5 ms·

> I think that's fair, considering that two of those books received advances under $20K and never earned out. It may be fair to you but how about other authors

> I think that's fair, considering that two of those books received advances under $20K and never earned out. It may be fair to you but how about other authors? Maybe it's not fair at all to them.

jawns 1y ago
Then they can opt out of the class.
- gowld 1y ago
  Or the judge can reject the settlement as insufficient, which is what TFA is about.
  - NoahZuniga 1y ago
    That doesn't seem why the judge rejected the settlement. To me it seems like there judge thought that the details weren't worked out enough to tell if its reasonable.
terminalshort 1y ago
Do they sell their books for more than $3000 per copy? In that case it isn't fair. Otherwise they are getting a windfall because of Anthropic's stupidity in not buying the books.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  Some judgements are punitive, to deter future abuse. Otherwise why pay for anything when you can just always steal and pay only what's owed whenever you're caught?
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    Yes, in this particular case the damages are statutory, which means they are specifically punitive and not in compensation to the author. This is why it is definitely not unfair to the author. It is a lucky win for them.
    - godelski 1y ago
      I think you are using a naïve model. You're making the comparison based on "price of book" vs "compensation". Do you think thats all the costs here? Who knows about OP, but I'm willing to bet many of those authors taught legal council, which costs money. Opportunity costs are also difficult to measure. Same with lost future incomes. I don't think $3k is likely a bad deal, but I still think you're over simplifying things.
      - terminalshort 1y ago
        This is a class action suit, so the legal fees are almost certainly being paid on contingency and not out of pocket. And there is no opportunity cost or lost future income here because this is piracy not theft. The authors were never deprived of any ability to continue to sell their work through normal channels. They only lost the revenue from the sale of a single copy.
        godelski 1y ago
        > the legal fees are almost certainly being paid on contingency and not out of pocket. The legal fees for this lawsuit. Not the legal feels for anyone who went and talked to a lawyer suspecting their material was illegitimately used. You're treating the system as isolated when it is not. > no opportunity cost or lost future income here because this is piracy not theft. I think you are confused. Yes, it is piracy but not like the typical piracy most of us do. There's no loss in pirating a movie if you would never have paid to see the movie in the first place. But there's future costs here as people will use LLMs to generate books, which is competition. The cost of generating such a book is much cheaper, allowing for a much cheaper product. > They only lost the revenue from the sale of a single copy. In your effort to simplify things you have only complicated them.
        terminalshort 1y ago
        You are not entitled to protection from future competition, only from loss of sales of your current work. You are not ever entitled to legal fees you pay if you don't file a suit.
  - f33d5173 1y ago
    Supposing a book is usually $30, then this would be a factor of 100 above that. That seems fairly punitive to me.
- godelski 1y ago
  | Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.[0] Please don't be disingenuous. You know that none of the authors were selling their books for $3k a piece, so obviously this is about something more > because of Anthropic's stupidity in not buying the books. And what about OpenAI, who did the same thing? What about Meta, who did the same thing? What about Google, who did the same thing? What about Nvidia, who did the same thing? Clearly something should be done because it's not like these companies can't afford the cost of the books. I mean Meta recently hired people giving out >$100m packages and bought a data company for $15bn. Do you think they can't afford to buy the books, videos, or even the porn? We're talking about trillion dollar companies. It's been what, a year since Eric Schmidt said to steal everything and let the lawyers figure it out if you become successful?[1] Personal I'm not a big fan of "the ends justify the means" arguments. It's led to a lot of unrest, theft, wars, and death. Do you really not think it's possible to make useful products ethically? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [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...
  - janalsncm 1y ago
    This isn’t a deal to sell their books. The authors are getting $3k per book while maintaining the rights to their IP. The settlement is to avoid statutory damages which are between $750 and $30k or more per infringement. One of the consequences of retaining their rights is that they can also sue Meta and Google and OpenAI etc for the same thing.
    - godelski 1y ago
