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

https://apnews.com/article/ai-anthropic-copyright-settlement-claude-books-bartz-74b140444023898aeba8579b6e9f0d63

by BeetleB • 1 day ago

542 540 1 day ago

exabrial• 1 day ago

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

BeetleB3• 1 day ago

As 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• 1 day 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

trentor2• 1 day ago

Thomas-Rasset got 80k per song and Tennenbaum got 22k per song. The law says up to 150k per work. It was a gift.

FireBeyond• 1 day ago

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

BeetleB3• 1 day ago

So that the authors can use it to write their next books!

jdlshore2• 1 day ago

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

EmoteSupportBot• 1 day ago

A 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• 1 day ago

They could have purchased the books instead. It was easier to pirate.

Aurornis5• 1 day ago

They 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

qq66• 1 day ago

They bought, scannned, trained from, and destroyed millions of paper books, which was ruled legal. This lawsuit was for training from LibGen.

sillysaurusx• 21 hours ago

It's an unfortunate outcome. Now to be a big player in AI, you have to have enough capital to buy your own library worth of books and digitize them. (Fun fact: a pallet of books is called a "gaylord," and they buy hundreds of gaylords.)

I created books3 to help settle the question of whether AI companies should be allowed to train on books. The outcome of "it's okay to pirate books as long as you're only training on them" was a long shot, but it would've let individual hackers train their own AI models (assuming access to sufficient compute, which you can get e.g. via https://sites.research.google/trc/about/).

Now we're in a world where you have to have dozens of millions in capital to do substantial work.

I heard at one point Eleuther was gathering public domain training data. I wonder if they ever built a corpus large enough so that training on books doesn't really matter...

kryogen1c• 19 hours ago

Fun fact: a pallet of books is called a "gaylord,"

A Gaylord is a type of box that fits on a pallet. There are multiple ways to palletize products, like shrink wrapping or metal banding

spaqin• 19 hours ago

Ladder-pulling at its best. It's also easier to swallow the fine once you've launched a successful product after pirating the books.

satvikpendem20• 11 hours ago

As this comment states, it may not be the piracy that is the issue, but the keeping of the books forever rather than just for the purpose of training. Regardless, I believe people will do this in a wink wink nudge nudge sort of way anyway, as no one releases their training data, because we all know where it comes from.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996652#49004015

jamesjhare4• 19 hours ago

how much of your economic output are you comfortable with companies like Anthropic stealing to put you out of work?

at least in Player Piano they paid the workers who made the cassette tapes that made the robots work.

our current LLM overlords demand that they be able to basically steal the sum total of all human knowledge so that they can sell it back to us at a rate they set.

they should have been shunned by society and made penniless when they first announced their goals but we have a bunch of deeply misanthropic people who have money and want to make a world where computer slaves do their bidding.

blackqueeriroh7• 19 hours ago

All of it.

mountainriver• 19 hours ago

This is why you should always distill your models from a competitor.

Let them take on the liability

wraptile3• 14 hours ago

With this it's becoming very clear that we're moving past information copyright of today and the only copyright that'll remain will be brand/trademark shaped. This might be a good thing right? Information remains free while people's effort remains protected (assuming fair governance).

nicce• 14 hours ago

Which is another issue. In the context of pirating, it should be also an issue, because it is a benefit from the crime.

processunknown• 1 day ago

Seems squarely in the "cost of doing business" category

Varelion• 1 day ago

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

datakan• 1 day ago

Punishable 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.

protocolture5• 1 day ago

No 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• 1 day ago

Because using pirated material is a civil issue, not a criminal offence?

renlo3• 1 day ago

the 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

Aurornis5• 1 day ago

The lawsuit was a mixed blend of individual authors and publishers.

It was started by a group of authors, not publishers.

robterrell• 1 day ago

Not true. Individual authors could sign up for the settlement. One of my books was in there under my name.

jdlshore2• 21 hours ago

Default payout is 50/50 author/publisher. If the author and publisher have a contract that states otherwise, then their contract overrides the default.

Source: I’m an author and signed up to be part of the class action, and this was the class action documents said.

Ritewut• 1 day ago

The laws are for you and me not companies like Anthropic and Meta.

PunchyHamster• 1 day ago

To keep users paying for content while companies do whatever they want - and if that's not the reason that's certainly an effect.

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?

