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Anthropic judge rejects $1.5B AI copyright settlement
- nobody9999 1y agohttps://archive.ph/tOwYx https://archive.ph/tOwYx
- throwmeaway222 1y ago[flagged]
- SilverElfin 1y agoThey may not have a choice. Fighting these legal battles is very expensive and exhausting. And books are a low margin business. Anthropic has access to funding. Authors? Not so much. Losing your book to AI for a one time $3000 settlement feels like a bad deal to me.
- pier25 1y ago> Authors? Not so much. Losing your book to AI for a one time $3000 settlement feels like a bad deal to me. AFAIK it's even worse as this settlement is only about downloading pirated copies of the books. IIRC the training itself was deemed fair use.
- Dylan16807 1y agoWell things are worse in the sense that a different ruling feels really bad for them. But it means that this case is getting them thousands of dollars instead of one or two purchases, which is a pretty good outcome.
- visarga 1y ago> Losing your book to AI for a one time $3000 settlement feels like a bad deal to me. I'm wondering how lost would the book be? What would be the difference in sales.
- program_whiz 1y agoIt isn't about sales in the short term. Same with code. Your project might even be OSS (so not expecting profit). Its about a system that exploits that for one party's profit, while putting the other out of business. They reduced the writer's ability to ever be employed again, or to make royalties at the same level as before (not necessarily reduced the sales of existing titles, though that may occur as well). Same with code, AI hoovering all the code doesn't mean people won't use libCurl, but it does mean jobs are disappearing and people may not be around to write the next libCurl.
- ares623 1y agoHow does the saying go again? “Everyone’s a libertarian until they get punched in the face.”
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jawns 1y agoIn class action lawsuits (Rule 23, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the U.S.) any settlement must be reviewed and approved by the judge, who has a duty to ensure it is "fair, reasonable, and adequate" for all members of the class. Judges often reject settlements if they appear unfair, too favorable to one side (often the defendant), or if attorney fees seem excessive.
- dboreham 1y agoVery wrong.
- ceejayoz 1y agoGotta love the confidence, though!
- NelsonMinar 1y agoIncorrect information from a throwaway account. This is simply not true.
- jawns 1y agoI'm an author, and I've confirmed that 3 of my books are in the 500K dataset. Thus, I stand to receive about $9,000 as a result of this settlement. I think that's fair, considering that two of those books received advances under $20K and never earned out. Also, while I'm sure that Anthropic has benefited from training its models on this dataset, that doesn't necessarily mean that those models are a lasting asset.
- franze 1y agowhere can i check if my book was in it?
- pier25 1y agoMaybe here: https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/ https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/
- simonw 1y agoOne of the sources is LibGen, you can search that with this tool: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/searc...
- k__ 1y agoCool. Where can I check if I'm eligible?
- jawns 1y agohttps://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/searc...
- gabriel666smith 1y agoThis is a 2025 snapshot of Libgen, rather than the dataset Anthropic trained on, or the 'reduced to 500k books' dataset of books by authors who are deemed legally due some cash from Anthropic because Anthropic downloaded the ebook file.
- puppycodes 1y agoI have no empathy for multi-billion dollar companies but intellectual property and copyright does nothing for positive for humanity.
- arduanika 1y agoWhat do you do for work, and do you believe it should be given away for free? Or are you just talking about other people's work?
- nextworddev 1y agoAre we even sure some of these posters aren’t LLms
- program_whiz 1y agoIn an economy where ideas have value, it seems logical we should have property protection, much like we do for physical goods. Its easy to argue "ideas should be freely shared", but if an idea takes 20 years and $100M dollars to develop, and there are no protections for ideas, then no one will take the time to develop them. Most modern technology we have is due to copyright/patents (drugs, electronics, entertainment, etc.), because without those protections, no one would have invested the time and energy to develop them in the first place. I believe you are probably only looking at the current state of the world and seeing how it "stifles competition" or "hampers innovation". Those allegations are probably true to some extent, especially in specific cases, but its also missing the fact that without those protections, the tech likely wouldn't be created in the first place (and so you still wouldn't be able to freely use the idea, since the person who invented it wouldn't have).
- 8note 1y ago> drugs this is a kinda strange example, since the discovery tends to be government funded research, and the safety shown by private money the USSR went to space without those protections. its not like property protections are the only thing that has driven invention. MIT licenses are also pretty popular as are creative commons licenses. people also do things that don't make a lot of money, like teaching elementary school. it costs a ton of money to make and run all those schools, but without any intellectual property being created that can be sold or rented out. i dont believe that nobody would want to build much of the things we have now, if there wasnt IP around them. Making and inventing things is fun
- firesteelrain 1y agoHow do any of these AI companies protect authors by users uploading full PDF or even plaintext of anything? Aren’t the same piracy concerns real even if they train on what users are providing ?
