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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: 0.437s | 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. jkaplowitz ◴[06 Sep 25 00:49 UTC] No.45145492[source]▶
I suspect that ruling legally gets wiped off the books by the settlement since the case gets dismissed, no?

Even if the ruling legally remains in place after the settlement, district court rulings are at most persuasive precedent and not binding precedent in future cases, even ones handled by the same court. In the US federal court system, only appellate rulings at either the circuit court of appeals level or the Supreme Court level are binding precedent within their respective jurisdictions.

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2. qingcharles ◴[06 Sep 25 18:19 UTC] No.45151618[source]▶
That ruling does not get wiped off, you're right it is persuasive precedent, and it certainly can be cited in other cases, even if it's non-binding. It will be useful. District court rulings are used all the time as cites in novel applications of law like this.