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

$1.5B is a nothing but a handslap for the big gold rush companies.

It's less than 1% Anthropic's valuation -- a valuation utterly dependent on all the hoovering up of others' copyrighted works.

AFAICT, if this settlement signals that the typical AI foundation model company's massive-scale commercial theft doesn't result in judgments that wipe out a company (and its execs), then we have confirmation that is a free-for-all for all the other AI gold rush companies.

Then making deals to license rights, in sell-it-to-us-or-we'll-just-take-it-anyway deals, becomes only a routine and optional corporate cost reduction exercise, but not anything the execs will lose sleep over if it's inconvenient.

> It's less than 1% Anthropic's valuation

The settlement is real money though. Valuation is imaginary.

There’s alternatives to wiping out the company that could be fair. For example, a judgement resulting in a shares of the company or revenue shares in the future rather than a one time pay off.

Writers were the true “foundational” piece of LLMs, anyway.

If this is an economist idea of fair, where is the market?

If someone breaks into my house and steals my valuables, without my consent, then giving me stock in their burglary business isn't much of a deterrent to them and other burglars.

Deterrence/prevention is my real goal, not the possibly of a token settlement from whatever bastard rips me off.

We need the analogue of laws and police, or the analogue of homeowner has a shotgun.

I don't much like the idea of settling in stock, but I also think you're looking for criminal law here. Civil law, and this is a civil suit, is far more concerned with making damaged parties whole than acting as a deterrent.

I understand that intentional copyright infringement is a crime in the US, you just need to convince the DOJ to prosecute Anthropic for it...