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> 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
by rchaud 1y 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.
- ReFruity 1y 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.
- crote 1y agoOption 1: $183B valuation, $1.5B settlement. 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.
- fn-mote 1y ago> which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these. What's actually wrong with this? They paid $1.5B for a bunch of pirated books. Seems like a fair price to me, but what do I know. The settlement should reflect society's belief of the cost or deterrent, I'm not sure which (maybe both). This might be controversial, but I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willing to pay the cost. Imagine if you couldn't speed in a car. Imagine if you couldn't choose to be jailed for nonviolent protest. This isn't some case where they destroyed a billion dollars worth of pristine wilderness and got off with a slap on the wrist.
- zmmmmm 1y ago> I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willing to pay the cost so you don't think super rich people should be bound by laws at all? Unless you made the cost proportional to (maybe expontial to) somebody's wealth, you would be creating a completely lawless class who would wreak havoc on society.
- ryandrake 1y agoHate to break it to you, but that's currently the world we live in. And yes, it sucks.
- LMYahooTFY 1y agoThe law was not broken by "super rich people". It was broken by a company of people who were not very rich at all and have managed to produce billions in value (not dollars, value) by breaking said laws. They're not trafficking humans or doing predatory lending, they're building AI. This is why our judicial system literally handles things on a case by case basis.
- godelski 1y agoI just want to make sure I understand this correctly. Your argument is that this is all fine because it wasn't done by people who were super rich but instead done by people who became super rich and were funded by the super rich? I just want to check that I have that right. You are arguing that if I'm a successful enough bank robber that this is fine because I pay some fine that is a small portion of what I heisted? I mean I wouldn't have been trafficking humans or doing predatory lending. I was just stealing from the banks and everyone hates the banks. But if I'm only a slightly successful bank robber stealing only a few million and deciding that's enough, then straight to jail do not pass go, do not collect $200? It's unclear to me because in either case I create value for the economy as long as I spend that money. Or is the key part what I do what that money? Like you're saying I get a pass if I use that stolen money to invent LLMs?
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoIn most places, a legal settlement is considered a tax deductible loss. At a certain scale it will likely cost the company nothing, but these kinds of cases often trigger speculators grabbing discount stock from panicking amateurs. lol We still have no idea what they sell, so avoided exposure to their antics... =3
- tpmoney 1y agoBut that isn't how tax deductions work. Since taxes are always a fraction of income, a deduction can never save you more money than you already paid out to get the deduction in the first place. If you have a 10% tax rate, your options are: A) Make 100M, pay 10M in taxes or B) Make 100M, pay 10M in lawsuit settlements, pay 9M in taxes You come out ahead every time by not paying the settlement in the first place.
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoYou may be confused, but a business loss deduction usually reduces a taxable income. In general, most systems only require the cost/loss was incurred during gaining or producing income from a business or property. For a significant sum, we should assume their team consulted a specialist firm on the subject at their location. People don't often YOLO this stuff at that scale, and businesses don't always settle every time they get shaken down for cash... some go to war, as it can be cheaper to sandbag/delay till opponents go bankrupt. Have a great day. =3
- tpmoney 1y ago> You may be confused, but a business loss deduction usually reduces a taxable income. Yes, I know, which is why in option B the taxes required was $9M instead of $10M. The 10k payment reduced taxable income from $100M to $90M. Business taxes are notoriously complex, but I am aware of no IRS rules that would allow a 10M legal settlement to reduce the taxes owed by >= $10M. If you believe I remain confused, please by all means provide an example scenario and/or citations to the relevant tax statutes.
- kingforaday 1y agoIt's not about money. It's about time.
- Aeolun 1y agoSure, but that’s mostly because the sheer convenience of the illegal way is so much higher, and carries zero startup cost.
- alpinisme 1y agoThe 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.
