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.

I wonder what Aaron Swartz would think if he lived to see the era of libgen.

Didn't he get in trouble for contributing to sci-hub before he died?

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.

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.