% of annual turnover seems like decent strategy. Caps the amount company can sue mere mortal for copyright infringement while at billion dollar company scale can wipe quite a bit

But main problem is enforcement and lobbying, not the size of the fine

blackqueeriroh7• 19 hours ago

So you now believe fair use should not exist?

Aurornis5• 1 day ago

This is a settlement that the authors and Anthropic agreed upon.

They agreed on the amount last year. The judge approved it now.

The lawsuit was for the way the books were acquired. They already ruled that it's not infringement to use the books.

The award was $3,000 per book, which is about 100X higher than it would have cost to buy the books.

It's never going to appease the people who demand companies be sued into collapse, but given that both parties came to an agreement and the damages are 100X higher than what a book costs, it looks reasonable to me.

nadermx2• 1 day ago

This case did at least shed light on the fair use argument.

scotty793• 1 day ago

The award was $3,000 per book, which is about 100X higher than it would have cost to buy the books.

How many of the authors would license their book for endless creation of derivative works for that amount?

ekianjo• 1 day ago

100x the books? Buying a book does not let you redistribute its contents.

If you are selling more than 100 books you are clearly losing out

pier253• 22 hours ago

This is a settlement that the authors and Anthropic agreed upon.

The authors or the publishers?

I have a hard time believing they agreed with the millions of authors they pirated.

zajio1am• 1 day ago

Civil justice is primarily about restoring damages, not about punishing wrongdoing (although common law in US it is more punitive than civil law in european countries). Therefore compensations are based on damages, not on profit from wrongdoings.

bjourne• 1 day ago

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!"

To create a moat around wealth generation. After all, that is the main purpose of all legal systems---to keep the wealthy wealthy and the poor poor. In this case, the settlement is chump change for Anthropic, but ensures that no upstart will be able to compete with them since they will get reamed on copyright charges. It's no different from Google Image search. They can make a product out of republishing others' images. You cannot do it.

persedes• 1 day ago

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

wmf• 1 day ago

Most open models are developed for profit so they should be equally liable.

curious_curios• 1 day ago

Many of the open weight models are trained on outputs from these models (distillation)

AndrewDucker• 1 day ago

If they provably shared those datasets then they're just as liable for piracy.

ilamont• 1 day ago

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.

nativeit• 18 hours ago

Realtors 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• 17 hours ago

There 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.

Tangurena22• 10 hours ago

pattern doesn’t affect lawyers is because they tend to be the ones writing ... the regulations in the first place

In my state, the people hired to write new bills (if passed becoming statute) have to pass their JD (law degree). Legislators only get to request new bills, they can't hand a proposal (which may have been written by a lobbying agency like ALEC or Heritage) into the system.

modo_mario• 15 hours ago

The class counsel's unreimbursed litigation expenses were $2.6m.

In what sane state does it even get that high?

Tangurena22• 10 hours ago

I've seen some YouTubes where lawyers were complaining about high bill rates and showing actual bills. One large firm billed the senior lawyers at $2500/hour and even the paralegals were billed at $600/hr.

HDThoreaun3• 5 hours ago

Associates are billing over $1000/hr and can bill 12 hours a day easily enough. If you have 5 associates billing an average of 50 hours a week then in a month thats a million dollar bill just for the junior lawyers.

nekooooo• 1 day ago

$3k a book is so cheap.

sebzim4500• 1 day ago

Its probably 100x more than it would have cost to do it legitimately, so seems like reasonable damages to me

AnimalMuppet• 23 hours ago

That 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.

HackerThemAll• 1 day ago

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.

ronsor• 24 hours ago

Well, 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• 23 hours ago

USA has settled a USA case and they think all is cool for the entire world.

Who said that?

br0ceph• 24 hours ago

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.

userbinator• 21 hours ago

Exactly. Everything is a derivative work, and AI is now making people realise the full extent of that reality.

IncreasePosts5• 21 hours ago

Aaron 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?

beering2• 20 hours ago

You have to consider that the lawsuit was likely extremely stressful and scary.

sudokatsu• 17 hours ago

Tom Dolan, is that you? Give it a rest already.

pier253• 22 hours ago

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...

paxys• 21 hours ago

It'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.

blackqueeriroh7• 19 hours ago

THANK 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• 21 hours ago

Those 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• 12 hours 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.

consensus14• 16 hours ago

That is a false statement. Gaining commercial advantage means selling pirated copies which Anthropic absolutely did not do, so none of your following statements are correct either.

pier253• 7 hours ago

It is an indisputable fact that Anthropic made money on models trained on those pirated books.

sensanaty• 21 hours ago

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.

economistbob6• 9 hours ago

Amen! 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.

driverdan2• 21 hours ago

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...

tzs2• 20 hours ago

Alsup 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-googl...

dataflow4• 17 hours ago

He learned Java to understand the Oracle v. Google case better.

