Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

exabrial

that number is missing a zero or two in front of the decimal point

FireBeyond

Maybe they can give it in the form of expiring Fable credits.

jdlshore

To be clear, the issue is not that the books were used to train Claude, but that they were pirated.

processunknown

Seems squarely in the "cost of doing business" category

Varelion

I 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

persedes

Are "open" models exempt from that? Can imagine they used the same datasets.

ilamont

If you have the time, read the judge's response to the motion: 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.

nekooooo

$3k a book is so cheap.

HackerThemAll

So... 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.

br0ceph

I 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.

pier25

This 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-enter...

sensanaty

What 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.

driverdan

Judge 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-an...

theplumber

But why not jail like Kim Dotcom? And why no Feds jumping on Dario’s window? They are not only pirating, they also resell it!

telotortium

See, 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

Did 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?

tim-projects

This 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.

timmg

If you extrapolate these “fines” to per book piracy, I wonder what the cost would be for something like Anna’s Archive. Trillions?

abuhl98

It 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.

blackqueeriroh

Death to copyright, which has always been far more harmful to small authors and creators than it has even been to large companies.