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

(www.nytimes.com)
989 points acomjean | 4 comments | 05 Sep 25 19:52 UTC | HN request time: 3.039s | 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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gnabgib ◴[05 Sep 25 23:16 UTC] No.45144845[source]▶
To be even more clear - this is a settlement, it does not establish precedent, nor admit wrongdoing. This does not establish that training is fair use, nor that scanning books is fine. That's somebody else's battle.
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djoldman ◴[05 Sep 25 23:27 UTC] No.45144924[source]▶
Right, the settlement doesn't.

However, the judge already ruled on the only important piece of this legal proceeding:

> Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work to train Claude...

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1. dragonwriter ◴[06 Sep 25 00:48 UTC] No.45145485[source]▶
The ruling also doesn’t establish precedent, because it is a trial court ruling, which is never binding precedent, and under normal circumstances can’t even be cited as persuasive precedent, and the settlement ensures there will be no appellate ruling.
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2. pera ◴[06 Sep 25 05:22 UTC] No.45146828[source]▶
On top of that this was just one case in the US. It's honestly a bit ridiculous how some Americans seem to believe that when one random judge from their country rules something that instantly turns into an international treaty that every country on Earth must accept.
3. 3836293648 ◴[06 Sep 25 08:09 UTC] No.45147502[source]▶
I thought it was precedentual within its circuit until an appellate says otherwise? And the the SC eventually joins in when two apellates disagree.
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4. dragonwriter ◴[06 Sep 25 17:32 UTC] No.45151244[source]▶
> I thought it was precedentual within its circuit until an appellate says otherwise?

No, trial court decisions are never binding precedent, if they are “published” decisions, they may generally be cited as persuasive precedent. Appellate decisions (Circuit Courts in the federal system) are binding on the trial courts subordinate to that appellate court (and even on panels of the same appellate court) until reversed by the same court sitting en banc or by a higher court (the US Supreme Court in the federal system.)