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.
But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future.
That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract with taxi medallion holders. It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation. In the same way, it was faster for Anthropic to load up their models with un-DRM'd PDFs and ePUBs from wherever instead of licensing them publisher by publisher.
Didn't Google have a long standing project to do just that?
- Anthropic
- Any Chinese company who do not care about copyright laws
What is the cost of buying and scanning books?
Copyright law needs to be fixed and its ridiculous hundred years tenure chopped away.
> Anthropic also agreed to delete the pirated works it downloaded and stored.
> As part of the settlement, Anthropic said that it did not use any pirated works to build A.I. technologies that were publicly released.And even if they didn't use the illegally-obtained work to train any of the models they released, of course they used them to train unreleased prototypes and to make progress at improving their models and training methods.
By engaging in illegal activity, they advanced their business faster and more cheaply than they otherwise would have been able to. With this settlement, other new AI companies will see it on the record that they could face penalties if they do this, and will have to go the slower, more expensive route -- if they can even afford to do so.
It might not make it impossible, but it makes the moat around the current incumbents just that much wider.
Oh so now we're at "just trust me bro" levels of absurdity