      I think we are in agreement[0]. I was just focusing on a different part [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45190232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45190232
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    Where is your evidence that Meta, Google, and OpenAI did the same thing? (As for NVIDIA, do they even train models?) Because if they did, why haven't they been sued? This is a garden variety copyright infringement case and would be a slam dunk win for the plaintiffs. The only novel part of the case is the claim that the plaintiffs lost on, which establishes president that training an LLM is fair use. > Clearly something should be done because it's not like these companies can't afford the cost of the books Yes indeed it should, and it has. They have been forced to pay $3000 per book they pirated, which is more than 100x what they would have gained if they had gotten away with it. IMO a fine of 100x the value of a copy of the pirated work is more than sufficient as a punishment for piracy. If you want to argue that the penalty should be more, you can do that, but it is completely missing my point. You are talking about what is fair punishment to the companies, and my comment was talking about what is fair compensation to the authors. Those are two completely different things.
- giveita 1y ago
  If I copy your book and sell a million bootleg copies that compete directly with your book is that worth the $30 cover price? This is what generative AI essentially is. Maybe the payment should be $500/h (say $5k a page) to cover the cost of preparing a human verified dataset for anthropic.
  - aeon_ai 1y ago
    It’s been determined that training is fair use by the same judge - Anthropic did in fact buy copies of books and train on those as well. Thus the $3k per violation is still punitive at (conservatively) 100x the cost of the book. Given that it is fair use, Authors do not have rights to restrict training on their works under copyright law alone.
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    In that case the damages would be $3000 per copy you sold. Distributing copyrighted work is an entirely different category of offense than just simply downloading and consuming. Anthropic didn't distribute any copies, so the damages are limited to the one copy they pirated. That is not remotely what generative AI is, and it's why the judge ruled that it was perfectly legal to feed the books to the model.
  - megaman821 1y ago
    I am not sure what types of books you read, but AI has replaced absolutely no books for me.
  - II2II 1y ago
    The thing is: you aren't distributing copies with generative AI, in any sensible meaning of the word. Don't get me wrong: I think this is in incredibly bad deal for authors. That said, I would be horrified if it wasn't treated as fair use. It would be incredibly destructive to society since people would try to use such rulings to chissel away at fair use. Imagine schools who had to pay yearly fees to use books. We know they would do that, they already try to do so (single use workbooks, online value added services). Or look at software. It is already going to be problematic for people who use LLMs. It is already problematic due to patents. Now imagine what would happen if reformulating algorithms that you read in a book was not considered as fair use. Or look at books themselves. A huge chunk of non-fiction consists of doing research and re-expressing ideas in non-original terms. Is that fair use? The main difference between that and a generative AI is we can say a machine did it in the case of generative AI, but is that enough to protect fair use in the conventional sense?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- seanhunter 1y ago
  If you read the copyright text on the back of the title page of a book, buying it doesn’t give you the right to “mechanically reproduce” the book. I would be very surprised if there was a court ruling that didn’t either A)completely strike that notice and say it’s fair game to photocopy or scan books you have bought for any purpose (which is not what courts have held in the past, so it would be a big shift) or B)uphold it and say it also applies to scraping the content of a book for training. …especially given the US “fair use” doctrine takes into account the effect that a particular use might have on the market for similar works, so the authors are bound to argue that the existence of AI that can reproduce fanfiction-like facsimiles of works at scale is going to poison the well and reduce the market for people spending actual money on future works (whether or not that’s true is another question). So in my view the court is going to say that buying a book doesn’t give them the right to train on the contents because that is mechanical reproduction which is explicitly disallowed by the copyright notice and they don’t fall under the “fair use” carveout because they affect the future market. There isn’t anywhere else where they were granted the right to use the authors’ works so the work is disallowed. Obviously no court finding is ever 100% guaranteed but that really seems the only logically-consistent conclusion they could come to.

