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Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude
- exabrial 3mo agothat number is missing a zero or two in front of the decimal point
- BeetleB 3mo agoAs was pointed out, the settlement is for piracy, not training. They had already ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted material for training fell within fair use. As such, if you pirated a book and had to pay $3000 for that one instance, I don't think you'd like it if I said you should have paid $30K or $300K instead. If anything, this is analogous to the ridiculous fines people had to pay when pirating music. (Not that I'm complaining...)
- wgjordan 3mo ago> As such, if you pirated a book and had to pay $3000 for that one instance, I don't think you'd like it if I said you should have paid $30K or $300K instead. If you pirated a book for personal use the amount of liability wouldn't match a company whose profit could be attributed to pirating the same book. In US copyright law, a copyright infringer could be liable for "any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement" [1] (if the copyright owner elects to recover actual damages and profits instead of statutory damages). [1] 17 U.S.C. § 504(b), https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- BeetleB 3mo agoI would imagine that for over 99% of the books covered in this lawsuit, they're earning less than $3000 per book. Put another way, their revenues wouldn't drop much if they simply hadn't trained on those 99%.
- ctippett 3mo agoIANAL, but the parent comment quotes "any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement", which I take to mean it's the profit Anthropic stands to make based on its use of the pirated content that's recoverable. Given the entire global economy is currently bullish on the potential profitability of AI, I dare say they got off incredibly lightly settling for just $3k per book.
- mediaman 3mo agoNone of this matters, this is the judge approving a voluntary settlement reached between the parties last year. If you think it should be different then you have to make a cogent argument why the public should get to interfere with a settlement the two sides mutually agree on.
- ctippett 3mo agoNote: I never said it should be different and certainly wasn't arguing for any side. I was merely making an observation that the settlement seemed like a good deal (for both parties) given the potential for Anthropic to be liable for a significantly greater amount depending on how the law would be interpreted if they went to trial.
- blackqueeriroh 3mo agoNo, because you cannot prove that any individual book actually contributed meaningfully to Anthropic’s profit. Exclude one book from the training dataset. Did you make a worse model? We actually know the answer to this, and it is: absolutely not. The reality is this: your intellectual output is almost always only valuable to any company in existence in aggregate, never in isolation.
- trentor 3mo agoThomas-Rasset got 80k per song and Tennenbaum got 22k per song. The law says up to 150k per work. It was a gift.
- xboxnolifes 3mo agoSure, but in any other instance of piracy, HN would call awarding $20k per pirated song insane.
- trentor 3mo agoBecause we are mostly discussing a single private person that got caught for maybe 20 songs. I don't want to bring up Aaron but the taste gets saltier the more we see settlements like this.
- FireBeyond 3mo agoMaybe they can give it in the form of expiring Fable credits.
- BeetleB 3mo agoSo that the authors can use it to write their next books!
- jdlshore 3mo agoTo be clear, the issue is not that the books were used to train Claude, but that they were pirated.
- EmoteSupportBot 3mo agoA critical distinction, because they were going to to find terabytes of not pirated books to train on that contained the sum history of humanities knowledge /s
- amanaplanacanal 3mo agoThey could have purchased the books instead. It was easier to pirate.
- Aurornis 3mo agoThey actually did this. > Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase millions of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Each print book resulted in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with machine-readable text (including front and back cover scans for softcover books
- modeless 3mo agoGreat, so now instead of allowing anyone to train on already scanned books for free, we can have only the richest big labs buy all the books and scan them privately to train their proprietary models. And since they buy the books used, authors still don't get any money. But at least the books are destroyed afterwards! What an improvement!
- fluoridation 3mo ago>instead of allowing anyone to train on already scanned books for free That would be pirating. So your complaint is that they didn't do more piracy?
- processunknown 3mo agoSeems squarely in the "cost of doing business" category
- Varelion 3mo agoI sincerely don't understand what the point of these laws are, when the cost of flagrant violations is no more than a slap on the wrist -- these really meager sums that serve as nothing more than something to point at and say "Look, we did something!" Cover-your-ass strategy, and nothing more. Who, besides the ones at fault, are ever happy with these mean-nothing fines? The justice system really needs an overhaul with how it tackles "justice" between the wealthy, the connected, the corporations, and the rest. Though I am unsure what that would look like. Minimum net wealth per category of infraction across the board? Edit: grammar
- datakan 3mo agoPunishable by fine just means it's legal for a cost. If the fine is less than the profit then they'll pay the fine every time.
