4 ms·

Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have do

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

kevingadd 1y ago
Google did it the legal way with Google Books, didn't they?
- pyman 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - suyjuris 1y ago
    The judge appears to disagree with you on this. They found that training and selling an LLM are fair use, based on the fact that it is exceedingly transformative, and that the copyright holders are not entitled to any profits thereof due to copyright. (They also did get paid — Anthropic acquired millions of books legally, including all of the authors in this complaint. This would not retroactively absolve them of legal fault for past infringements, of course.)
    - pyman 1y ago
      The 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 ago
        Yes, 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.
        pyman 1y ago
        A couple of books? Anthropic faces billions of dollars in damages for pirating over 7 million books to build a digital library. The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That’s when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing over 7 million pirated books
    - flaptrap 1y ago
      The fallacy in the 'fair use' logic is that a person acquires a book and learns from it, but a machine incorporates the text. Copyright does not allow one to create a derivative work without permission. Only when the result of the transformation resembles the original work could it be said that it is subject to copyright. Do not regard either of those legal issues are set in concrete yet.
      - mensetmanusman 1y ago
        Both a human and a machine learn from it. You can design an LLM that doesn’t spit back the entire text after annealing. It just learns the essence like a human.
        badmintonbaseba 1y ago
        Morally maybe, but AFAIK machines "learning" and creating creative works on their own is not recognized legally, at least certainly not the same way as for people.
        Workaccount2 1y ago
        >AFAIK machines "learning" and creating creative works on their own is not recognized legally Did you read the article? The judge literally just legally recognized it.
TimorousBestie 1y ago
150K per work is the maximum fine for willful infringement (which this is). 105B+ is more than Anthropic is worth on paper. Of course they’re not going to be charged to the fullest extent of the law, they’re not a teenager running Napster in the early 2000s.
- voxic11 1y ago
  Even if they don't qualify for willful infringement damages (lets say they have a good faith belief their infringement was covered by fair use) the standard statutory damages for copyright infringement are $750-$30,000 per work.
- eikenberry 1y ago
  Plus they did it with a profit motive which would entail criminal proceedings.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > 150K per work is the maximum fine for willful infringement No, its not. It's the maximum statutory damages for willful infringement, which this has not be adjudicated to be. it is not a fine, its an alternative to basis of recovery to actual damages + infringers profits attributable to the infringement. Of course, there's also a very wide range of statutory damages, the minimum (if it is not "innocent" infringement) is $750/work. > 105B+ is more than Anthropic is worth on paper. The actual amount of 7 million works times $150,000/work is $1.05 trillion, not $105 billion.
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    > It's the maximum statutory damages for willful infringement, which this has not be adjudicated to be. it is not a fine, its an alternative to basis of recovery to actual damages + infringers profits attributable to the infringement. Yeah, you’re probably right, I’m not a lawyer. The point is that it doesn’t matter what number the law says they should pay, Anthropic can afford real lawyers and will therefore only pay a pittance, if anything. I’m old enough to remember what the feds did to Aaron Schwarz, and I don’t see what Anthropic did that was so different, ethically speaking.
pyman 1y ago
The problem with this thinking is that hundreds of thousands of teachers who spent years writing great, useful books and sharing knowledge and wisdom probably won't sue a billion dollar company for stealing their work. What they'll likely do is stop writing altogether. I'm against Anthropic stealing teacher's work and discouraging them from ever writing again. Some teachers are already saying this (though probably not in California).
- lofaszvanitt 1y ago
  They won't be needed anymore, once singularity is reached. This might be their thought process. This also exemplifies that the loathed caste system found in India is indeed in place in western societies. There is no equality, and seemingly there are worker bees who can be exploited, and there are privileged ones, and of course there are the queens.
  - pyman 1y ago
    :D Note: My definition of singularity isn't the one they use in San Francisco. It's the moment founders who stole the life's work of thousands of teachers finally go to prison, and their datacentres get seized.
    - lofaszvanitt 1y ago
      You can bet that this never gonna happen...
      - covercash 1y ago
        When the rich and powerful face zero consequences for breaking laws and ignoring the social contracts that keep our society functioning, you wind up with extreme overcorrections. See Luigi.
        achierius 1y ago
        How extreme is that, really? Not to justify murder: that is clearly bad. But "killing one man" is evidently something we, as a society, consider an "acceptable side-effect" when a corporation does it -- hell, you can kill thousands and get away scot-free if you're big enough. Luigi was peanuts in comparison. “THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” - Mark Twain
glimshe 1y ago
Isn't "pirating" a felony with jail time, though? That's what I remember from the FBI warning I had to see at the beginning of every DVD I bought (but not "pirated" ones).
- pyman 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - mystified5016 1y ago
    No, it isn't.
  - dmix 1y ago
