Thus, I stand to receive about $9,000 as a result of this settlement.
I think that's fair, considering that two of those books received advances under $20K and never earned out. Also, while I'm sure that Anthropic has benefited from training its models on this dataset, that doesn't necessarily mean that those models are a lasting asset.
| Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.[0]
> because of Anthropic's stupidity in not buying the books.
What about Meta, who did the same thing?
What about Google, who did the same thing?
What about Nvidia, who did the same thing?
Clearly something should be done because it's not like these companies can't afford the cost of the books. I mean Meta recently hired people giving out >$100m packages and bought a data company for $15bn. Do you think they can't afford to buy the books, videos, or even the porn? We're talking about trillion dollar companies.
It's been what, a year since Eric Schmidt said to steal everything and let the lawyers figure it out if you become successful?[1] Personal I'm not a big fan of "the ends justify the means" arguments. It's led to a lot of unrest, theft, wars, and death.
Do you really not think it's possible to make useful products ethically?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220658/google-eric-schm...
I don't think $3k is likely a bad deal, but I still think you're over simplifying things.
This is what generative AI essentially is.
Maybe the payment should be $500/h (say $5k a page) to cover the cost of preparing a human verified dataset for anthropic.
One of the consequences of retaining their rights is that they can also sue Meta and Google and OpenAI etc for the same thing.
Thus the $3k per violation is still punitive at (conservatively) 100x the cost of the book.
Given that it is fair use, Authors do not have rights to restrict training on their works under copyright law alone.
> Clearly something should be done because it's not like these companies can't afford the cost of the books
Yes indeed it should, and it has. They have been forced to pay $3000 per book they pirated, which is more than 100x what they would have gained if they had gotten away with it.
IMO a fine of 100x the value of a copy of the pirated work is more than sufficient as a punishment for piracy. If you want to argue that the penalty should be more, you can do that, but it is completely missing my point. You are talking about what is fair punishment to the companies, and my comment was talking about what is fair compensation to the authors. Those are two completely different things.
Don't get me wrong: I think this is in incredibly bad deal for authors. That said, I would be horrified if it wasn't treated as fair use. It would be incredibly destructive to society since people would try to use such rulings to chissel away at fair use. Imagine schools who had to pay yearly fees to use books. We know they would do that, they already try to do so (single use workbooks, online value added services). Or look at software. It is already going to be problematic for people who use LLMs. It is already problematic due to patents. Now imagine what would happen if reformulating algorithms that you read in a book was not considered as fair use. Or look at books themselves. A huge chunk of non-fiction consists of doing research and re-expressing ideas in non-original terms. Is that fair use? The main difference between that and a generative AI is we can say a machine did it in the case of generative AI, but is that enough to protect fair use in the conventional sense?
If there's evidence of this that will stand up in court, they should be sued as well, and they'll presumably lose. If this hasn't happened, or isn't in the works, then I guess they covered their tracks well enough. That's unfortunate, but that's life.
> the legal fees are almost certainly being paid on contingency and not out of pocket.
You're treating the system as isolated when it is not.
> no opportunity cost or lost future income here because this is piracy not theft.
But there's future costs here as people will use LLMs to generate books, which is competition. The cost of generating such a book is much cheaper, allowing for a much cheaper product.
> They only lost the revenue from the sale of a single copy.
Torrenting:
Meta Pirating Books[1,2,3]
- [1] Fun fact, [1] is the most popular post of all time on HN for the search word "torrent" and the 5th ranking for "Meta". [2] is the 16th for "illegal"
Nvidia [4,5]
Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic[6]
GitHub [7,8]
OpenAI [9,10]
Google [11]
- I mean this one was even mentioned in the articled from the Anthropic post from a few days ago[12]
> which establishes president that training an LLM is fair use.
~~~~~~~~~
precedent
> IMO a fine of 100x the value of a copy of the pirated work is more than sufficient as a punishment for piracy.
But that is a different topic all together. I still think you've vastly over simplified the conversation and thus unintentionally making some naive assumptions. It's the whole reason I said "probably" in [16]. The big difference being just that you're smart enough to figure out how law works and I'm smart enough to know that neither of us are lawyers.
And please don't ask me for more citations unless they are difficult to Google... I think I already set some kinda record here...
[0] https://archive.is/3oCg8
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971446
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43125840
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42772771
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40505480
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41163032
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40987971
[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33457063
[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27724042
[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42273817
[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941
[11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520633
[12] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45142885
[13] https://perkinscoie.com/insights/update/court-sides-meta-fair-use-and-dmca-questions-leaves-door-open-future-challenges
[14] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/meta-pirated-and-seeded-porn-for-years-to-train-ai-lawsuit-says/
[15] https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-lawsuit-accuses-meta-of-pirating-adult-films-for-ai-training/
[16] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45190232 > You are not entitled to protection from future competition
There's "Statutory Damages" which account for a wide range of things[0].
Not to mention you just completely ignored what I argued!
Seriously, you've been making a lot of very confident claims in this thread and they are easy to verify as false. Just google some of your assumptions before you respond. Hell, ask an LLM and they'll tell you! Just don't make assumptions and do zero amount of vetting. It's okay to be wrong, but you're way off base buddy.
Yes. Nemotron:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/ai-data-science/foundation-mode...
"Future competition" is a loosely worded way of saying this.
Anti-piracy groups use scare letters on pirates where they threaten to sue for tens of thousands of dollars per instance of piracy. Why should it be lower for a company?
…especially given the US “fair use” doctrine takes into account the effect that a particular use might have on the market for similar works, so the authors are bound to argue that the existence of AI that can reproduce fanfiction-like facsimiles of works at scale is going to poison the well and reduce the market for people spending actual money on future works (whether or not that’s true is another question).
So in my view the court is going to say that buying a book doesn’t give them the right to train on the contents because that is mechanical reproduction which is explicitly disallowed by the copyright notice and they don’t fall under the “fair use” carveout because they affect the future market. There isn’t anywhere else where they were granted the right to use the authors’ works so the work is disallowed. Obviously no court finding is ever 100% guaranteed but that really seems the only logically-consistent conclusion they could come to.