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Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penalt
by peri-cl 2mo ago
Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penalties and continue doing it. Just like they want it to be illegal to run local ML inference.
- spwa4 2mo agoIn theory none of them actually got the right to train on illegally downloaded books. Anthropic was simply punished for doing it once. One wonders if they're still doing it.
- outside1234 2mo agoOf course they are. They have just put on their Swiss Banker suit now and have all sorts of deflection techniques in place such that, of course, "the money has the stamps that says its clean" (when it it really blood money hidden behind a pretty wall).
- ungut 2mo agoOpenAI plainly admitted that it is impossible not to do so in a House of Lords inquiry. So, presumably there is no way around it to train models. There is just not enough non-copyrighted data out there.
- yorwba 2mo agoYou mean this one https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/126981/pdf/ https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/126981/pdf/ where they write "it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials"? That doesn't mean they have to download those materials illegally. For a billion dollars, you can easily buy one legal copy of each book in Anna's Archive and still have some cash left over to run a whole-of-internet scraping operation.
- spwa4 2mo agoI'm pretty sure we would know if they did that. And we don't. Plus this is not legal in the EU (and Canada, and ... let's just say the entire rest of the world, and accept that I'll be wrong for one or two smaller countries). Doesn't that matter? Or is only Mistral disallowed from training on copyrighted materials? Je veux ma chaton fat, goddamit!
- yorwba 2mo agoAI companies legally acquiring books have indeed been in the news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742 And where are you getting the idea that Mistral doesn't train on copyrighted data? There's not a lot of code written by people who've been dead for more than 70 years, but somehow Mistral has been able to release coding models anyway.
- spwa4 2mo agoBut they have been training on copyrighted data since GPT-2 at least. 2019, and that's when it came out, so before that of course.
- yorwba 2mo agoGPT-2 was trained using data scraped from the web (https://cdn.openai.com/better-language-models/language_models_are_unsupervised_multitask_learners.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/better-language-models/language_model... section 2.1), i.e. copyrighted data provided free of charge to anyone with an internet connection.
- spwa4 2mo agoYou mean very likely the Anna's archive torrent dump because it's MUCH better quality than the general internet and beyond a certain amount of input data (which is a lot, but much less than the internet) the only thing that matters in training is the quality of the data, to the point that now many labs have thousands of people just making and improving essentially school exercises full time? Hell, I know that for one "lab" (kindof AI lab) since 2020 or so has determined wikipedia quality is dropping fast. It was already dropping slowly before that, but now it's getting bad.
- deadbunny 2mo agoWhat tosh. It's copywrited material, they pay to access it like everyone else.
- IncreasePosts 2mo agoI thought the outcome of that was basically it's legal to train on books, but they acquired the books in the wrong way. If they went out and bought copies of them and trained it would have been fine
- vaylian 2mo ago> Just like they want it to be illegal to run local ML inference. Citation?
- peri-cl 2mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49076057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49076057 ("Our position on open-weights models (anthropic.com)", 1812 comments)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- vaylian 2mo agoI see. The following two statements (headlines) stand out: * We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China * We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations That's not quite a ban of local ML inference, but it basically says that he doesn't want companies in China to create their own state of the art models.
- peri-cl 2mo agoNo; it's the other headline, mandatory US government certification, that would ban Americans from running their own Chinese large models.
- bookofjoe 2mo agoOver the past decade I've noticed on HN the following order of frequency in choice of words, most common to least: 1. Citation 2. Source 3. Reference Long ago in a career based on original research, I/we ONLY used "reference."
- tygon 2mo agoWhile it is definitely over a decade at this point (over two in fact), some of this likely comes from the term [citation needed], that originated on Wikipedia, as a cynical backhanded response to unsourced claims. It has become a catch-all. Language and how it evolves is a pretty interesting subject.
- gruez 2mo ago>Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penalties and continue doing it. This seems like a "heads I win, tails you lose" type of argument. If Anthropic was pro-piracy I can imagine everyone getting mad that they're flouting law and want to "steal from artists" or whatever. >and continue doing it Source? AFAIK they were caught and stopped. That's why there was the recent story about how they were destroying old books to scan them.
- sam_lowry_ 2mo ago[flagged]
- empiricus 2mo agodid not follow all the details, but my understanding is that some form of copyright law nudges in the direction of destroy after scan?
- yonran 2mo ago> This is an unethical as a company may behave, short of killing people. This is hysterical. No, format shifting old unwanted books is not unethical. The books still exist, in an internal digital library. If copyright law were to change to allow sharing orphan works some day, Anthropic could share them. But under current law, the books are preserved digitally and used for transformative uses that all Claude users benefit from.
- bix6 2mo ago> From the start, Anthropic “ha[d] many places from which” it could have purchased books, but it preferred to steal them to avoid “legal/practice/business slog,” as cofounder and chief executive officer Dario Amodei put it (see Opp. Exh. 27). https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz-v-Anthropic-Order-on-Fair-Use-6-23-25.pdf https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz... Sounds pretty pro piracy to me.
- wolvoleo 2mo ago
- hintymad 2mo ago> they can afford the penalties and continue doing it. I thought they could've bought just a single copy of each book and use the content to train their models. In that case, it falls into the fair use doctrine and they wouldn't need to pay the fine. And that will be way less expensive than the $1.5B price tag.
- Gud 2mo agoThat's what they're doing now, when they are established. But when it was a proof of concept, they were using pirated data. Just like Spotify did.