- protocolture 3mo agoNo the "fine" is 3000 bucks per book. Thats more than it costs to just shred the spine and scan the book in. Which is probably 15 - 20 bucks a piece. They will be shredding the book not paying the fine.
- jaitsu 3mo agoBecause using pirated material is a civil issue, not a criminal offence?
- renlo 3mo agothe irony is that all of this money will go to rent-seeking publishers who won't pass it on to the artists; basically a dispute between the wealthy you're upset with
- Aurornis 3mo agoThe lawsuit was a mixed blend of individual authors and publishers. It was started by a group of authors, not publishers.
- persedes 3mo agoAre "open" models exempt from that? Can imagine they used the same datasets.
- wmf 3mo agoMost open models are developed for profit so they should be equally liable.
- curious_curios 3mo agoMany of the open weight models are trained on outputs from these models (distillation)
- AndrewDucker 3mo agoIf they provably shared those datasets then they're just as liable for piracy.
- ilamont 3mo agoIf you have the time, read the judge's response to the motion: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.434709/gov.uscourts.cand.434709.680.0_4.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43... The big deal for publishers and authors is the payout per eligible title is $3k. For a traditional publishing contract involving one author, the amount will be split down the middle. The other thing which caught my eye is the judge slashed the class counsel's fee by half, from 12.5% ($187.5m) to 6.8% ($101m). The class counsel's unreimbursed litigation expenses were $2.6m. The three class representatives get just $15k each.
- Henchman21 3mo ago[flagged]
- nativeit 3mo agoRealtors are capped in the percentage they can take for selling properties. Brokers and financial advisers are capped in their fees. My presumption is that the only reason this very standard and reasonable regulatory pattern doesn’t affect lawyers is because they tend to be the ones writing and enforcing the regulations in the first place.
- ryan_lane 3mo agoThere is no legal maximum for the percentage real estate agents can take, in the US. Rates are also not fixed, by law, and are required to be negotiable. There's a general standard for rates (typically 5-6%, split between agents/brokers), but there's nothing stopping them from setting it to 99%, other than the fact that people won't pay it. Source: was a licensed real estate agent for a long time.
- Fantosism 3mo agoI might be misremembering, as I worked on the loan side, but wasn't the 6% standard set by the state's realtor association until 2024?
- nekooooo 3mo ago$3k a book is so cheap.
- sebzim4500 3mo agoIts probably 100x more than it would have cost to do it legitimately, so seems like reasonable damages to me
- AnimalMuppet 3mo agoThat depends on the answer to a question that hasn't been answered yet. Is what an AI does similar to a human reading a book, and adding it to their knowledge? Or is it similar to a human plagiarizing a book? If it's the second, for at least some books, no, the damages are not reasonable. They are far too small.
- marcus_holmes 3mo agoGood question. Can you ask an LLM to repeat the entire contents of a novel, word-for-word, and read that instead of the original book? I haven't tried it, but I would guess it would not be able to do this. Can you ask it questions about the book and expect it to get them right? Yeah, probably. Same as if I read the book and you asked me questions about it. The LLM would probably answer those questions better than I could, and about every single book in its training data, but still same-same. I don't think this is plaguarism.
- greyw 3mo agoIf you ask me to repeat the contents of a novel I read line by line I can do it too. Is this fair use? Do I have to pay someone?
- marcus_holmes 3mo agoThat's a remarkable memory you have! I'm jealous Good point, are you plagiarising every book you've read every time you remember it? If you recite some of a book to a friend, do you need to pay the author a fee? I would say not. So why are we talking about LLMs in the same vein?
- HackerThemAll 3mo agoSo... What about authors from other parts of the world? USA has settled a USA case and they think all is cool for the entire world. So americentric.
- ronsor 3mo agoWell, the USA has jurisdiction over USA companies. If the rest of the world's authors can find a way to obtain jurisdiction over the companies in a way that USA courts won't balk at if asked to enforce, then they're welcome to go ahead.
- bmitc 3mo ago> USA has settled a USA case and they think all is cool for the entire world. Who said that?
