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

(www.nytimes.com)
989 points acomjean | 3 comments | 05 Sep 25 19:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.406s | source
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aeon_ai ◴[05 Sep 25 20:46 UTC] No.45143392[source]▶
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.

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ants_everywhere ◴[05 Sep 25 21:18 UTC] No.45143731[source]▶
I wonder what Aaron Swartz would think if he lived to see the era of libgen.
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r14c ◴[05 Sep 25 22:35 UTC] No.45144481[source]▶
Didn't he get in trouble for contributing to sci-hub before he died?
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dekhn ◴[05 Sep 25 23:40 UTC] No.45145012[source]▶
He got into trouble for breaking into an unsecured network closet at MIT and using MIT credentials to download a bunch of copyrighted content.

The whole incident is written up in detail, https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ by Hal Abelson (who wrote SICP among other things). It is a well-researched document.

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1. ants_everywhere ◴[06 Sep 25 00:13 UTC] No.45145229[source]▶
I think the parent may be getting at why he was downloading the content. I don't know the answer to this. Maybe someone here does. What was he intending to do with the articles?

The report speculates to his motivations on page 31, but it seems to be unknown with any certainty.

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2. dekhn ◴[06 Sep 25 01:24 UTC] No.45145708[source]▶
Swartz, like many of us, see pay-for-access journals as an affront. I believe he wanted to "liberate" the content of these articles so that more people could read them.

Information may want to be free, but sometimes it takes a revolutionary to liberate it.

3. JCharante ◴[06 Sep 25 06:37 UTC] No.45147141[source]▶
I think legally nobody knows why he was downloading the content to the point where he had to come to his hidden laptop to swap out hard drives of papers.

but also prior to that he had written the guerilla open access manifesto so it wasn't great optics to be caught doing that