- gpm 1y agoI think the most notable difference is that grand larceny actually deprived someone of something they would have otherwise had, while pirating something you couldn't afford to buy doesn't because there was no circumstance in which they were getting the money and piracy doesn't involve taking anything from them...
- Aeolun 1y agoNot sure it is realistic or easier to physically steal 500k books. I get what you are going for, but my point was that a dataset existed, and the only way it could be compiled was illegaly.
- _heimdall 1y agoWhat 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.
- Lu2025 1y agoI think the difference between Waymo and Uber is risk level. Maybe Waymo would like to skirt regulations but they won't be allowed to by citizens and officials alike.
- _heimdall 1y agoWaymo could likely have done something similar to Tesla. Pay a licensed driver to sit behind the wheel and claim the car only has driver assist. That likely would have worked long enough to gain traction and leverage to pressure a green light for full driverless mode.
- utyop22 1y agoExactly. Well said.
- kelnos 1y agoThat doesn't really feel like the same thing to me. With Uber you had a company that wanted to enter an existing market but couldn't due to legally-granted monopolies on taxi service. And given that existing market, you can be sure that the incumbents would lobby to keep Uber locked out. With Waymo you have a new technology that has a computer driving the car autonomously. There isn't really any directly-incumbent party with a vested (conflict of) interest to argue against it. Waymo is a kind of taxi, though, so presumably existing taxi operators -- and the likes of Uber and Lyft -- could argue against it in order to protect their advantages. But ironically Uber and Lyft "softened" those regulatory bars already, so it might not have been worth it to try. At any rate, the regulatory and safety concerns are also very different between the two. I think I am also just a little more sympathetic to early Uber, given how terrible and cartel-like taxi service was in the past. But I would not at all be sympathetic toward Waymo putting driverless cars on the streets without regulatory approval and oversight, especially if people got injured or killed.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoSir. These were carpoolers, just sharing a ride to their new online friends' B&B.
- DoctorOetker 1y agoLawyer: "Sir. These were carpoolers, just sharing a ride to their new online friends' B&B." Judge: "But this app facilitated them." Lawyer: "Well, you presume so-called genuine carpoolers are not facilitated? The manufacturers of their cell phones, the telecom operators, their employers or the bar where they met, or the bus company at whose bus stop they met, they all facilitated their carpooling behavior." Judge: "But your company profits from this coordination!" Lawyer: "Well we pay taxes, just like the manufacturer of the cell phone, the telecom operator, their employers, the bus company or the bar... But let's ignore that, what you -representing the government (which in turn supposedly represents the people)- are really after is money or power. As a judge you are not responsible for setting up the economy, or micromanaging the development of apps, so its not your fault that the government didn't create this application before our company did. In a sense you are lucky that we created the app given that the government did not create this application in a timely fashion!" Judge: "How so?" Lawyer: "If the population had created this app they would have started thinking about where the proceeds should go. They would have gotten concerned about the centralization of power (financial and intelligence). They would have searched for ways to decentralize and secure their app. They would have eventually gotten cryptographers involved. In that world, no substantial income would be generated, your fleet of taxi's would be threatened as well, and you wouldn't even have the juicy intel we occasionally share either!" This conversation almost never takes place, since it only needs to take place once, after which a naive judge has learned how the cookie crumbles. Most judges have lost this naivety before even becoming a judge. They learn this indirectly when small "annoyances" threaten the scheme (one could say the official taxi fleet was an earlier such scheme).
- jayd16 1y ago> But nobody was ever going to that Didn't Google have a long standing project to do just that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books
- efskap 1y agoCrazy to think we've been helping train AI through captchas long before the "click all squares containing" ones.
- a2128 1y ago"stop spam. read books." is a very ironic phrase to look back on considering the amount of spam on the internet that LLMs have enabled
- miohtama 1y agoThis lawsuit also makes sure that only parties that can train an AI with good enough training material are now - Google - Anthropic - Any Chinese company who do not care about copyright laws What is the cost of buying and scanning books? Copyright law needs to be fixed and its ridiculous hundred years tenure chopped away.