- br0ceph 3mo agoI support anthropics position here, on both learning from and "pirating" books. The way i see things , the publishers and authors are happy with any policy that makes them more money, and more market control, regardless of what is ethical/just/right. They would shutdown public libraries , all libraries, if they could. Aaron Swartz lost his life because he tried to make public knowledge public, and they would be happy to put every information activist to death to protect their monopolies. IMHO they have no right to stop free access on the internet. The whole copyright system is artificial and monopolistic, and the publishers are complaining yet again, that technology moves information more efficiently than they do, so they want to artificially retard it through goverment action. The real goverment action that is needed, is to protect private/personal data; not data that is actively traded commercially or publically. These tech companies are invading personal and private spaces of everyday people, and storing and training with it. Even using it for military targetting and warrantless surveillance. Anthropic is by no means a good entity, so the way to stick it to them and all tech companies, is to allow their internet scraping, but make it outright criminal to use telemetry or any surveillance techniques they have or will develop. Also... the ”creators",hollywood,publishers, have no problems scraping themselves, and lift ideas from just about everywhere they can get it. Almost every hollywood movie is just an assemblage of random memes and topical concerns of everyday ppl, distilled into embelished predictable cheese. The publishers are the original slop actors. Human Slop.
- userbinator 3mo agoExactly. Everything is a derivative work, and AI is now making people realise the full extent of that reality.
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoAaron swartz lost his life because he committed suicide. Something he had tried multiple times before. If he really only committed suicide because of the legal jeopardy he was in, wouldn't it have made more sense to commit suicide after you're found guilty?
- beering 3mo ago
- pier25 3mo agoThis is not even than a slap on the wrist. Publishers who negotiated this really fucked up writers. According to US federal law, pirating a single copyrighted work and gaining commercial advantage of it (which Anthropic 100% did) represents five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. But it gets worse: "Penalties for a copyright infringement conviction may increase if the defendant has previous similar convictions, made more than 10 copies of copyrighted works, committed copyright infringement during a period longer than 180 days, or infringed copyrighted material worth more than $2,500." https://www.justia.com/entertainment-law/piracy-in-the-entertainment-industry/ https://www.justia.com/entertainment-law/piracy-in-the-enter...
- paxys 3mo agoIt's valid to not take AI companies' side here but people who think publishers are fighing for the little guy's rights are delusional. Tech companies have been exploiting artists for a few years, publishers/record labels/media companies have been doing it for centuries.
- blackqueeriroh 3mo agoTHANK YOU! And the idea that copyright actually helps individuals is such bullshit I can’t even believe anyone believes it! On a site filled with free software advocates. Absurd.
- conradkay 3mo agoThose are the maximum penalties though It's seemingly $3,000 per book, so they could've (and did, partially) just bought the books themselves for way cheaper, and with only a fraction of that money going to the authors
- jeroenhd 3mo ago> could've (and did, partially) just bought But they didn't. The fact they partially did proves that they knew they should've, so they can't even claim ignorance.
- 3mo ago
- sensanaty 3mo agoWhat a fucking joke of a country the US is, allowing this kind of behaviour with such a pathetic "punishment". Barely even qualifies as a tap on the wrist, Anthropic should be getting gutted into non-existence for this shit and the execs should be given the Aaron Swartz treatment.
- economistbob 3mo agoAmen! We are watching them incinerate the past so they can lie about the past in the future. They are destroying the books and will censor what was in them.
- driverdan 3mo agoJudge Alsup issued the original order that determined they were liable for piracy but that training LLMs on books was fair use. It's worth reading if you're interested in the topic. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/231/bartz-v-anthropic-pbc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/231/bartz-v-an...
- tzs 3mo agoAlsup is an interesting judge. He has handled several important tech cases, such as Oracle v Google, and Waymo v Uber. He's also a longtime hobbyist programmer working in BASIC, much of it in support of his ham radio hobby. Screenshots of his shortwave propagation prediction program here [1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-google-judge-william-alsup-interview-waymo-uber https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...
- brlewis 3mo agoYes, that is interesting. It sounds like he was aware of the theoretical possibility of a book being regurgitated verbatim. Do you know if he was aware it had been done? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000742 If he was not aware, I wonder if he still would have described the process as "exceedingly transformative" had he been aware.
- theplumber 3mo agoBut why not jail like Kim Dotcom? And why no Feds jumping on Dario’s window? They are not only pirating, they also resell it!
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoKim built something designed to help everyone pirate stuff. Anthropic pirated specific content.
- ceejayoz 3mo agoAnthropic pirated that content to help everyone do the same.
- xienze 3mo agoPlease post the prompts that will reproduce the pirated works verbatim. Or even halfway.