His middle name is Haskell.

driverdan2• 6 hours ago

He was one of the few judges that understood tech. Unfortunately he retired last year.

brlewis• 19 hours ago

Yes, 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

If he was not aware, I wonder if he still would have described the process as "exceedingly transformative" had he been aware.

FeepingCreature3• 17 hours ago

Note that they're testing for 100-word passages. This is a level of memorization that avid readers can credibly also reach.

Note also that Sonnet 3.7 had to be jailbroken.

Note also that they got high memorization for a few books that were widely quoted. The books in question can probably also be "retrieved" by putting phrase prefixes into Google, which is probably why Sonnet 3.7 knows them with the precision of a fanboy. Material being widely repeated in the training set is a well-known cause of memorization.

penguin_booze• 16 hours ago

So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use?

It's funny that crimes can be settled in cash. IOW, everything has a price; and the price is always right. Settlement ought to be the euphemism for blood money.

In addition to the settlement, what I'd consider fair is to have these companies pay royalties in perpetuity. Of course, that's not tractable.

owenfi• 16 hours ago

Yeah, I feel like penalties here should be something like 10% of revenue in perpetuity. Then companies might think twice about asking forgiveness instead of permission.

simianwords• 15 hours ago

Why do they need prior consent? What sort of rent seeking do you want?

shakna4• 15 hours ago

So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use?

No, that's what they got in trouble for - a lack of consent.

If the author consents, it would have been fine. If they bought the books, then it is fine. Digitisation through destruction, like most book scanning systems. As long as the original work is destroyed during the process, and you actually paid for it, then it is fair use.

If it regurgitates, then the author can sue you again. So you are incentivised to make damn sure it doesn't. That's not covered by fair use.

Its only if the original cannot be accessed anymore, and you paid to get the original. Both must be true, for fair use to hold.

sdenton4• 15 hours ago

I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of that knowledge speed on your brain? No, because that's not what copyright is about.

Learning from and building on previous work is civilization. Copyright maximalism is a plague.

visarga4• 13 hours ago

So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use?

Yeah, you are right. Have you been paying your dues to the authors of your math books in first 4 grades? I think 15% of your wages as an engineer would suffice. These kids continue to profit for years, and they are so many. Gotta pot a stop to that IP theft.

In my mistake I thought copyright was about copying rights, not paying for using ideas themselves. If just being downstream from a copyrighted work is infringement even without substantial similarity, then it's more like patents that expire in lifetime + a million years.

itemize123• 12 hours ago

once you read the book, and learn from it and use the knowledge in your livelihood - you have to perpetually pay the author? Doesn't sound right.

HDThoreaun3• 5 hours ago

So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use?

Yes, that is the entire history of humanity. People steal the last generations works and build something from it to make it their own.

theplumber5• 21 hours ago

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!

IncreasePosts5• 21 hours ago

Kim built something designed to help everyone pirate stuff. Anthropic pirated specific content.

ceejayoz2• 21 hours ago

Anthropic pirated that content to help everyone do the same.

onemoresoop• 21 hours ago

If Anthopic had bought all the books it had trained for say at market rate we’d be having a different conversation now. Anthropic, through this settlement, has been forced to pay back, at least something… Kim would likely not have had enough money to compensate the victims and probably caused some more direct dammage by sharing pirated content. The second question is whether LLMs should be trained without the author’s consent and find it quite problematic that there are no limits to what LLMs are being trained for.

theplumber5• 20 hours ago

Fuck off! what about Aaron Swartz ? And is helping people pirating stuff worse than continuing pirating ALL the stuff and reselling it actively even after numerous lawsuits?

Some of you really don’t deserve good things. You should be blocked from using AI on more than one device without paying an additional subscription plan.

unsungNovelty• 19 hours ago

As soon as we start conditioning ethics, we give up and undermine the principles behind those ethics.

- @Nevermark

inigyou20• 12 hours ago

Kim built something designed to share files. Are you saying Microsoft should go to jail for SMB?

matheusmoreira• 21 hours ago

Yeah. These AI settlements make such a mockery of past copyright enforcement victims that it's straight up offensive.

