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.
If this is a choice between risking to pay 1.5 billion or just paying 15 mil safely, they might.
Option 2: near-$0 valuation, $15M purchasing cost.
To an investor, that just looks like a pretty good deal, I reckon. It's just the cost of doing business - which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these.
What's actually wrong with this?
They paid $1.5B for a bunch of pirated books. Seems like a fair price to me, but what do I know.
The settlement should reflect society's belief of the cost or deterrent, I'm not sure which (maybe both).
This might be controversial, but I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willing to pay the cost. Imagine if you couldn't speed in a car. Imagine if you couldn't choose to be jailed for nonviolent protest.
This isn't some case where they destroyed a billion dollars worth of pristine wilderness and got off with a slap on the wrist.
> They paid $1.5B for a bunch of pirated books.
They didn't pay, they settled. And considering flesh-and-blood people get sued for tens of thousands per download when there isn't a profit motive, that's a bargain.
> The settlement should reflect society's belief of the cost or deterrent.
No, it reflects the maximum amount the lawyers believe they can get out of them.
> This might be controversial, but I think a free society needs to let people break the rules if they are willing to pay the cost.
So how much should a politician need to pay to legally murder their opponent? Are you okay with your ex killing you for a $5000 fine?
> Imagine if you couldn't speed in a car.
Speed enough and you lose your license, no need to imagine.
Why does this company get away with it, but do warez groups get raided by SWAT teams, labeled a "criminal enterprise" or "crime gang", and sentenced to decades in jail? Why does the law not apply when you are rich?