- ceejayoz 3mo agoA shitty cam rip of a movie is still punishable as infringement. That said, it's been done: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671 > In some cases, jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet outputs entire books near-verbatim (e.g., nv-recall=95.8%).
- theplumber 3mo agoSubtitle translation is punishable as well…
- JAlexoid 3mo agoInfringement is a civil lawsuit, with financial punishment only.
- 3mo ago
- telotortium 3mo agoSee, Judge Alsup should have been the person Biden put on the Supreme Court, that or re-nominate Merrick Garland. Instead, he made a silly promise to sate Black Lives Matter, which even when he took office was fast on its way to ignominy, and now Kagan is stuck being the only competent liberal justice on the court. At least Alsup can continue setting the direction of law as it applies to the tech industry.
- BloodyIron 3mo agoDid someone forget to consult with the MPAA and the RIAA on this one? This is a joke of an outcome. $3k per book. How much was it per song for Napster?
- tzs 3mo agoThe RIAA typically asked for around $2-4 per song to settle without a lawsuit, which would come to a total of a few thousand because they generally only went after people sharing over a thousand songs. In the couple of few where the party would not agree to a settlement and the RIAA sued, they would pick about 15 of the thousand+ songs to sue over. Statutory damages are a minimum of $750 per infringed work, so the total would now be about 3-5 times what their settlement offer amount had been. Most parties then got a lawyer, the lawyer told the party that had no chance, and they would then seriously negotiate with the RIAA and get a settlement. Only a couple would still not settle, went to trial, and did an absolutely terrible job and the judge/jury awarded well above the minimum statutory damages. The RIAA still tried to settle for well below that, but the defendants refused and kept trying to fight and did not have a happy time.
- ariwilson 3mo agoWeird to hear a full throated defense of the RIAA here
- beering 3mo agoA summary of what happened is not a full-throated defense of anyone.
- jamesjhare 3mo ago[flagged]
- Fantosism 3mo agoIt's pretty easy to validate that everything they're saying is accurate. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/september-8/riaa-begins-suing-individual-sharers-of-copyrighted-mp3-files https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/september-8/riaa... > in practice the RIAA offered defendants the option of establishing a “Clean Slate” by destroying all of their illegally acquired files and paying a settlement of approximately $3 per illegal song. The two notable cases were: 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thomas-Rasset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thoma... 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_Music_Entertainment_v._Tenenbaum_(2009) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_Music_Entertainment_v...
- tim-projects 3mo agoThis is a too big to fail scenario. If these companies fail, so does the US economy. Normal laws for individuals don't apply, so any comparison to that is pointless.
- wtfHN26 3mo ago> If these companies fail, so does the US economy. I would be really worried about the US economy then.
- thewebguyd 3mo agoThere should be no such thing as "too big to fail" in a free, competitive market. Companies must be allowed to fail. If failure means catastrophe for the nation, it shouldn't have been a private, for-profit project in the first place and instead be a public project.
- tim-projects 3mo agoI don't make the rules
- timmg 3mo agoIf you extrapolate these “fines” to per book piracy, I wonder what the cost would be for something like Anna’s Archive. Trillions?
- abuhl98 3mo agoIt is wild to see a $1.5 billion resolution in the AI copyright space—especially with around $3,000 per book going directly to affected authors.
- protocolture 3mo ago1500 to the author, 1500 to the publisher.
- abuhl98 3mo agoI didn't catch that part.
- blackqueeriroh 3mo agoDeath to copyright, which has always been far more harmful to small authors and creators than it has even been to large companies.
- ori_b 3mo agoLet's have that conversation after the people strip mining the livelihoods of creators cough up for UBI.
- brigandish 3mo agoNo UBI, thanks, let's just make them pay for the works they're relying on (as the rest of us would have to).
- ori_b 3mo agoThat would be my preference, but if people really want to have free as in beer access to information, we can have that conversation. After these companies give people money for the commons that they're strip mining.
- muzani 3mo agoOdd place to bring this up. This is one of those situations where copyright is doing what it's meant to do.
- Der_Einzige 3mo agoThe only bad thing about OpenAI and Anthropic training on everyone's stuff without their consent is that they didn't give away the model weights afterwards. The people who espouse copyright abolitionism believe "information wants to be (and should be) free" So no, for these people including myself, Copyright isn't doing anything good at all. It should be abolished. None of the people in this suit should get a dime. The government should force open weight releases of all foundation models as basically the only regulation that applies to the space at this current time.
