Anthropic judge rejects $1.5B AI copyright settlement

Selling a game whose assets were made with a pirated copy of Photoshop does not extend Adobe's copyright to cover your game itself. They can sue you for using the pirated copy of Photoshop, but they can't extend copyright vampirically in that manner — at least, not in the United States.

(They can still sue for damages, but they can't claim copyright over your game itself.)

What is illegal about using pirated software that someone else distributed to you, if you never agreed to a license contract?

Are the authors claiming copyright over the LLM? My understanding is they were suing Anthropic for using the authors' data in their training product. The court ruled that using the books for training would be fair use, but that piracy is not fair use.

Thus, isn't the settlement essentially Anthropic admitting that they don't really have an effective defense against the piracy claim?

If you can show that the pirated copy was provided to you without your knowledge, and that there was no reasonable way for you to know that it was pirated, there probably isn't anything illegal about it for you.

But otherwise, you're essentially asking if you can somehow bypass license agreements by simply refusing to read them, which would obviously render all licensing useless.

Well, there are damages torts and there's also an unjust enrichment tort. In the paradigm example where you make funding available to your treasurer and he makes an unscheduled stop in Las Vegas to bet it on black, you can sue him for damages. If he lost the bet, he owes you the amount he lost. If he won, he owes you nothing (assuming he went on and deposited the full amount in your treasury as expected).

Or you could sue him on a theory of unjust enrichment, in which case, if he lost, he'd owe you nothing, and if he won, he'd owe you all of his winnings.

It's not clear to me why the same theory wouldn't be available to Adobe, though the copyright question wouldn't be the main thrust of the case then.

Why do you think reading the agreement is notionally mandatory before the software becomes functional?

Most paid software generally makes you acknowledge that you have read and accepted the terms of the license before first use, and includes a clause that continued use of the software constitutes acceptance of the license terms.

In the event that you try to play games to get around that acknowledgement: Courts aren't machines, they can tell that you're acting in bad faith to avoid license restrictions and can punish you appropriately.

>> Why do you think reading the agreement is notionally mandatory before the software becomes functional?

> Most paid software generally makes you acknowledge that you have read and accepted the terms of the license before first use, and includes a clause that continued use of the software constitutes acceptance of the license terms.

Huh. If only I'd known that.

Why do you think that is?

How about you directly say what you're trying to say instead of being unnecessarily sarcastic?

If it's possible to use software without agreeing to the license, then the license really doesn't bind the user. That's why people try to make it mandatory.

Why did you think it made sense to respond to the question "Why do you think X is true?" with "Did you know that X is true?"?

Oh I don't disagree that the authors may have a compelling case — I was just responding to the statistical similarities vs copying argument. Anthropic may have violated the authors rights, but technically that doesn't extend copyright via a "causal link."

The authors can still sue for damages though (and did, and had a strong enough case Anthropic is trying to settle for over a billion dollars).