    A court just ruled on Anthropic and said an LLM response wasn't a form of counterfeiting (ie, essentially selling pirate books on the black market). Although tbf that is the most radical interpretation still being put forward by the lawyers of publishers like NYTimes, despite the obvious flaws.
    - pyman 1y ago
      Anthropic still faces billions of dollars in damages for pirating over 7 million books to build a digital library. The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That's when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing those pirated books
  - Kim_Bruning 1y ago
    What someone at Anthropic did was download libgen once, then Anthropic figured "wait a minute, isn't that illegal?" , so instead they went and bought 7 million books for real and cut them up to scan them. Turns out this doesn't quite mitigate downloading them first. (Though frankly, I'm very much against people having to buy 7 million books when someone has already scanned them)
- voxic11 1y ago
  Yes criminal copyright infringement (willful copyright infringement done for commercial gain or at a large scale) is a felony.
maeln 1y ago
If you wanted to be legit with 0 chance of going to court, you would contact publisher and ask to pay a license to get access to their catalog for training, and negotiate from that point. This is what every company using media are doing (think Spotify, Netflix, but also journal, ad agency, ...). I don't know why people in HN are giving a pass to AI company for this kind of behavior.
- pyman 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - edgineer 1y ago
    The paradigm is that teachers will teach life skills like public speaking and entrepreneurship. Book smarts that can be more effectively taught by AI will be, once schools catch up.
    - pyman 1y ago
      I agree. The world is changing fast, but we need to make the transition less painful for everyone. The way things are going now only benefits big tech.
- ohashi 1y ago
  Because they are mostly software developers who think it's different because it impacts them.
- CaptainFever 1y ago
  > I don't know why people in HN are giving a pass to AI company for this kind of behavior. As mentioned in The Fucking Article, there's a legal difference between training an AI which largely doesn't repeat things verbatim (ala Anthropic) and redistributing media as a whole (ala Spotify, Netflix, journal, ad agency).
suyjuris 1y ago
Just downloading them is of course cheaper, but it is worth pointing out that, as the article states, they did also buy legitimate copies of millions of books. (This includes all the books involved in the lawsuit.) Based on the judgement itself, Anthropic appears to train only on the books legitimately acquired. Used books are quite cheap, after all, and can be bought in bulk.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  Buying a book is not license to re-sell that content for your own profit. I can't buy a copy of your book, make a million Xeroxes of it and sell those. The license you get when you buy a book is for a single use, not a license to do what ever you want with the contents of that book.
  - thedevilslawyer 1y ago
    What are you on about - the judge has literally said this was not resell, and is transformative and fair use.
  - suyjuris 1y ago
    Yes, of course! In this case, the judge identified three separate instances of copying: (1) downloading books without authorisation to add to their internal library, (2) scanning legitimately purchased books to add to their internal library, and (3) taking data from their internal library for the purposes of training LLMs. The purchasing part is only relevant for (2) — there the judge ruled that this is fair use. This makes a lot of sense to me, since no additional copies were created (they destroyed the physical books after scanning), so this is just a single use, as you say. The judge also ruled that (3) is fair use, but for a different reason. (They declined to decide whether (1) is fair use at this point, deferring to a later trial.)
darkoob12 1y ago
This is not about paying for a single copy. It would still be wrong even if they have bought every single one of those books. It is a form of plagiarism. The model will use someone else's idea without proper attribution.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  Legally speaking, we don't know that yet. Early signs are pointing at judges allowing this kind of crap because it's almost impossible for most authors to point out what part of the generated slop was originally theirs.
tmaly 1y ago
At minimum they should have to buy the book they are deriving weights from.
- SirMaster 1y ago
  But should the purchase be like a personal license? Or like a commercia license that costs way more? Because for example if you buy a movie on disc, that's a personal license and you can watch it yourself at home. But you can't like play it at a large public venue that sell tickets to watch it. You need a different and more expensive license to make money off the usage of the content in a larger capacity like that.
  - tmaly 1y ago
    I think it would have to be commercial since they are making profits from selling inference on the weights that derived from the books.
bmitc 1y ago
> I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Individuals would have their lives ruined either from massive fines or jail time.
blibble 1y ago
> Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. $500,000 per infringement...
- jandrese 1y ago
  And the crazy thing is that might be cheaper when you consider the alternative is to have your lawyers negotiate with the lawyers for the publishing companies for the right to use the works as training data. Not only is it many many billable hours just to draw up the contract, but you can be sure that many companies would either not play ball or set extremely high rates. Finally, if the publishing companies did bring a suit against Anthropic they might be asked to prove each case of infringement, basically to show that a specific work was used in training, which might be difficult since you can't reverse a model to get the inputs. When you're a billion dollar company it's much easier to get the courts to take your side. This isn't like the music companies suing teenagers who had a Kazaa account.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

kevingadd 1y ago

Google did it the legal way with Google Books, didn't they?