- 3mo ago
- blackqueeriroh 3mo agoFor anyone who thinks the problem is Anthropic, I want you all to know that most authors make less than the median income. Most make less than $20,000 a year, because publishing houses give authors an advance, and then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work. Most never do. Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years. https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author-income-survey/ https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author...
- broodbucket 3mo agoThere can be more than one problem at once
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- fhe 3mo agoif authors get an advance that's greater than the sale of their books, doesn't it mean that the publishers lose money, i.e. paid more for those books than the books sales?
- gnopgnip 3mo agoAuthors get around 10% of the cover price of a book as royalties, it depends on several factors. The rest goes to the publisher. So some do lose money, but the break even for the publisher is usually well before the advance is fully covered by royalties. Well the publisher also pays for the book to be bound, edited, overhead for their staff, cover art. Many books don't sell for the full retail price and are discounted. So net of all of this a 10% profit margin is common, they aren't keeping 90% of the book sales.
- JAlexoid 3mo ago
- nohell 3mo agoalso see: https://nonogra.ph/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop-07-22-2026 https://nonogra.ph/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books...
- up2isomorphism 3mo ago1.5B is a joke
- fithisux 3mo agoThis is "smoothed" by governments cause they need this tech for surveillance. The verdict is a joke.
- croes 3mo agoUsually a thief isn‘t allowed to keep what he has stolen
- sharts 3mo agoThat doesn’t seem like much
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- sashank_1509 3mo agoA one time payment like 1.5B doesn’t do anything. There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the correct way to legislate this. If anything a human does can instantly be copied by an LLM, and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change
- nikanj 3mo agoIt doesn't do anything? Au contraire! Now the creations of the LLMs stand on legal ground. This was an excellent deal for Anthropic
- usef- 3mo agoYeah, it's always interesting the two-sides of a situation like this. Add regulation/enforcement to the big companies and you often shut out the smaller ones following. Meta also has copyright lawsuits for the open models they released, so open models are not immune. ... unless the line we want to draw is "american orgs pay, others don't", as currently seems to be happening.
- Arkhaine_kupo 3mo ago> Add regulation/enforcement to the big companies and you often shut out the smaller ones following. That is the case, any regulation increases the cost to enter a market. But in this case, its irrelevant because the moat of cost to enter is already unfathomable and secondly, they are not adding regulation but fining them for committing a crime. So yeah, adding that every food compnay needs 3 health inspectors that they pay for would benefit coca cola over you mom and pop bakery. But telling someone they cannot start a Space agency with money laundered from ransom and drug sales payments would not affect much the competition markets
- vovavili 3mo ago>the moat of cost to enter is already unfathomable At the moment.
- doitright99 3mo agoIf a person did this, this person would go to jail. If a company does it? Small fine and the green light to cannibalize more content. Funny how that works.
- cataphract 3mo agoIt's not a small fine. It's much more than what each title could be bought for in the market.
- octocop 3mo agoRoko's basilisk might be at work here
- cultofmetatron 3mo agoI do recall that a "famous redditor" was driven to suicide for making works available and he wasn't even making money for it.
- Rodmine 3mo ago[flagged]
- root_axis 3mo agoNo he wasn't, stop spreading lies.
- archerx 3mo agoHe wasn’t just some famous redditor. Aaron Swartz helped create Reddit and invented RSS. If I put my conspiracy theory hat one and I always get piled on for this theory in other online communities but I think it could be possible. The theory is I think Aaron found some very dark stuff while exploring the MIT private networks, things that he was not supposed to see and could be very damaging to a lot people if they were exposed. The infamous Jeffery Epstein was donating a lot of money to MIT and its Media Labs. I think there is a much deeper story at play that the mainstream narrative is hiding with a “suicide”.
