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Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

(www.businessinsider.com)
399 points pyman | 7 comments | 07 Jul 25 09:20 UTC | HN request time: 1.209s | source | bottom
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ramon156 ◴[07 Jul 25 10:42 UTC] No.44488798[source]▶
Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation?

Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

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kevingadd ◴[07 Jul 25 11:21 UTC] No.44489076[source]▶
Google did it the legal way with Google Books, didn't they?
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1. suyjuris ◴[07 Jul 25 12:00 UTC] No.44489423[source]▶
The judge appears to disagree with you on this. They found that training and selling an LLM are fair use, based on the fact that it is exceedingly transformative, and that the copyright holders are not entitled to any profits thereof due to copyright. (They also did get paid — Anthropic acquired millions of books legally, including all of the authors in this complaint. This would not retroactively absolve them of legal fault for past infringements, of course.)
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2. pyman ◴[07 Jul 25 12:11 UTC] No.44489534[source]▶
The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That's when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing over seven million pirated books
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3. suyjuris ◴[07 Jul 25 13:05 UTC] No.44489979{3}[source]▶
Yes, that would by an interesting trial. But it is only about six books, and all claims regarding Claude have been dismissed already. So only the internal copies remain, and there the theory for them being infringing is somewhat convoluted: you have to argue that they are not just for purposes of training (which was ruled fair use), and award damages even though these other purposes never materialised (since by now, they have legal copies of those books). I can see it, but I would not count on there being a trial.
4. flaptrap ◴[07 Jul 25 14:04 UTC] No.44490502[source]▶
The fallacy in the 'fair use' logic is that a person acquires a book and learns from it, but a machine incorporates the text. Copyright does not allow one to create a derivative work without permission. Only when the result of the transformation resembles the original work could it be said that it is subject to copyright. Do not regard either of those legal issues are set in concrete yet.
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5. mensetmanusman ◴[07 Jul 25 14:25 UTC] No.44490708{3}[source]▶
Both a human and a machine learn from it. You can design an LLM that doesn’t spit back the entire text after annealing. It just learns the essence like a human.
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6. badmintonbaseba ◴[07 Jul 25 14:36 UTC] No.44490817{4}[source]▶
Morally maybe, but AFAIK machines "learning" and creating creative works on their own is not recognized legally, at least certainly not the same way as for people.
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7. Workaccount2 ◴[07 Jul 25 14:58 UTC] No.44491070{5}[source]▶
>AFAIK machines "learning" and creating creative works on their own is not recognized legally

Did you read the article? The judge literally just legally recognized it.