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

> 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.

> 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.

Setting the penalty to what it would have cost to obey the law in the first place does the opposite.

If you give people a claim for damages which is an order of magnitude larger than their actual damages, it encourages litigiousness and becomes a vector for shakedowns because the excessive cost of losing pressures innocent defendants to settle even if there was a 90% chance they would have won.

Meanwhile both parties have the incentive to settle in civil cases when it's obvious who is going to win, because a settlement to pay the damages is cheaper than the cost of going to court and then having to pay the same damages anyway. Which also provides a deterrent to doing it to begin with, because even having to pay lawyers to negotiate a settlement is a cost you don't want to pay when it's clear that what you're doing is going to have that result.

And when the result isn't clear, penalizing the defendant in a case of first impression isn't just either, because it wasn't clear and punitive measures should be reserved for instances of unambiguous wrongdoing.

https://copyright.gov/about/1790-copyright-act.html

Specified in dollars because dollars had been invented (in 1789), but in the amount of one half of one dollar, i.e. $0.50. That's 1790 dollars, of course, so a little under $20 today. (There was basically no inflation for the first 100+ years of that because the US dollar was still backed by precious metals then; a dollar was worth slightly more in 1900 than in 1790.)

That seems more like an attempt to codify some amount of plausible actual damages so people aren't arguing endlessly about valuations, rather than an attempt to impose punitive damages. Most notably because -- unlike the current method -- it scales with the number of sheets reproduced.