- kimjune01 3mo agounderstatement is a kind of humor, when he said 'redditor'
- nylonstrung 3mo agoIf he found fucked up stuff regarding crimes way worse than his on university networks don't you think he could have gotten out of the sentencing entirely by cooperating against them Epstein was relatively restrained even in his personal email, I doubt he was using MIT administrated systems to facilitate a pedo ring
- vagrantJin 3mo ago
- gabriel666smith 3mo agoI work as an author. I believe this is total bullshit, from beginning to end - the ruling, the settlement, and the suit itself. In the UK, we have a thing called the Public Lending Right [1]. This pays authors a fixed sum each time their book is taken out of a library, up to a capped amount. The cap isn't very high - about $7k - so it is both an OK bit of income for authors who might be making very little money elsewhere, and also doesn't end up all going to authors who are already bestsellers. It's a decent legal system for helping libraries hold niche titles as well as the popular ones. This is, after all, the purpose of a library. To establish my bias here: My debut novel came out after the period this specific suit concerns. I also uploaded it to LibGen myself. I strongly believe that books should be available to read, free of charge, to all people. I benefited enormously from libraries and piracy growing up. I think they serve an important educational purpose that does not end when a person leaves school, and I do not think wealth or disposable income is a fair way to decide the breadth of a person's education. I also have no problem with people making new "language things" using my work. I love sample-based music (like dance music, hip hop, etc) and it'd be hypocritical for me to take issue with anyone doing analogous things using books. Maximising sales is not the end-goal of making art, for me personally. Other artists feel otherwise. They consider training on pirated books stealing. That's OK - it's not for me to tell them what to believe. The problem for me is that these corporations - undoubtedly still pretraining on pirated material - are, essentially, leeching. By not releasing the model as open-weight, freely available, they are not acting in the same spirit of the system they took advantage of. It's the Spotify model: pirate first, pay a nominal amount that does not meaningfully harm profit later. Now the dust has settled there, we can see the harm it has done to music culture. A single settlement which does not establish precedent does not solve anything. A tokenistic $3k allows anti-AI authors to wave a cheque in the air and declare a victory. It pays the rent for a month or two. It does nothing for the months after that, when the corporation is still profiting. It does nothing to establish precedent for future artists, who also have to pay rent. It would be (non-trivial, but) relatively simple to integrate - for example - download figures from Anna's Archive into the PLR. I'd happily dilute my PLR payment appropriately, because I think libraries are important. You can't stop people pirating digitally replicable things. Digital ownership is not a concept that has held, or will hold. There are only 23,000 authors in the UK who claim the cash from the PLR. To pay all those authors the national living wage in the UK (£26k) from the PLR, you would need to raise £546 million. That is around 1/34 of Anthropic's reported annual revenue. I'm of course not arguing Anthropic should be solely responsible. But it's very frustrating that all the pieces of the puzzle for actually paying artists in a sustainable and ongoing way now exist, and one of the major obstacles to this - and the idea of a genuinely free, legal, international library, which creates more authors, writing better books, full-time - are legacy rights holders who remain attached to a completely dysfunctional and outdated concept of ownership. So - unless part of a sustained and reasonable campaign, which understands the futility of (and damage to the medium and its creators caused by) treating digital ownership in the same way as physical ownership - this suit is close to pointless, and arguably actively harmful in the long term. [1] https://www.bl.uk/services/plr https://www.bl.uk/services/plr
- shevy-java 3mo agoOne thing I always wondered ... There used to be libgen. Then it went down. It went semi-back up but ... it is still kind of down. Those issues kind of coincided with the big greedy mega-corporations leeching off data en masse; Anthropic was not the only one, Facebook is another example here. I always wondered whether the decline in quality, fewer liberated books published, coincided with what the big corporations were doing. Would be great to be able to see any underlying strategy here. Imagine Anthropic, just as a scenario, leeching off of everyone else, and then also sending in their lawyers to try to close down what they leeched off here. I mean the rise of bots kind of coincides with the rise of AI. So why not them also trying to make it harder for the rest of the world to access liberated books.
- sschueller 3mo agoWhere is my check for my 20 years of contributing to reddit?
- lvl155 3mo agoSo they used pirated materials to train their models but others can’t use their models for training even if you pay.
- petterroea 3mo agoSettlement would mean it doesn't become legal precedence, right? This outcome seems to be the best possible for Anthropic. Over 100B$ have been invested in AI so far, venture capital can afford to pay a few billions per big company as a South Park style "Sorry". Or am I missing something?
- papercrane 3mo ago> Settlement would mean it doesn't become legal precedence, right? The summary judgment ruling from 2025 in this case will still be legal precedence, the settlement will mean that there is no trial for damages. However, since this is a district court ruling it is non-binding on other courts.
- spectre23 3mo ago$3000/book for effectively pirating a book is shamefully low.
- visarga 3mo agoWhat do you mean pirating? They don't even distribute the originals, LLMs are not for replication, we already have copying and internet for that. Why would we use a multi-billion parameter model to copy text? If we wanted the originals it would be easier to find them free, pirate or pay, if we use LLMs it is because we want something ELSE. And caring about content rights in a world with limitless content and scarce attention is a mistake, it was never the content that was scarce in the last 20 years.
