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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: 1.107s | source
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gordian-mind ◴[06 Sep 25 10:42 UTC] No.45148158[source]▶
After the book publishers burned Google Book's Library of Alexandria, they are now making it impossible to train a LLM unless you engage in the medieval process of manually buying paper-copies of work just to scan & destroy them...
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1. znpy ◴[06 Sep 25 12:10 UTC] No.45148574[source]▶
for recent books, they could buy digital version of the books and use them for training, though.
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2. satyrnein ◴[06 Sep 25 15:09 UTC] No.45149956[source]▶
I was wondering about this, but digital versions are typical DRM-encumbered and actually a license (not a true purchase) whose terms probably don't allow this. The court's decision was that training is fair use, but in practice, it seems many avenues are blocked.

It reminds of the theoretically public beaches that are blocked off by privately owned land.

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3. riskable ◴[06 Sep 25 19:47 UTC] No.45152316[source]▶
DRM is irrelevant. That's only if you want to efficiently extract the text.

If you point a camera at an ebook reader with a little motor to tap the screen, "next" that's still easier than scanning physical books.

The reason why companies aren't using ebooks is because all the publishers and ebook companies make you click through a license stating that "this book for personal use" (paraphrased).