pyman 1y ago
[flagged]
- suyjuris 1y ago
  The judge appears to disagree with you on this. They found that training and selling an LLM are fair use, based on the fact that it is exceedingly transformative, and that the copyright holders are not entitled to any profits thereof due to copyright. (They also did get paid — Anthropic acquired millions of books legally, including all of the authors in this complaint. This would not retroactively absolve them of legal fault for past infringements, of course.)
  - pyman 1y ago
    The 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 ago
      Yes, 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.
      - pyman 1y ago
        A couple of books? Anthropic faces billions of dollars in damages for pirating over 7 million books to build a digital library. The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That’s when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing over 7 million pirated books
  - flaptrap 1y ago
    The fallacy in the 'fair use' logic is that a person acquires a book and learns from it, but a machine incorporates the text. Copyright does not allow one to create a derivative work without permission. Only when the result of the transformation resembles the original work could it be said that it is subject to copyright. Do not regard either of those legal issues are set in concrete yet.
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      Both a human and a machine learn from it. You can design an LLM that doesn’t spit back the entire text after annealing. It just learns the essence like a human.
      - badmintonbaseba 1y ago
        Morally maybe, but AFAIK machines "learning" and creating creative works on their own is not recognized legally, at least certainly not the same way as for people.
        Workaccount2 1y ago
        >AFAIK machines "learning" and creating creative works on their own is not recognized legally Did you read the article? The judge literally just legally recognized it.

TimorousBestie 1y ago

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

voxic11 1y ago
Even if they don't qualify for willful infringement damages (lets say they have a good faith belief their infringement was covered by fair use) the standard statutory damages for copyright infringement are $750-$30,000 per work.
eikenberry 1y ago
Plus they did it with a profit motive which would entail criminal proceedings.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> 150K per work is the maximum fine for willful infringement No, its not. It's the maximum statutory damages for willful infringement, which this has not be adjudicated to be. it is not a fine, its an alternative to basis of recovery to actual damages + infringers profits attributable to the infringement. Of course, there's also a very wide range of statutory damages, the minimum (if it is not "innocent" infringement) is $750/work. > 105B+ is more than Anthropic is worth on paper. The actual amount of 7 million works times $150,000/work is $1.05 trillion, not $105 billion.
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  > It's the maximum statutory damages for willful infringement, which this has not be adjudicated to be. it is not a fine, its an alternative to basis of recovery to actual damages + infringers profits attributable to the infringement. Yeah, you’re probably right, I’m not a lawyer. The point is that it doesn’t matter what number the law says they should pay, Anthropic can afford real lawyers and will therefore only pay a pittance, if anything. I’m old enough to remember what the feds did to Aaron Schwarz, and I don’t see what Anthropic did that was so different, ethically speaking.

pyman 1y ago

The problem with this thinking is that hundreds of thousands of teachers who spent years writing great, useful books and sharing knowledge and wisdom probably won't sue a billion dollar company for stealing their work. What they'll likely do is stop writing altogether. I'm against Anthropic stealing teacher's work and discouraging them from ever writing again. Some teachers are already saying this (though probably not in California).

lofaszvanitt 1y ago
They won't be needed anymore, once singularity is reached. This might be their thought process. This also exemplifies that the loathed caste system found in India is indeed in place in western societies. There is no equality, and seemingly there are worker bees who can be exploited, and there are privileged ones, and of course there are the queens.
- pyman 1y ago
  :D Note: My definition of singularity isn't the one they use in San Francisco. It's the moment founders who stole the life's work of thousands of teachers finally go to prison, and their datacentres get seized.
  - lofaszvanitt 1y ago
    You can bet that this never gonna happen...
    - covercash 1y ago
      When the rich and powerful face zero consequences for breaking laws and ignoring the social contracts that keep our society functioning, you wind up with extreme overcorrections. See Luigi.
      - achierius 1y ago
        How extreme is that, really? Not to justify murder: that is clearly bad. But "killing one man" is evidently something we, as a society, consider an "acceptable side-effect" when a corporation does it -- hell, you can kill thousands and get away scot-free if you're big enough. Luigi was peanuts in comparison. “THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” - Mark Twain