- tancop 3mo agothis is not enough. the penalty for training ai without permission should be releasing the model as public domain. if you take from everyone you have to give back the same way.
- larodi 3mo agoSo it goes like this: I first you take, then money you make and eventually you repay. This is a very smart loan from society indeed. And seems to be the new normal… Even though Anthropic is my daily driver I’m done respecting any sort of copyright. I’m okay paying for subscription for a service delivery but never ever again will I believe in copyright or any other utterly non-enforceable similar concept.
- pjio 3mo agoThis is insufficient for the human authors but seems ideal for Anthropic, who now have established a financial moat for others to train their ai on those works (except for Chinese companies, which don't care either way).
- surfingdino 3mo agoThe correct way to do it would be to force Anthropic to remove content and the results of training based on that content from their models at copyright holder's request.
- throw1234567891 3mo agoNow it’s time to mount such cases everywhere in the world.
- hyperbole 3mo agoThe fact that pirated books en-mass were used to train LLMs is legally irrelevant, oh do tell - why is that? The whole point of an LLM is to train a neural network based on content - without the content the net is entirely noise. Anthropic/OpenAI, etc. do not exist without training data. Its akin to taking millions of courses online that are intended to be paid for, but never paying.
- lukewarm707 3mo ago$1.5bn? it's a steal!
- thiht 3mo agoHonestly maybe (and just maybe) waiving copyrights on all the written content that ever existed to create training data would be a good thing to do, laws are made up so we can decide it’s a good trade off as a society. But: 1. I feel like this should be discussed globally, there should be a public debate, a vote, and guardrails 2. It should not be in the hands of private companies, it should either be done by the government and made available to the public ; or if it’s done by private companies they should be mandated to give the training data to the government so it’s available to the public. My point is we can decide to say it’s ok because LLMs are too important strategically. But if we do so it should benefit the public, not 5 mega corporations, training data should be considered as public infrastructure, like roads, rails, or the electricity grid. Societies are failing and this is just one more nail in the coffin.
- chrisaiv 3mo agoIn many ways this adds to Anthropic’s motivation to IPO. This deal is built around Anthropic surviving. The $1.5B comes in installments, and counsel’s fees are paid in step with those installments. The class is now effectively Anthropic’s creditor, with a direct financial interest in the company staying solvent through the payment schedule. Civil suits compensate and the one outcome guaranteed to leave authors worse off was a verdict big enough to kill the payer.
- pietmichal 3mo agoSo just a speeding ticket...
- jiaosdjf 3mo agoSingle greatest transfer of intellectual property in history. I don't think royalties or settlements are really the point here. AI must be a net benefit to humanity, or we burn everything to the ground, it's that simple. The next few decades of AI need to lift everyone up, it needs to eliminate the most degrading and dangerous jobs while providing abundance. There is simply no point to robots if they don't serve us and make everything cheaper and more accessible to us. We are watching Wall Street. The Devon's and Luigi's of the world are not interested in your settlement figure or what this means to shareholders. Humanity needs to be aware that it either keeps parasites at bay or the parasites are going to build a robot and surveillance army. It is literally us or them. I'm not anti-AI, I am not scared of AI going rogue, I simply recognise that these people cannot be trusted, they do not care about your rules, there is no "regulating" it, the only thing that can scare them is a million people holding pitchforks outside their building.
- panny 3mo ago$1.5 billion at 150,000 per copyright violation according to DMCA and such. About 10,000 books. >$3000 per book Ohhhh, yeah, big copyright fines only apply to us little guys, not the "asshole tech" companies.
- hmokiguess 3mo agoI'm curious to see how Suno and the Record Labels is gonna play out
- reactordev 3mo ago$1.5B for a company that is valued at $1T+…
- basilgohar 3mo agoIs anyone else having mixed feelings about AI companies' special-casing themselves being a potentially new avenue to review copyright and IP law in the first place? Am I naïve for being hopeful that IP law may become a little more lax now that AI companies are opening a front for potential reevaluation? Edited for slight typo.
- fooker 3mo agoIMO this ruling will be the inflection point that kills either the book publishing industry or the US big model frontier lab industry. It's trendy to say it'll be the later, but I see a credible case for the former. I see no reason to pay for a textbook in 2026, while I'm happy to pay an expensive monthly subscription for a coding agent. (And before someone accuses me of being anti education or anything, bona fide scientist with a PhD here and I have written book chapters for a couple of popular textbooks).
