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

> illegally copying and selling pirated software

This is very different to what Anthropic did. Nobody was buying copies of books from Anthropic instead of the copyright holder.

At the very least, they should have purchased the originals once

Yeah, people have gone to jail for a few copies of content. Taking that large of a corpus and getting off without penalty would be a farce of the justice system.

Bad decisions should not be repeated in the name of fair application.

I wouldn't be so sure about that statement, no one has ruled on the output of Anthropic's AI yet. If their AI spits out the original copy of the book then it is practically the same as buying a book from them instead of the copyright holder.

We've only dealt with the fairly straight-forward legal questions so far. This legal battle is still far from being settled.

It is extremely likely this will be declared fair use in the end.

There's already one decision on a competitor.

It makes sense, if you think of how the model works.

They actually should, because generally an equal playing field is more important that correct law.

As an extreme example, consider murder. Obviously it should be illegal, but if it's legal for one group and not for another, the group for which it's illegal will probably be wiped out, having lost the ability to avenge deaths in the group.

It's much more important that laws are applied impartially and equally than that they are even a tiny bit reasonable.

I think GP's point is that you should always seek to apply the law correctly, hopefully setting precedent for its correct application for everyone in the future.

It’s very unlikely that Claude will verbatim reproduce an entire book from its training corpus. If that’s the bar, they are pretty safe in my opinion.

You're assuming discrimination on the basis of groups. That seems bad to me.

Laws and their enforcement are a clusterfuck. To achieve greater justice we should strive towards better judgements overall.

God, stop with the group on group bs please and engage with things the way they're written without injecting the entirety of your cynical worldview layered on top.

Yep, exactly

> If their AI spits out the original copy of the book

Not even the authors suing Anthropic have claimed it can do this, have they?