glimshe 1y ago

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

pyman 1y ago
[flagged]
- mystified5016 1y ago
  No, it isn't.
- dmix 1y ago
  A court just ruled on Anthropic and said an LLM response wasn't a form of counterfeiting (ie, essentially selling pirate books on the black market). Although tbf that is the most radical interpretation still being put forward by the lawyers of publishers like NYTimes, despite the obvious flaws.
  - pyman 1y ago
    Anthropic still faces billions of dollars in damages for pirating over 7 million books to build a digital library. The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That's when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing those pirated books
- Kim_Bruning 1y ago
  What someone at Anthropic did was download libgen once, then Anthropic figured "wait a minute, isn't that illegal?" , so instead they went and bought 7 million books for real and cut them up to scan them. Turns out this doesn't quite mitigate downloading them first. (Though frankly, I'm very much against people having to buy 7 million books when someone has already scanned them)
voxic11 1y ago
Yes criminal copyright infringement (willful copyright infringement done for commercial gain or at a large scale) is a felony.

maeln 1y ago

If you wanted to be legit with 0 chance of going to court, you would contact publisher and ask to pay a license to get access to their catalog for training, and negotiate from that point. This is what every company using media are doing (think Spotify, Netflix, but also journal, ad agency, ...). I don't know why people in HN are giving a pass to AI company for this kind of behavior.

pyman 1y ago
[flagged]
- edgineer 1y ago
  The paradigm is that teachers will teach life skills like public speaking and entrepreneurship. Book smarts that can be more effectively taught by AI will be, once schools catch up.
  - pyman 1y ago
    I agree. The world is changing fast, but we need to make the transition less painful for everyone. The way things are going now only benefits big tech.
ohashi 1y ago
Because they are mostly software developers who think it's different because it impacts them.
CaptainFever 1y ago
> I don't know why people in HN are giving a pass to AI company for this kind of behavior. As mentioned in The Fucking Article, there's a legal difference between training an AI which largely doesn't repeat things verbatim (ala Anthropic) and redistributing media as a whole (ala Spotify, Netflix, journal, ad agency).

suyjuris 1y ago

Just downloading them is of course cheaper, but it is worth pointing out that, as the article states, they did also buy legitimate copies of millions of books. (This includes all the books involved in the lawsuit.) Based on the judgement itself, Anthropic appears to train only on the books legitimately acquired. Used books are quite cheap, after all, and can be bought in bulk.

asadotzler 1y ago
Buying a book is not license to re-sell that content for your own profit. I can't buy a copy of your book, make a million Xeroxes of it and sell those. The license you get when you buy a book is for a single use, not a license to do what ever you want with the contents of that book.
- thedevilslawyer 1y ago
  What are you on about - the judge has literally said this was not resell, and is transformative and fair use.
- suyjuris 1y ago
  Yes, of course! In this case, the judge identified three separate instances of copying: (1) downloading books without authorisation to add to their internal library, (2) scanning legitimately purchased books to add to their internal library, and (3) taking data from their internal library for the purposes of training LLMs. The purchasing part is only relevant for (2) — there the judge ruled that this is fair use. This makes a lot of sense to me, since no additional copies were created (they destroyed the physical books after scanning), so this is just a single use, as you say. The judge also ruled that (3) is fair use, but for a different reason. (They declined to decide whether (1) is fair use at this point, deferring to a later trial.)

darkoob12 1y ago

This is not about paying for a single copy. It would still be wrong even if they have bought every single one of those books. It is a form of plagiarism. The model will use someone else's idea without proper attribution.

jeroenhd 1y ago
Legally speaking, we don't know that yet. Early signs are pointing at judges allowing this kind of crap because it's almost impossible for most authors to point out what part of the generated slop was originally theirs.

tmaly 1y ago

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

SirMaster 1y ago
But should the purchase be like a personal license? Or like a commercia license that costs way more? Because for example if you buy a movie on disc, that's a personal license and you can watch it yourself at home. But you can't like play it at a large public venue that sell tickets to watch it. You need a different and more expensive license to make money off the usage of the content in a larger capacity like that.
- tmaly 1y ago
  I think it would have to be commercial since they are making profits from selling inference on the weights that derived from the books.

bmitc 1y ago

> I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Individuals would have their lives ruined either from massive fines or jail time.

blibble 1y ago

> Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. $500,000 per infringement...

jandrese 1y ago
And the crazy thing is that might be cheaper when you consider the alternative is to have your lawyers negotiate with the lawyers for the publishing companies for the right to use the works as training data. Not only is it many many billable hours just to draw up the contract, but you can be sure that many companies would either not play ball or set extremely high rates. Finally, if the publishing companies did bring a suit against Anthropic they might be asked to prove each case of infringement, basically to show that a specific work was used in training, which might be difficult since you can't reverse a model to get the inputs. When you're a billion dollar company it's much easier to get the courts to take your side. This isn't like the music companies suing teenagers who had a Kazaa account.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]