- gowld 1y agoIf this is detected as leading to copyright violation, then that can be the subject of a lawsuit. Since the violation is detected via model output, it doesn't matter what the input method is.
- jahbrewski 1y agoIf you’re vacuuming, shouldn’t you be responsible for what you’re vacuuming?
- robryan 1y agoTraining aside, an llm reading a pdf as part of a prompt feels similar to say Dropbox storing a pdf for you.
- terminalshort 1y agoIt's not similar at all because you can't get the book back out of the LLM like you can out of Dropbox. Copyright law is concerned with outputs, not with inputs. If you could make a machine that could create full exact copies of books without ever training on or copying those books, that would still be infringement.
- shkkmo 1y ago> make a machine that could create full exact copies of books without ever training on or copying those books, that would still be infringement. No it wouldn't. Making the machine is not making a copy of the book. Using the machine to make a copy of the book would be infringment because...you would be making a copy of the book.
- pessimizer 1y ago
- atleastoptimal 1y agoCopying files of scanned books isn’t worth a 1T dollar fine
- adrr 1y agoMaybe Anthropic should have paid attention to the law that has $150k statutory damages per violation if the infringement is willful. So much cheaper just to buy the books and scan it instead of violating a law that has a statutory damage clause.
- ripped_britches 1y agoI really want to see an alternative universe where we have mechanical turk folks scanning a huge literal book library into a data warehouse.
- eschaton 1y agoIn general buying books and scanning them for this type of use would *also* be copyright infringement.
- adrr 1y agoNo. Thats fair use. Format shifting is fair use as affirmed by RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia which was about ripping CDs to MP3s.
- 1y ago
- SamoyedFurFluff 1y agoFor folks unable to access the full article, does the judge say why?
- jorams 1y agoTwo paragraphs from the article that I think sum it up pretty nicely: > Judge William Alsup at the hearing said the motion to approve the deal was denied without prejudice, but in a minute order after the hearing said approval is postponed pending submission of further clarifying information. > Alsup said class members “get the shaft” in many class actions once the monetary relief is established and attorneys stop caring. He told the parties that “very good notice” must be given to class members to ensure they have the opportunity to opt in or out, and protect Anthropic from potential claimants coming out of the woodwork later. Essentially he has concerns about missing details in two directions: 1. How class members are going to get notified, submit claims, and paid out, what works are even included, and the involvement of an army of lawyers that shouldn't be paid from the settlement. 2. How this deal is going to prevent Anthropic getting sued for cases that should have been covered.
- stingraycharles 1y agoAlmost feels like the judge is siding with Anthropic here. But he’s right that in these types of cases, the lawyers stop caring once a settlement is reached because that’s the massive pay day they were after.
- IshKebab 1y agoFeels like they should only get paid when each individual settlement is actually settled surely?
- jokoon 1y agoThat tiles is weird, what is an "Anthropic judge"?
- rideontime 1y agoThe judge for the Anthropic lawsuit, obviously.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- phaedryx 1y agoIt sounds like the judge works for Anthropic
- giveita 1y agoA human judge. Make the most of it, times are changing.
- m463 1y agonot to be confused with an anthropomorphic judge.
- alok-g 1y agoIndeed. While I could sense what was implied, I also thought of some newly-launched 'AI Judge' by Anthropic making the said claim. :-)
- rideontime 1y agoDirect link to Judge Alsup's order: https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/BartzetalvAnthropicPBCDocketNo324cv05417NDCalAug192024CourtDocket/38?doc_id=X541S23JROF9BCQSF8959K1SF12 https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Bartzet... Name should sound familiar to those who follow tech law; he presided over Oracle v Google, along with Anthony Levandowski's criminal case for stealing Waymo tech for Uber.
- wrsh07 1y agoAs someone who has had a passing interest in most of these cases, I've actually come to like Alsup and am impressed by his technical understanding. His orders and opinions are, imo, a success story of the US judicial system. I think this is true even if you disagree with them
- darkwizard42 1y agoHe actually does understand most of what he is ruling on which is a welcome surprise. Not just legal jargon but also the technical spirit of what is at stake.
