem to chime with the copyright notices I have read in books.
- badlibrarian 1y agoFirst sale doctrine gives the person who sold the book you bought the right to sell it to you. Fair Use permits you to scan your copy, used or new. It's your book, you can destroy it. But you have to delete your digital copy if you sell it or give it away. And you can't distribute your digital copy.
- kube-system 1y agoFair use can be a pretty gray area and details matter, but copying for personal use is frequently okay. > That doesn't seem to chime with the copyright notices I have read in books. You shouldn't get your legal advice from someone with skin in the game.
- BeetleB 1y ago> That doesn't seem to chime with the copyright notices I have read in books. I used to get scared by such verbiage. Courts ruled decades ago that many of those uses are actually permitted, under very common conditions (e.g. not distributing, etc). Yes, you totally can photocopy a book you own, for your own purposes.
- platunit10 1y agoEvery time an article like this surfaces, it always seems like the majority of tech folks believe that training AI on copyrighted material is NOT fair use, but the legal industry disagrees. Which of the following are true? (a) the legal industry is susceptible to influence and corruption (b) engineers don't understand how to legally interpret legal text (c) AI tech is new, and judges aren't technically qualified to decide these scenarios Most likely option is C, as we've seen this pattern many times before.
- rockemsockem 1y agoIdk, I think most people in tech I talk to IRL think it is fair use? I think the overly liberal, non-tech crowd has become really vocal on HN as of late and your sample is likely biased by these people.
- 827a 1y agoArmchair commentators, including myself, tend to be imprecise when speaking about whether something is illegal, versus something should be illegal. Sometimes due to a misunderstanding of the law, or an over-estimation of the court's authority, or an over-estimation of our legislature's productivity, or just because we're making conversation and like talking.
- CaptainFever 1y ago> Every time an article like this surfaces, it always seems like the majority of tech folks believe that training AI on copyrighted material is NOT fair use Where are you getting your data from? My conclusions are the exact opposite. (Also, aren't judges by definition the only ones qualified to declare if it is actually fair use? You could make a case that it shouldn't be fair use, but that's different from it being not fair use.)
- redcobra762 1y agoIt's not likely you've actually gotten the opinion of the "majority of tech folks", just the most outspoken ones, and only in specific bubbles you belong to.
- OkayPhysicist 1y ago
- Zufriedenheit 1y agoMaybe to give something back to the pirates, Anthropic could upload all the books they have digitized to the archive? /s
- pmdr 1y agoThey've all done that, it should be obvious by now. Training on just freely available data only gets you so far.
- stackedinserter 1y agoEverybody that wants to train an LLM, should buy every single book, every single issue of a magazine or a newspaper, and personally ask every person that ever left a comment on social media. /s If I was China I would buy every lawyer to drown western AI companies in lawsuits, because it's an easy way to win AI race.
- IOT_Apprentice 1y agoIf Anthropic is funded by Amazon, they should have just asked Amazon for unlimited download of EVERY book in the Amazon book store, and all audio-books as well. It certainly would be faster than buying one copy of each and tearing it apart.