Police descended upon Kim Dotcom like he was a terrorist or something. They rappelled down helicopters and stormed his home like he was bin Laden.

Then these big techs come along and they make some absurd cost of doing business settlement.

basilgohar2• 8 hours ago

Let's place the rage in the rage in the right place. What they did to past infringements is wrong. What they're doing now is also wrong, but less wrong.

dijit• 21 hours ago

Maybe if they could have fined him $1.5B he would have gotten away with it too.

What was Sean Parker sued for again?

koolba• 20 hours ago

Kill a man you’re a murderer. Kill a thousand, you’re a conqueror.

debo_• 19 hours ago

Kill them all... Oooooaaahhhhh you're a goddd

yard20102• 15 hours ago

I harass the sea with my tiny boat and am called a pirate, you do it with a great fleet and are called a king.

onionisafruit• 19 hours ago

It was a class action law suit. I may be wrong, but I don’t think jail is ever an option in a civil suit.

adgjlsfhk1• 18 hours ago

right, the thread you responded to is asking why there hasn't been a parallel criminal suit

dyauspitr4• 17 hours ago

Because no one wants that. They’re offering incredible value for what they took.

danny_codes• 17 hours ago

I mean.. it also sends the message that you can ignore the law if you're rich. $1.5B is like a single failed training run for Anthropic. They burn that in a long weekend because somebody forgot to abort a hyper parameter search.

Obviously exaggerating.. but not by much.

monooso3• 17 hours ago

1. Some people want that, with good reason.

2. There's incredible value in what they stole.

3. IANAL, but I don't believe "but now everyone can write like a terrible version of the writer we fleeced" is a valid legal defense.

markdown• 16 hours ago

Aaron Swartz also intended to offer incredible value for what he took, AND for no personal profit.

bigbuppo• 15 hours ago

Yeah, man, sure they cleaned out the vault, but the valuable insights gained for how to keep it from happening again are priceless!

bandrami5• 16 hours ago

inigyou20• 12 hours ago

This clearly meets the scale requirements for criminality.

Saline95152• 16 hours ago

Jail for copying bits... come on, no one was hurt here.

yard20102• 15 hours ago

This sends a clear message and it echoes the "you can't solve a societal problem with tech" comment from the other thread - there is a right way and a wrong way of breaking the law. It's not that you have to keep the law, you just need to break it in the way that the consequences can be contained.

I think it's just a matter of time until everyone learns this. And then it will be the end of the slowly dying liberal democracies.

elil17• 15 hours ago

This settlement doesn't stop that from happening in the future

ethagnawl• 9 hours ago

Right. It's effectively a toll.

yogthos• 8 hours ago

it's a big club, and you ain't in it

telotortium• 21 hours ago

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• 20 hours ago

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?

tzs2• 20 hours ago

The 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• 20 hours ago

Weird to hear a full throated defense of the RIAA here

inigyou20• 12 hours ago

How did the 200 million dollar lawsuits for one song come about then?

tim-projects• 20 hours ago

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.

wtfHN26• 19 hours ago

If these companies fail, so does the US economy.

I would be really worried about the US economy then.

thewebguyd• 17 hours ago

There 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.

timmg• 20 hours ago

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

abuhl982• 19 hours ago

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.

protocolture5• 19 hours ago

1500 to the author, 1500 to the publisher.

abuhl982• 13 hours ago

I didn't catch that part.

blackqueeriroh7• 19 hours ago

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

ori_b5• 19 hours ago

Let's have that conversation after the people strip mining the livelihoods of creators cough up for UBI.

brigandish• 18 hours ago

No UBI, thanks, let's just make them pay for the works they're relying on (as the rest of us would have to).

muzani2• 18 hours ago

Odd place to bring this up. This is one of those situations where copyright is doing what it's meant to do.

Der_Einzige• 17 hours ago

The 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.

imp0cat• 17 hours ago

But does it, really?

A slap on the wrist, that's what it's doing here, isn't it?

blackqueeriroh7• 19 hours ago

For 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...

broodbucket• 19 hours ago

There can be more than one problem at once

fhe• 19 hours ago

if 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• 18 hours ago

Authors 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.

duped• 19 hours ago

The problem is the plagiarism

Saline95152• 16 hours ago

I don't think so Anthropic models are not used to distribute fake copies of books. Excerpts, maybe, but that's fair use.

bruce511• 19 hours ago

> Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years

There are a couple problems with this approach.

