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

(www.businessinsider.com)
394 points pyman | 2 comments | 07 Jul 25 09:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.411s | source
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dehrmann ◴[07 Jul 25 16:02 UTC] No.44491718[source]▶
The important parts:

> Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use

> "All Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies"

It was always somewhat obvious that pirating a library would be copyright infringement. The interesting findings here are that scanning and digitizing a library for internal use is OK, and using it to train models is fair use.

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6gvONxR4sf7o ◴[07 Jul 25 16:25 UTC] No.44491944[source]▶
You skipped quotes about the other important side:

> But Alsup drew a firm line when it came to piracy.

> "Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library," Alsup wrote. "Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic's piracy."

That is, he ruled that

- buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use

- pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.

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throwawayffffas ◴[07 Jul 25 16:39 UTC] No.44492103[source]▶
So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated. They will have ceased and desisted.
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1. dragonwriter ◴[07 Jul 25 17:02 UTC] No.44492352[source]▶
> So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated.

No, that doesn't undo the infringement. At most, that would mitigate actual damages, but actual damages aren't likely to be important, given that statutory damages are an alternative and are likely to dwarf actual damages. (It may also figure into how the court assigns statutory damages within the very large range available for those, but that range does not go down to $0.)

> They will have ceased and desisted.

"Cease and desist" is just to stop incurring additional liability. (A potential plaintiff may accept that as sufficient to not sue if a request is made and the potential defendant complies, because litigation is uncertain and expensive. But "cease and desist" doesn't undo wrongs and neutralize liability when they've already been sued over.)

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2. rockemsockem ◴[07 Jul 25 17:39 UTC] No.44492771[source]▶
> So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated.

For anyone else who wants to do the same thing though this is likely all they need to do.

Cutting up and scanning books is hard work and actually doing the same thing digitally to ebooks isn't labor free either, especially when they have to be downloaded from random sites and cleaned from different formats. Torrenting a bunch of epubs and paying for individual books is probably cheaper