- bsimpson 1y agoHe's also the one who called bullshit when Oracle tried to claim that Java's function signatures were so novel they should be eligible for copyright. (Generally, arts are copyrightable and engineering is not - there's a creativity requirement.) They tried to say `rangeCheck(length, start, end)` was novel. He spat back that he'd written equivalent utility functions as a hobbyist hundreds of time!
- kemitchell 1y agoArt versus engineering is a very dangerous generalization of the law. There is a creativity requirement for copyrightability, but it's an explicitly low bar. Search query "minimal degree of creativity". The Supreme Court decision in Oracle v Google skipped over copyrightability and addressed fair use. Fair use is a legal defense, applying only in response to finding infringement, which can only be found if material's copyrightable. So the way the Supreme Court made its decision was weird, but it wasn't about the creativity requirement.
- lxe 1y agoGood. Approving this would have set a concerning precedent. Edit: My stance on information freedom and copyright hasn't changed since Aaron Swartz's death in 2013. Intellectual property laws, patents, copyright, and similar protections feel outdated and serve mainly to protect established interests. Despite widespread piracy making virtually all media available immediately upon release, content creators and media companies continue to grow and profit. Why should publishers rely on century-old laws to restrict access?
- gabriel666smith 1y agoWould it actually set any kind of legal precedent, or just establish a sort of cultural vibe baseline? I know Anthropic doesn't have to admit fault, and I don't know if that establishes anything in either direction. But I'm not from the US, so I wouldn't want to pretend to have intimate knowledge of its system. The number of bizarre, contradictory inferences this settlement asks you to make - no matter your stance on the wider question - is wild.
- stingraycharles 1y agoA settlement means that no legal precedent is set, so I can only assume a cultural precedent. Sometimes these companies specifically seek out a settlement to avoid setting a legal precedent in case they feel like they will lose.
- lxe 1y agoHmm my huge concern was that if the settlement were to get approved, it would set a legal precedent for other "settlement approvals" like this one, setting back AI research in the US, paving way for China to win the race.
- impossiblefork 1y agoNah, I think it's the opposite. If this settlement were approved, then you could screw people over in class action lawsuits. This settlement was the "AI-friendly" thing.
- paddw 1y agoAnthropic should drop the deal and take the battle up the court system, they'll probably win
- AuthError 1y agothey did, judge told authors to get better representation to prove harm. I think it's dicey cause if anthropic loses then it could be catastrophic (i.e. if judge jury thinks reward is 5x of what the proposal is would mean they would need to raise a new round)
- rvz 1y ago> they'll probably win They are settling because the risk of losing will cost their entire business. Anthropic knows that they will lose if they were brought to trial.
- pier25 1y agoIt's an indisputable fact they downloaded like 7M books illegally.
- HardCodedBias 1y agoOutputs not inputs needs to become law.
- anp 1y agoComments so far seem to be focusing on the rejection without considering the stated reasons for rejection. AFAICT Alsup is saying that the problems are procedural (how do payouts happen, does the agreement indemnify Anthropic from civil “double jeopardy”, etc), not that he’s rejecting the negotiated payout. Definitely not a lawyer but it seems to me like the negotiators could address the rejection without changing any dollar numbers.
- yladiz 1y agoYes, exactly. The article is pretty clear that it’s rejected without prejudice and that a few points need to be ironed out before he gives a preliminary approval. I suspect a lot of folks didn’t read much/any of TFA. I do wonder if all of the kinks will be smoothed out in time. Not a lawyer too, but the timeline to create the longer list is a bit tight, and generally feels like we could see an actual rejection or at least a stretched out process here that goes on for a few more months at least before approval.
- qingcharles 1y agoExactly. The judge is doing exactly what he's designed to do in a civil case -- help forge an agreement between the parties that doesn't come back to bite anyone in the future. The last thing a judge wants is a case getting reopened and relitigated a year from now because there was a "bug" in the settlement.
- cleandreams 1y agoThe judge IIRC found that training models using copyrighted materials was fair use. I disagree. Furthermore this will be a problem for anyone who generates text for a living. Eventually LLMs will undercut web, news, and book publishing because LLMs capture the value and don't pay for it. The ecosystem will be harmed. The only problem the judge found here was training on pirated texts.
- xvector 1y agoThe tech companies need to make a shared subsidiary that simply buys all the books just once and then shares that data amongst subsidiary owners.
- internet_points 1y agoBuying a book at the regular price doesn't give you rights to sell copies of that book. (I'm not saying selling llm access means selling copies of the book -- but then I'm also not not saying it.)
- freejazz 1y agoThis headline is incorrect.