Firstly, while the median income is 20k, the book business is like films or music; ie not evenly distributed. At the top end are a small number of successful authors. They effectively subsidize the publishing house while the house throws advances at authors hoping for the next big whale.

Many books never earn back their advance. Meaning if the author was paid out of royalties they'd make less, not more.

Making advances bigger would result in fewer advances. The pot of money is finite.

This is all happening in a market where supply is unconstrained (everyone thinks they can write), and demand is very limited.

And before we discuss the value, or lack thereof of having an intermediary at all, it should be noted from your link that the median for published authors is higher than self-published authors. So clearly they seem to be making authors more valuable.

In truth of course, most (published) books aren't terribly valuable. Like music and movies most float to the bottom.

So no, the answer is not "pay authors more".

bloppe• 18 hours ago

If most books never recoup the advance in sales, then isn't this a better deal for most authors? It sounds like a guaranteed floor which might be very low but is nonetheless higher than the alternative

ori_b5• 18 hours ago

Yes, the Anthropic settlement is far too small to distribute fairly. It seems like you think this makes the action that lead to this settlement justified?

potlee• 16 hours ago

then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work. Most never do.

Thats a nice way of saying publishing houses are paying most authors more than they make from the sales

qurren• 16 hours ago

Part of the problem is the rest of us are broke as well and taxed to death so we don't have much left. If they paid you well, we wouldn't be able to afford your books.

inigyou20• 12 hours ago

Note that most of our biggest tax is not called a tax, it's called rent.

nohell• 19 hours ago

also see: https://nonogra.ph/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books...

up2isomorphism• 19 hours ago

1.5B is a joke

fithisux• 18 hours ago

This is "smoothed" by governments cause they need this tech for surveillance.

The verdict is a joke.

croes3• 18 hours ago

Usually a thief isn‘t allowed to keep what he has stolen

t0mpr1c3• 17 hours ago

Perhaps your analogy is wrong.

croes3• 11 hours ago

Maybe they shouldn’t call it piracy then

bandrami5• 15 hours ago

That's why copyright infringement is legally different from theft

croes3• 11 hours ago

They call it piracy, not me

sharts• 16 hours ago

That doesn’t seem like much

sashank_15092• 16 hours ago

A 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• 15 hours ago

It doesn't do anything?

Au contraire! Now the creations of the LLMs stand on legal ground. This was an excellent deal for Anthropic

usef-4• 15 hours ago

Yeah, 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.

chvid2• 15 hours ago

It is legal to train LLMs on books but illegal to train on output of LLMs.

Perfect - an absolute steal for 1.5B.

remify• 14 hours ago

The legal ground is: If you're rich enough you can do it.

Now only big tech companies can train models

Maxatar• 13 hours ago

Settlements do not in any way establish legal precedent or any legal standing.

This is simply an agreement between two parties.

agilob• 15 hours ago

and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change

and then sell to all its subscribers, things need to change.

Fixed that for you.

Imagine being able to pay a fraction of your savings to download all Netflix shows and then sell 1 minute chunk of every media to your paid subscribers.

Llamamoe• 14 hours ago

Exactly. This is a slap on the wrist. They need to either be banned from profiting from the egregious piracy, meaning charging money for anything trained on pirated works, or at least be forced to pay major royalties.

olalonde• 14 hours ago

Regurgitating existing ideas is not copyright infringement. Reproducing works verbatim is and AI companies already implement guardrails to prevent that.

rzmmm• 14 hours ago

It depends. In music for example it's often question whether the artist has been exposed to the original work. In that spirit, small language models are less likely to infringe copyright.

timmb• 13 hours ago

This is exactly why something more advanced than copyright is needed to protect human creative endeavour against AI appropriation. Copyright is demonstrated here not to be up to the job but it doesn’t mean there isn’t regulation needed to give human creators rights and a reward for their contribution

zingar• 13 hours ago

It would be interesting to know what the guardrails are. That would help me with understanding how I can use AI content. For instance I asked Claude to help me draw a diagram to represent a software engineering concept for a public presentation and then I had to stop and think: am I about to just reuse something from a Martin Fowler or Kent Beck book without attribution?

shevy-java2• 14 hours ago

I think the only way to stop that is to put the responsible folks in prison permanently. Small criminals are being jailed permanently on repeated offence. I think big guns with a lot of money need to get much higher sentences by default. And no monetary way to avoid that. The whole prison system is kind of screwed up here. A leech system for lawyers and judges.

visarga4• 13 hours ago

There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas.

