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

(www.nytimes.com)
989 points acomjean | 1 comments | 05 Sep 25 19:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | 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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Nursie ◴[06 Sep 25 02:00 UTC] No.45145907[source]▶
> pirating of the books is the issue

I have an author friend who felt like this was just adding insult to injury.

So not only had his work been consumed into this machine that is being used to threaten his day job as a court reporter, not only was that done without seeking his permission in any way, but they didn’t even pay for a single copy.

Really embodies raising your middle finger to the little guy while you steamroll him.

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1. Lu2025 ◴[06 Sep 25 03:26 UTC] No.45146355[source]▶
Exactly this. It's only us peons who will be prosecuted under the current copyright laws. The rich and well connected will base their entire business on blatant theft and will get away with it.