Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

One thing that comes to mind is...

Is there a way to make your content on the web "licensed" in a way where it is only free for human consumption?

I.e. effectively making the use of AI crawlers pirating, thus subject to the same kind of penalties here?

I'd argue you don't actually want this! You're suggesting companies should be able to make web scraping illegal.

That curl script you use to automate some task could become infringing.

I'm sure one can try, but copyright has all kinds of oddities and carve-outs that make this complicated. IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that, for example, if you tried putting in your content license "Free for all uses public and private, except academia, screw that ivory tower..." that's a sentiment you can express but universities are under no obligation legally to respect your wish to not have your work included in a course presentation on "wild things people put in licenses." Similarly, since the court has found that training an LLM on works is transformative, a license that says "You may use this for other things but not to train an LLM" couldn't be any more enforceable than a musician saying "You may listen to my work as a whole unit but God help you if I find out you sampled it into any of that awful 'rap music' I keep hearing about..."

The purpose of the copyright protections is to promote "sciences and useful arts," and the public utility of allowing academia to investigate all works(1) exceeds the benefits of letting authors declare their works unponderable to the academic community.

(1) And yet, textbooks are copyrighted and the copyright is honored; I'm not sure why the academic fair-use exception doesn't allow scholars to just copy around textbooks without paying their authors.

No. Neither legally or technically possible.

Maybe some kind of captcha like system could be devised that could be considered a security measure under the DMCA and not allowed to be circumvented. Make the same content available under a licence fee through an API.

Yes to the first part. Put your site behind a login wall that requires users to sign a contract to that effect before serving them the content... get a lawyer to write that contract. Don't rely on copyright.

I'm not sure to what extent you can specify damages like these in a contract, ask the lawyer who is writing it.

>I'd argue you don't actually want this! You're suggesting companies should be able to make web scraping illegal.

At this point, we do need some laws regulating excessive scraping. We can't have the ineternet grind to a halt over everyone trying to drain it of information.

Contracts generally require an exchange of consideration (something of value, like money).

If you put a “contract” on your website that users click through without paying you or exchanging value with you and then you try to collect damages from them according to your contract, it’s not going to get you anywhere.

The consideration the viewer received was access to your private documents.

The consideration you received was a promise to refrain from using those documents to train AI.

I'm not a lawyer, but by my understanding of contract law consideration is trivially fulfilled here.

Ummm.. terms and conditions?

The GP was talking about web scraping, not "excessive web scraping". It's an important difference.

DMCA is a US thing, and people in other countries don't have to follow it.