> I think that's fair, considering that two of those books received advances under $20K and never earned out. It may be fair to you but how about other authors? Maybe it's not fair at all to them.

jawns 1y ago

Then they can opt out of the class.

gowld 1y ago
Or the judge can reject the settlement as insufficient, which is what TFA is about.
- NoahZuniga 1y ago
  That doesn't seem why the judge rejected the settlement. To me it seems like there judge thought that the details weren't worked out enough to tell if its reasonable.

terminalshort 1y ago

Do they sell their books for more than $3000 per copy? In that case it isn't fair. Otherwise they are getting a windfall because of Anthropic's stupidity in not buying the books.

paulryanrogers 1y ago
Some judgements are punitive, to deter future abuse. Otherwise why pay for anything when you can just always steal and pay only what's owed whenever you're caught?
- terminalshort 1y ago
  Yes, in this particular case the damages are statutory, which means they are specifically punitive and not in compensation to the author. This is why it is definitely not unfair to the author. It is a lucky win for them.
  - godelski 1y ago
    I think you are using a naïve model. You're making the comparison based on "price of book" vs "compensation". Do you think thats all the costs here? Who knows about OP, but I'm willing to bet many of those authors taught legal council, which costs money. Opportunity costs are also difficult to measure. Same with lost future incomes. I don't think $3k is likely a bad deal, but I still think you're over simplifying things.
    - terminalshort 1y ago
      This is a class action suit, so the legal fees are almost certainly being paid on contingency and not out of pocket. And there is no opportunity cost or lost future income here because this is piracy not theft. The authors were never deprived of any ability to continue to sell their work through normal channels. They only lost the revenue from the sale of a single copy.
      - godelski 1y ago
        > the legal fees are almost certainly being paid on contingency and not out of pocket. The legal fees for this lawsuit. Not the legal feels for anyone who went and talked to a lawyer suspecting their material was illegitimately used. You're treating the system as isolated when it is not. > no opportunity cost or lost future income here because this is piracy not theft. I think you are confused. Yes, it is piracy but not like the typical piracy most of us do. There's no loss in pirating a movie if you would never have paid to see the movie in the first place. But there's future costs here as people will use LLMs to generate books, which is competition. The cost of generating such a book is much cheaper, allowing for a much cheaper product. > They only lost the revenue from the sale of a single copy. In your effort to simplify things you have only complicated them.
        terminalshort 1y ago
        You are not entitled to protection from future competition, only from loss of sales of your current work. You are not ever entitled to legal fees you pay if you don't file a suit.
- f33d5173 1y ago
  Supposing a book is usually $30, then this would be a factor of 100 above that. That seems fairly punitive to me.
godelski 1y ago
| Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.[0] Please don't be disingenuous. You know that none of the authors were selling their books for $3k a piece, so obviously this is about something more > because of Anthropic's stupidity in not buying the books. And what about OpenAI, who did the same thing? What about Meta, who did the same thing? What about Google, who did the same thing? What about Nvidia, who did the same thing? Clearly something should be done because it's not like these companies can't afford the cost of the books. I mean Meta recently hired people giving out >$100m packages and bought a data company for $15bn. Do you think they can't afford to buy the books, videos, or even the porn? We're talking about trillion dollar companies. It's been what, a year since Eric Schmidt said to steal everything and let the lawyers figure it out if you become successful?[1] Personal I'm not a big fan of "the ends justify the means" arguments. It's led to a lot of unrest, theft, wars, and death. Do you really not think it's possible to make useful products ethically? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [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...
- janalsncm 1y ago
  This isn’t a deal to sell their books. The authors are getting $3k per book while maintaining the rights to their IP. The settlement is to avoid statutory damages which are between $750 and $30k or more per infringement. One of the consequences of retaining their rights is that they can also sue Meta and Google and OpenAI etc for the same thing.
  - godelski 1y ago
    I think we are in agreement[0]. I was just focusing on a different part [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45190232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45190232
