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

(www.nytimes.com)
989 points acomjean | 2 comments | 05 Sep 25 19:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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nicce ◴[05 Sep 25 20:56 UTC] No.45143507[source]▶
I guess they must delete all models since they acquired the source illegally and benefitted from it, right? Otherwise it just encourages others to keep going and pay the fines later.
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greensoap ◴[05 Sep 25 20:58 UTC] No.45143530[source]▶
In a prior ruling, the court stated that Anthropic didn't train on the books subject to this settlement. The record is that Anthropic scanned physical books and used those for training. The pirated books were being held in a general purpose library and were not, according to the record, used in training.
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reassess_blind ◴[05 Sep 25 21:56 UTC] No.45144126[source]▶
So how did they profit off the pirated books?
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1. greensoap ◴[06 Sep 25 00:38 UTC] No.45145413{3}[source]▶
According to the judge, they didn't. The judge said they stored those books in a general purpose library for future use just in case they decided to use them later. It appears the judge took much issue with the downloading of "pirated content." And Anthropic decided to settle rather than let it all play out more.
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2. nicce ◴[06 Sep 25 02:46 UTC] No.45146190[source]▶
But how the settlement cost was then defined if nobody read those books and there was no financial lost...