So, by that logic, you need to be paying every time you regurgitate any of my ideas. Or anyone else's. Copyright now protects abstractions and vibes. Substantial similarity test be damned. Nobody can write stories about wizard schools, the idea is taken.

21asdffdsa12• 13 hours ago

Every morning we pay royalties to prometheus for we all are toast.

runroader2• 13 hours ago

Humans are not computers. Humans are not a service. In the end, all laws are made up rules and can absolutely be written to have different outcomes and restrictions based on if a human is doing something or if a program is doing it.

Orygin2• 12 hours ago

You indeed need to pay someone if you take their copyrighted materials and regurgitate it. Ask DJ's and producers how they need to include royalties for samples used in their tracks.

benj111• 12 hours ago

Well I think that is the greater question.

Is AI just an algorithm. Is human creativity just an algorithm?

Who, if anyone should own the copyright if you prompt AI to write a book?

I'm thinking more from a moral and philosophical pov, the copyright regime is broken anyway

PhunkyPhil• 7 hours ago

This isn't that out there in our current scenario. These models compress our collective thought and effort. Why not make these publicly owned, all profits distributed back to us?

TeMPOraL4• 13 hours ago

It's not meant to do anything about LLMs. It addresses the procurement of training data. I'm glad the courts demonstrate some basic lucidity that sadly seems to have escaped tech discussion sites some time ago.

Lutger2• 13 hours ago

Ideas are not protected by copyright, nor are facts. You need to have a very specific and 'creative' / 'substantial' expression of an idea for copyright to apply.

The output of an LLM can be easily be such, but usually not.

jagged-chisel• 10 hours ago

… very specific …

That phrase is doing a lot of work. In the US, any writing is automatically protected by copyright. (This comment, for example.) Whether the author can claim infringement is a can of worms: legal costs, fair use … but your “very specific” phrasing makes it sound like there’s a prescription for exactly what is protected by copyright - there is not.

Ideas are not protected by copyright.

The expression of the idea is, however. Same with facts. The fact that I live at a specific street address is not protected. My sentence construction explaining my specific street address is protected.

The output of an LLM …

… is not protected, not matter its shape. The US Copyright Office has declared as much.

ethbr13• 9 hours ago

I'll link to a previous comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968156

You need to have a very specific and 'creative' / 'substantial' expression of an idea for copyright to apply. The output of an LLM can be easily be such, but usually not.

This is incomplete with current US law. You need the above (the typical copyright qualifiers) AND evidence of substantial human involvement in the creation.

Minimally directing an autonomous agent does not qualify.

pixlmint• 13 hours ago

if they had any intention of doing things "the right way", they would have gone to every publisher individually and asked for a proper license.

phire6• 13 hours ago

This settlement has basically nothing to do with LLMs.

At least not as far as the courts are concerned. Alsup ruled [0] that feeding a book into an LLM is transformative and counts as fair use. Especially when they purchased a physical copy of the book, scanned it, and destroyed the original.

But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as long as they planned to eventually deleted them afterwards)

Where Anthropic ran into problems is that they put all their pirated books into a big central library (file on a server), and planned to keep those copies forever. Including copies they never actually fed into the LLM (a point that seriously worked against them).

Alsup ruled this central library of pirated books was copyright infringement. And it's this "pirated central library" that Anthropic are now paying a a 1.5B settlement for, nothing else.

The fact that the pirated books were also used to train LLMs is legally irrelevant. Though... I suspect a non AI company could have negotiated a significantly smaller settlement.

[0] https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar...

embedding-shape3• 12 hours ago

At least not as far as the courts are concerned. Alsup ruled [0] that feeding a book into an LLM is transformative and counts as fair use. Especially when they purchased a physical copy of the book, scanned it, and destroyed the original.
But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as long as they eventually deleted them afterwards)

The way I understood it, was that essentially the entire case rested on if Anthropics use was "transformative" or not. And since they literally destroyed the books (not just delete files, which would be copied), that made it transformative.

Regardless if they deleted files or not, if nothing existing was transformed, it would have been illegal. But because of the destruction of k̶n̶o̶w̶l̶e̶d̶g̶e̶ physical property, this ended up being legal.

lp4v4n• 12 hours ago

It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, right?

It seems to be the modus operandi of corporations in general: they commit any kind of infringement they want and then later they go for a settlement with a value that's, of course, not too big for a company too big to fail.

In the meantime, the average person or company gets shafted.

