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

(www.businessinsider.com)
393 points pyman | 4 comments | 07 Jul 25 09:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.634s | source
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pyman ◴[07 Jul 25 09:20 UTC] No.44488332[source]▶
Anthropic's cofounder, Ben Mann, downloaded million copies of books from Library Genesis in 2021, fully aware that the material was pirated.

Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.

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originalvichy ◴[07 Jul 25 09:55 UTC] No.44488540[source]▶
At least most pirates just consume for personal use. Profiting from piracy is a whole other level beyond just pirating a book.
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KoolKat23 ◴[07 Jul 25 11:13 UTC] No.44489003[source]▶
This isn't really profiting from piracy. They don't make money off the raw input data. It's no different to consuming for personal use.

They make money off the model weights, which is fair use (as confirmed by recent case law).

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j_w ◴[07 Jul 25 11:36 UTC] No.44489216[source]▶
This is absurd. Remove all of the content from the training data that was pirated and what is the quality of the end product now?
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pyman ◴[07 Jul 25 11:43 UTC] No.44489279[source]▶
With Claude, people are paying Anthropic to access answers that are generated from pirated books, without the authors permission, credit, or compensation.
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1. KoolKat23 ◴[07 Jul 25 11:45 UTC] No.44489304[source]▶
There is no copyright on knowledge.

If it outputs parts of the book verbatim then that's a different story.

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2. pyman ◴[07 Jul 25 12:22 UTC] No.44489612[source]▶
Let's don't change the focus of the debate.

Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to power Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your personal website. The original creators don't get credit or payment, and someone’s profiting off their work.

All this happens while authors, many of them teachers, are left scratching their heads with four kids to feed

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3. KoolKat23 ◴[07 Jul 25 12:40 UTC] No.44489775[source]▶
That may be the case, but you'd have to have laws changed.
4. SirMaster ◴[07 Jul 25 16:31 UTC] No.44492025[source]▶
>If it outputs parts of the book verbatim then that's a different story.

But it does...