- godelski 1y agoThe solution has always been: show us the training data. As a researcher I've been furious that we publish papers where the research data is unknown. To add insult to injury, we have the audacity to start making claims about "zero-shot", "low-shot", "OOD", and other such things. It is utterly laughable. These would be tough claims to make *even if we knew the data*, simply because of its size. But not knowing the data, it is outlandish. Especially because the presumptions are "everything on the internet." It would be like training on all of GitHub and then writing your own simple programming questions to test an LLM[0]. Analyzing that amount of data is just intractable, and we currently do not have the mathematical tools to do so. But this is a much harder problem to crack when we're just conjecturing and ultimately this makes interoperability more difficult. On top of all of that, we've been playing this weird legal game. Where it seems that every company has had to cheat. I can understand how smaller companies turn to torrenting to compete, but when it is big names like Meta, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI (Microsoft), etc it is just wild. This isn't even following the highly controversial advice of Eric Schmidt "Steal everything, then if you get big, let the lawyers figure it out." This is just "steal everything, even if you could pay for it." We're talking about the richest companies in the entire world. Some of the, if not the, richest companies to ever exist. Look, can't we just try to be a little ethical? There is, in fact, enough money to go around. We've seen unprecedented growth in the last few years. It was only 2018 when Apple became the first trillion dollar company, 2020 when it became the second two trillion, and 2022 when it became the first three trillion dollar company. Now we have 10 companies north of the trillion dollar mark![3] (5 above $2T and 3 above $3T) These values have exploded in the last 5 years! It feels difficult to say that we don't have enough money to do things better. To at least not completely screw over "the little guy." I am unconvinced that these companies would be hindered if they had to broker some deal for training data. Hell, they're already going to war over data access. My point here is that these two things align. We're talking about how this technology is so dangerous (every single one of those CEOs has made that statement) and yet we can't remain remotely ethical? How can you shout "ONLY I CAN MAKE SAFE AI" while acting so unethically? There's always moral gray areas but is this really one of them? I even say this as someone who has torrented books myself![4] We are holding back the data needed to make AI safe and interpretable while handing the keys to those who actively demonstrate that they should not hold the power. I don't understand why this is even that controversial. [0] Yes, this is a snipe at HumanEval. Yes, I will make the strong claim that the dataset was spoiled from day 1. If you doubt it, go read the paper and look at the questions (HuggingFace). [1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220658/google-eric-schmidt-stanford-talk-ai-startups-openai https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220658/google-eric-schm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... [3] https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/ [4] I can agree it is wrong, but can we agree there is a big difference between a student torrenting a book and a billion/trillion dollar company torrenting millions of books? I even lean on the side of free access to information, and am a fan of Aaron Swartz and SciHub. I make all my works available on ArXiv. But we can recognize there's a big difference between a singular person doing this at a small scale and a huge multi-national conglomerate doing it at a large scale. I can't even believe we so frequently compare these actions!
- damnesian 1y agoseems like the "mis" is missing from the name.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoMost of the comments missed the point. It's not that they trained on books, it's that they pirated the books.
- spandrew 1y agoAmazon has been doing this since the 2000's. Fun fact: This is how AWS came about; for them to scale its "LOOK INSIDE!" feature for all the books it was hoovering in an attempt to kill the last benefit the bookstore had over them. Ie. This is not a big deal. The only difference now is ppl are rapidly frothing to be outraged by the mere sniff of new tech on the horizon. Overton window in effect.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoTwo week old news. Some previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44367850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44367850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381639
- burnt-resistor 1y ago1980's: Johnny No. 5 need input! 2020's: (Steals a bunch of books to profit off acquired knowledge.)
- throwawayffffas 1y agoThe article doesn't say who is suing them. Is it a class action? How many of these 7M pirated books have they written? Is it publishing houses? How many of these books are relevant in this judgement?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoOrder on Fair Use https://ia800101.us.archive.org/15/items/gov.uscourts.cand.434709/gov.uscourts.cand.434709.231.0.pdf https://ia800101.us.archive.org/15/items/gov.uscourts.cand.4...
- greenie_beans 1y agosomething i've been trying to reconcile: i buy a cheap used book on biblio and i'm morally ok even though the writer doesn't get paid. but if i pirate the book, then i'm wrong for that because the writer doesn't get paid?
- nsonha 1y agono one said anything when Google did it way before LLM is a thing
- freejazz 1y agoI'm curious - do the people here who think copyright shouldn't exist also think trademark shouldn't exist?
- reverendsteveii 1y agounder the DMCA the minimum penalty for an illegally downloaded file is $750 (https://copyrightresource.uw.edu/copyright-law/dmca/ https://copyrightresource.uw.edu/copyright-law/dmca/) "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." --- the ruling If they committed piracy 7 million times and the minimum fine for each instance is $750 million then the law says that anthropic is liable for $5.25 billion. I just want it to be out there that they definitely broke the law and the penalty is a minimum $5.25 billion in fines according to the law, this way when none of this actually happens we at least can't pretend we didn't know.
- buyucu 1y agoWhen Aaron Schwartz did it, he ended up dying.