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

(www.nytimes.com)
989 points acomjean | 3 comments | 05 Sep 25 19:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.696s | source
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pbd ◴[06 Sep 25 04:02 UTC] No.45146495[source]▶
From a systems design perspective, $3,000 per book makes this approach completely unscalable compared to web scraping. It's like choosing between a O(n) and O(n²) algorithm - legally compliant data acquisition has fundamentally different scaling characteristics than the 'move fast and break things' approach most labs took initially.
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1. BoorishBears ◴[06 Sep 25 04:50 UTC] No.45146703[source]▶
I don't know if anyone has actually read the article or the ruling, but this is about pirating books.

Anthropic went back and bought->scanned->destroyed physical copies of them afterward... but they pirated them first, and that's what this settlement is about.

The judge also said:

> “The training use was a fair use,” he wrote. “The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes.”

So you don't need to pay $3,000 per book you train on unless you pirate them.

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2. pbd ◴[06 Sep 25 07:49 UTC] No.45147414[source]▶
i agree. this is very gray imo. e.g., books in India have cheap EEE editions compared to the ones in US/Europe. so they can pre-process the data in India & then compile it in US. does that save them from piracy rules & reduces cost as well.
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3. BoorishBears ◴[06 Sep 25 08:36 UTC] No.45147623[source]▶
I mean relative to the cost of pre-training, books are going to be cheap even if you buy them in the US (as demonstrated by the fact Anthropic bought them after)

For post-training, other data sources (like human feedback and/or examples) are way more expensive than books