In my opinion, we are one step away from AI companies capturing the entirety of copyright legislation.

smolder4• 11 hours ago

As far as I'm concerned, the courts are wrong, and training on ill gotten copyrighted material is not fair use. Given the clear value of highly trained LLMs, the investment they have taken on, and the amount of disruption to the existing economy they stand to make, in a just world, the people who created the training data deserve some level of compensation. I think, in the US, they are very afraid of falling behind China, who doesn't give a shit about intellectual property, but that doesn't mean we aren't crossing an ethical boundary, acting like them.

satvikpendem20• 11 hours ago

That's a good ruling, because otherwise only the big companies can afford to pay for enough content to make an LLM (say goodbye to open weight or research LLMs). Having a fee like this is actually a form of regulatory capture.

cataphract2• 11 hours ago

But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as long as they planned to eventually deleted them afterwards)

The court says otherwise.

Such piracy of otherwise available copies is inherently, irredeemably infringing even if the pirated copies are immediately used for the transformative use and immediately discarded.

Then it says it doesn't need to decide on that basis because they kept it not just for training LLMs, but also for building a central library. Which seems a bit ridiculous, because the sole purpose of the central library is to train LLMs.

zelphirkalt2• 10 hours ago

Who would have thought, that this is the way, which we take to arrive at the burning books stage again? They neatly line up with historical perpetrators in that regard.

freejazz11• 8 hours ago

But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as long as they planned to eventually deleted them afterwards)

You're not. Even if training is fair use, it doesn't mean you can steal copies to train the model. It just means the training itself isn't an infringement (in Alsup's opinion). Stealing the copies of the books was an infringement and that's exactly the liability that Anthropic settled.

xuhu• 6 hours ago

Hey I just came up with this idea, I'm going to feed copyrighted books into my LLM that remembers them verbatim, and then people pay me to ask the LLM for complete copies of a book.

Wait, no, not verbatim. It transforms upper case into lower case and vice versa.

one33seven• 12 hours ago

If it is based on all our data, we should all own it and democratically chose what is done with it or profits it generates

Zambyte5• 12 hours ago

The correct way to legislate this is to abolish copyright. It is strictly a negative force. Nobody makes art because of copyright, only in spite of it.

inigyou20• 12 hours ago

Commercial enterprises make content, like Marvel movies and Netflix series, because of copyright.

ivell• 11 hours ago

People make art to also get recognized for that art. Otherwise they would keep that art secret at home.

Without copyright, anyone can copy the art and call it their own. What is then the incentive for the creator to share the art, if there is neither monetory gain and nor fame. And worse than them being recognized, they might even get accused of copying their own art if someone else became famous due to a copy.

Society would miss out a lot.

newsclues• 11 hours ago

What if copyrights are shorter, but vigorously defended (other than fair use provisions)?

Can we use the modern tech (AI) to policy copyright infringement, to liberate the culture and business?

jstummbillig• 11 hours ago

There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas

This does not do enough to fix the root problem.

People who live right now, who happen to have written or produced anything that AI works with, build on the back of humanities combined knowledge, will become outsized beneficiaries of AI, with the AI wave offering new ways of monetizing their work – while everyone who has not, won't be.

It's simply not good enough. We have to make sure people broadly benefit first and foremost.

crest• 10 hours ago

It's easy to beat up on OpenAI and Anthropic, because they have lots of money and knowingly broke the law, but writing the book was onetime work too. Do we really want to turn everything into recurring revenue stream to skim of? How would that even work for an open weights model? Would you say the same about a human educating themselves from a book? The answer has to be more than pearl clutching for poor starving little authors (and the not so poor class action lawyers).

nobleach• 10 hours ago

I agree. If I pirate a book and share it on the web, and I get busted for doing so, and subsequently pay a fine, I don't get to KEEP sharing it on the web.

Now, if I license the book, I might be able to come to an agreement with the author/publisher whereby I can share some of it.

drngdds• 7 hours ago

The post specifically proposes royalties for ideas from books, not royalties for the books themselves. You would absolutely still be able to share ideas you learned from the books you pirated in that situation. It'd be insanely draconian if you couldn't.

(Then again, US copyright law often is insanely draconian.)

andsoitis4• 9 hours ago

royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas

That doesn’t make sense. You cannot copyright an idea, only the specific expression of the idea.

dec0dedab0de2• 9 hours ago

There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas.

We're trying to own ideas now?

freejazz11• 8 hours ago

There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas.

