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

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.

This is to teach a lesson because you cannot prosecute all thieves.

Yale Law Journal actually writes about this, the goal is to deter crime because in most cases damages cannot be recovered or the criminal will never be caught in the first place.