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

To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training.

It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data.

Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.

Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.

Paying $3,000 for pirating a ~$30 book seems disproportionate.

Not if 100 companies did it and they all got away.

This is to teach a lesson because you cannot prosecute all thieves.

Yale Law Journal actually writes about this, the goal is to deter crime because in most cases damages cannot be recovered or the criminal will never be caught in the first place.

If in most cases damages cannot be recovered or the criminal will never be caught in the first place, then what is the lesson being taught? Doesn't that just create a moral hazard where you "randomly" choose who to penalize?

It's about sending a message.

The message being you’ll likely get away with it?