The settlement does not pertain to any outputs

giancarlostoro• 7 hours ago

I'd rather see AI studios do the same as the film industry, pay a one-time up front cost per major model (or major.minor?) depending on how they contract it out. This also allows smaller startups to license books for less than a larger frontier studio would. In theory and hopefully, the pricing would not be too insane per book, you want them to rent more books and spend more, not go back to pirating right?

efficax• 7 hours ago

how would you do that? you can copyright words, but you can't copyright an idea (you can patent some ideas, but not all of them)

doitright99• 15 hours ago

If 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.

cataphract2• 11 hours ago

It's not a small fine. It's much more than what each title could be bought for in the market.

octocop• 15 hours ago

Roko's basilisk might be at work here

cultofmetatron• 15 hours ago

I do recall that a "famous redditor" was driven to suicide for making works available and he wasn't even making money for it.

archerx3• 14 hours ago

He 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• 14 hours ago

understatement is a kind of humor, when he said 'redditor'

nylonstrung• 12 hours ago

If 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

inigyou20• 12 hours ago

Aaron Swartz founded Reddit in the same way that Elon Musk founded Tesla, but without the money.

Quothling• 12 hours ago

I'm not from the USA so my views are obviously biased by this. I very much doubt Epstein committed suicide, and it's been wild to watch you guys deal with it, not releasing the files, holding nobody accountable and so on. That being said, I also don't think there needs to be a big dark secret to explain why someone caught in the USA justice system would commit suicide.

It's crazy that you could face 35 years in jail for trying to free knowledge in a harmless manner. The longest anyone has been imprisoned for in my country in modern times is 26 years, 11 months and 6 days. We have a few people posed to break that record. Peter Lundin has been in prison for 25ish years, and him and Peter Madsen (the discount elon musk turned murderer who killed some poor journalist in is selfmade submarine) are contenders to people who will probably go beyond 35 years.

Not that our system is perfect. I think we're far too lenient on some crimes, but risking 35 years in jail for downloading and sharing academic knowledge... That's objectively evil.

satvikpendem20• 11 hours ago

That's the joke, why do you think they put it in quotes?

phailhaus• 7 hours ago

Your theory is that he found "very dark stuff" that is accessible to any MIT student? Schwartz didn't "hack" anything, he connected to their student network and downloaded articles that they had access to but the public didn't.

gabriel666smith• 14 hours ago

I 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

shevy-java2• 14 hours ago

One 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• 14 hours ago

Where is my check for my 20 years of contributing to reddit?

petterroea• 14 hours ago

Settlement 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• 8 hours 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• 13 hours ago

$3000/book for effectively pirating a book is shamefully low.

visarga4• 13 hours ago

What 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.

chrisjj• 13 hours ago

Why would we use a multi-billion parameter model to copy text?

Because it is free and essy to use? The number of numbers under the hood is irrelevent.

inigyou20• 12 hours ago

They mean pirating. Why is it suddenly hard to understand when an LLM company is involved?

tancop• 13 hours ago

this 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• 13 hours ago

So 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• 13 hours ago

This 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• 12 hours ago

The 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• 12 hours ago

Now it’s time to mount such cases everywhere in the world.

hyperbole• 12 hours ago

The 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• 12 hours ago

$1.5bn? it's a steal!

thiht• 11 hours ago

Honestly 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• 11 hours ago

In 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• 10 hours ago

So just a speeding ticket...

lvl155• 10 hours ago

So they used pirated materials to train their models but others can’t use their models for training even if you pay.

jiaosdjf• 10 hours ago

Single 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• 9 hours 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• 9 hours ago

I'm curious to see how Suno and the Record Labels is gonna play out

reactordev2• 9 hours ago

$1.5B for a company that is valued at $1T+…

basilgohar2• 8 hours ago

Is 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• 7 hours ago

IMO 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).

Dkuku• 7 hours ago

It 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.

kmeisthax2• 7 hours ago

I'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

WillAdams3• 6 hours ago

A 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/_wl1DciZZ...

raverbashing2• 6 hours ago

I 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

WillAdams3• 5 hours ago

Edited 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.

docmars• 6 hours ago

This does absolutely nothing to compensate the authors whose content was stolen by AI companies.

m0llusk• 6 hours ago

LLMs improve development speed such that enshittification can be in progress well before the IPO.

tripleee• 6 hours ago

Now 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• 5 hours ago

What 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• 3 hours 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• 18 minutes ago

I 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.

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

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