- terminalshort 1y ago
  Where is your evidence that Meta, Google, and OpenAI did the same thing? (As for NVIDIA, do they even train models?) Because if they did, why haven't they been sued? This is a garden variety copyright infringement case and would be a slam dunk win for the plaintiffs. The only novel part of the case is the claim that the plaintiffs lost on, which establishes president that training an LLM is fair use. > Clearly something should be done because it's not like these companies can't afford the cost of the books Yes indeed it should, and it has. They have been forced to pay $3000 per book they pirated, which is more than 100x what they would have gained if they had gotten away with it. IMO a fine of 100x the value of a copy of the pirated work is more than sufficient as a punishment for piracy. If you want to argue that the penalty should be more, you can do that, but it is completely missing my point. You are talking about what is fair punishment to the companies, and my comment was talking about what is fair compensation to the authors. Those are two completely different things.
giveita 1y ago
If I copy your book and sell a million bootleg copies that compete directly with your book is that worth the $30 cover price? This is what generative AI essentially is. Maybe the payment should be $500/h (say $5k a page) to cover the cost of preparing a human verified dataset for anthropic.
- aeon_ai 1y ago
  It’s been determined that training is fair use by the same judge - Anthropic did in fact buy copies of books and train on those as well. Thus the $3k per violation is still punitive at (conservatively) 100x the cost of the book. Given that it is fair use, Authors do not have rights to restrict training on their works under copyright law alone.
- terminalshort 1y ago
  In that case the damages would be $3000 per copy you sold. Distributing copyrighted work is an entirely different category of offense than just simply downloading and consuming. Anthropic didn't distribute any copies, so the damages are limited to the one copy they pirated. That is not remotely what generative AI is, and it's why the judge ruled that it was perfectly legal to feed the books to the model.
- megaman821 1y ago
  I am not sure what types of books you read, but AI has replaced absolutely no books for me.
- II2II 1y ago
  The thing is: you aren't distributing copies with generative AI, in any sensible meaning of the word. Don't get me wrong: I think this is in incredibly bad deal for authors. That said, I would be horrified if it wasn't treated as fair use. It would be incredibly destructive to society since people would try to use such rulings to chissel away at fair use. Imagine schools who had to pay yearly fees to use books. We know they would do that, they already try to do so (single use workbooks, online value added services). Or look at software. It is already going to be problematic for people who use LLMs. It is already problematic due to patents. Now imagine what would happen if reformulating algorithms that you read in a book was not considered as fair use. Or look at books themselves. A huge chunk of non-fiction consists of doing research and re-expressing ideas in non-original terms. Is that fair use? The main difference between that and a generative AI is we can say a machine did it in the case of generative AI, but is that enough to protect fair use in the conventional sense?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
seanhunter 1y ago
If you read the copyright text on the back of the title page of a book, buying it doesn’t give you the right to “mechanically reproduce” the book. I would be very surprised if there was a court ruling that didn’t either A)completely strike that notice and say it’s fair game to photocopy or scan books you have bought for any purpose (which is not what courts have held in the past, so it would be a big shift) or B)uphold it and say it also applies to scraping the content of a book for training. …especially given the US “fair use” doctrine takes into account the effect that a particular use might have on the market for similar works, so the authors are bound to argue that the existence of AI that can reproduce fanfiction-like facsimiles of works at scale is going to poison the well and reduce the market for people spending actual money on future works (whether or not that’s true is another question). So in my view the court is going to say that buying a book doesn’t give them the right to train on the contents because that is mechanical reproduction which is explicitly disallowed by the copyright notice and they don’t fall under the “fair use” carveout because they affect the future market. There isn’t anywhere else where they were granted the right to use the authors’ works so the work is disallowed. Obviously no court finding is ever 100% guaranteed but that really seems the only logically-consistent conclusion they could come to.