- docmars 3mo agoThis does absolutely nothing to compensate the authors whose content was stolen by AI companies.
- Dkuku 3mo agoIt would be fair use if the model in not used. But it is using this compsessed knowledge and make a competition to the original product-authors should be compensated.
- kmeisthax 3mo agoI'm glad to see Anthropic's nose bloodied but I'm still very worried about the ruling in this case as I can already see the wheels turning as a way to limit fair use. For context, the ruling is basically, "AI training is fair use but building a library of pirated books to train on is not". This is obviously because Judge Alsup does not want to put AI under a de-facto ban, but he wants AI companies to have to care about copyright... which in my opinion is self-contradictory, but let's go along with the (paraconsistent) logic. If we insist that every prior act up to a fair use must be lawful, then this means that fair use is not a right, but a privilege that is purchased alongside the work itself. This opens the door to Oracle-level shenanigans: so long as every legal avenue to watch a work is encumbered by, say, a DeWitt clause[0], you cannot legally review the work. There are actually copyright cases hinging on this: Triller Fight Club sued H3H3 for reviewing a pirated stream of a Logan Paul fight that lasted 40 seconds and lost, for obvious reasons. This case smells like an accidental overturning of this. Would I rather live in a world where robots[1] aren't allowed to read copyrighted books, or a world where copyright owners have veto rights over any and all critical commentary of their work? I would happily choose the former every time. [0] A contractual clause that prohibits the recipient of a work from reviewing it without written permission of the owner. [1] Mind uploads inclusive
- WillAdams 3mo agoA good example of the problem with this settlement: >It appears that LLMs have already incorporated APOSD EDIT: The text of the book _A Philosophy of Software Design_ ENDEDIT (which would seem to be illegal, since it is copyrighted). For example, I have asked ChatGPT questions about APOSD and it seems to be able to answer. https://groups.google.com/g/software-design-book/c/_wl1DciZZqw/m/jZ8j7mxiBAAJ https://groups.google.com/g/software-design-book/c/_wl1DciZZ...
- raverbashing 3mo agoI don't see: - what's APOSD - "it's illegal since it's copyrighted" makes no sense to me - The settlement should be exactly to cover their licenses for training
- WillAdams 3mo agoEdited to clarify APOSD == the book _A Philosophy of Software Design_ Please ask John Ousterhout what his cut of this settlement will be, and whether or no he agreed to it and finds it acceptable.
- raverbashing 3mo agoYeah ask him how much he gets paid for one copy of the book, I assure you it's not much If he's not getting a cut of this settlement then that's between him and his publisher.
- WillAdams 3mo agoYes, but what is the calculus of 1 copy of book divided amongst number of copies/usages of LLM which reference said material? That's the innate disparity and unfairness here --- time was when one made a design which was physically instantiated and replicated, the copies would wear out and one would then earn money again on replacement copies --- this is just another example of the commons and other resources being grabbed by profiteers who use them to make money as opposed for public benefit.
- m0llusk 3mo agoLLMs improve development speed such that enshittification can be in progress well before the IPO.
- tripleee 3mo agoNow view this in contrast with what happened to Aaron Swartz > According to state and federal authorities, Swartz used JSTOR, a digital repository,[79] to download a large number[note 2] of academic journal articles through MIT's computer network over the course of a few weeks > ...federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, increasing Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment > ...On the evening of January 11, 2013, Swartz's girlfriend, Stinebrickner-Kauffman, found him dead in his Brooklyn apartment.[80][116][117] A spokesperson for New York's Medical Examiner reported that he had hanged himself
- radu_floricica 3mo agoWhat this does is make it harder for new AI companies to train from scratch. Anthropic should take it from its marketing/strategic budget. It just bought itself a 1.5B moat at exactly the time it can afford it.
- slowmovintarget 3mo ago"...what you would do if you’re a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be, is if it took off, then you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right? But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content. And do not quote me." -- Eric Schmidt
- hn_submit 3mo agoI would argue Anthropic isn't pirating books but merely "reading" them. If they simply buy the books they can read them like any individual does.
- TheSpacerr 3mo ago[dead]
- joelwallis 3mo agoSo, Ahthropic pirated god-knows-how-many books from all around the world to build Claude models, launches multi-billion products out it, and then gets fined $1.5B. Sounds like the crime was worth the shot. It reminds me of: > "If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class."