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.
Infringement was supposed to imply substantial similarity. Now it is supposed to mean statistical similarity?
The suit isn't about Anthropic training its models using copyrighted materials. Courts have generally found that to be legal.
The suit is about Anthropic procuring those materials from a pirated dataset.
The infringement, in other words, happened at the time of procurement, not at the time of training.
If it had procured them from a legitimate source (e.g. licensed them from publishers) then the suit wouldn't be happening.
The portion the court said was bad was not Anthropic getting books from pirated sites to train its model. The court opined that training the model was fair use and did not distinguish between getting the books from pirated sites or hard copy scans. The part the court said was bad, which was settled, was Anthropic getting books from a pirate site to store in a general purpose library.
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"To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude
and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the
Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was.
also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a
fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central
library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central
library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.
However, Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library. Creating a
permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic’s piracy."
"Because the legal issues differ between the *library copies* Anthropic purchased and
pirated, this order takes them in turn."
Questions
As an author do you think it matters where the book was copied from? Presumably, a copyright gives the author the right to control when a text is reproduced and distributed. If the AI company buys a book and scans it, they are reproducing the book without a license, correct? And fair use is the argument that even though they violated the copyright, they are execused. In a pure sense, if the AI company copied (assuming they didn't torrent back the book) from a "pirate source" why is that copy worse then if they copied from a hard book?
No? I think there are a lot more details that need to be known before answering this question. It matters what they do with it after they scan it.
Yes
> it means that yes what I did was technically a violation but is forgiven
Not at all. All "affirmative defence" means is that procedural the burden is on me to establish that I was not violating the law. The law isn't "you can't do the thing", rather it is "you can't do the thing unless its like this". There is no violation, there is no forgiveness as there is nothing to forgive, because it was done "like this" and doing it "like this" doesn't violate the law in the first place.