- slow_typist 1y agoTraining a Model on 100+ years old literature only could be an interesting experience though.
- 1y ago
- golem14 1y agoGoogle did.
- greensoap 1y agoAnthropic 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
- hcs 1y agoThe lawsuit didn't find anything, Anthropic claimed this as part of the settlement. Companies settle without admission of wrongdoing all the time, to the extent that it can be bargained for.
- ijk 1y agoThe judge's ruling from earlier certainly seemed to me to suggest that the training was fair use. Obviously, that's not part of the current settlement. I'm no expert on this, so I don't know the extent to which the earlier ruling applies.
- hcs 1y agoIf I'm reading this right yes the training was fair use, but I was responding (unclearly) to the claim that the pirated books weren't used to train commercially released LLMs. The judge complained that it wasn't clear what was actually used, from the June order https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/ANTHROPIC%20fair%20use.pdf https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/... [pdf]: > Notably, in its motion, Anthropic argues that pirating initial copies of Authors’ books and millions of other books was justified because all those copies were at least reasonably necessary for training LLMs — and yet Anthropic has resisted putting into the record what copies or even sets of copies were in fact used for training LLMs. > We know that Anthropic has more information about what it in fact copied for training LLMs (or not). Anthropic earlier produced a spreadsheet that showed the composition of various data mixes used for training various LLMs — yet it clawed back that spreadsheet in April. A discovery dispute regarding that spreadsheet remains pending.
- rise_before_sun 1y ago
- Ninjinka 1y agoAnthropic also did specifically this, spent millions on it
- jimmaswell 1y ago> It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel. Now you don't even have to use Uber in many of these places because taxis had to compete - they otherwise never would have stopped pulling the "credit card reader is broken" scam, taking long routes on purpose, and started using tech that made them more accountable to these things as well as harder for them to racially profile passengers. (They would infamously pretend not to see you if they didn't want to give you service back when you had to hail them with an IRL gesture instead of an app..)
- 33MHz-i486 1y agoi dont know that its such a great thing in the end. Uber/Lyft is 50-100% more expensive now than taxis were before. Theyre entrenched in different ways.
- bnjms 1y agoAs far as I was aware taxis were an imagined thing we saw in movies. I understand you could call a number and ask for a ride to the airport though they were never useful.
- internetter 1y agoWhat?
- bnjms 1y agoTaxis weren’t actually available in most US cities before ride share. Only the large dense cities really had them. This argument that things were better before is only relevant for a small handful of metros. The ride shares are better in spite of their flaws.
- starttoaster 1y agoThey're always more common in metro areas of the US. You must be from a relatively rural area and don't get out of it much. That said, uh, the use of getting a taxi to drive you to or from the airport was just not having to park at the airport which generally costs a lot of money, and in certain areas is a little sketchy on whether or not your car will get cracked open while you're away.
- UltraSane 1y agoAnthropic bought books, cut the spine off and scanned them with sheet fed scanners.
- simonw 1y agoAnthropic started scanning books in February 2024. I don't think these lawsuits had been filed by then - as far as I can tell that was in August 2024: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/bartz-v-anthropic-pbc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/bartz-v-anthro...
- sim7c00 1y agoactually NL is training a GPT on only materials they bought fairly. it wont be a chatgpt or coding model ofc, thats not what they go for, but it'll be interesting to see its quality as its all fairly and honestly done. transparently.
- TimByte 1y agoWhat's wild is that $1.5B sounds huge… until you compare it to the potential upside of owning the dominant AI model trained on everything
- lazide 1y agoNot to mention that Uber doing well is exactly what would give them leverage to even have a discussion with Taxi medallion owners. Otherwise, of course they would tell them to just pound sand.
- rpdillon 1y ago> But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Anthropic did. That was the part of their operation that they didn't get in trouble for, but the news spun it as "Anthropic destroyed millions of books to make AI".