Anthropic judge rejects $1.5B AI copyright settlement

I'm an author, and I've confirmed that 3 of my books are in the 500K dataset.

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.

> I think that's fair, considering that two of those books received advances under $20K and never earned out.

It may be fair to you but how about other authors? Maybe it's not fair at all to them.

Do they sell their books for more than $3000 per copy? In that case it isn't fair. Otherwise they are getting a windfall because of Anthropic's stupidity in not buying the books.

  | Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.[0]

Please don't be disingenuous. You know that none of the authors were selling their books for $3k a piece, so obviously this is about something more

  > because of Anthropic's stupidity in not buying the books.

And what about OpenAI, who did the same thing?

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...

Where is your evidence that Meta, Google, and OpenAI did the same thing? (As for NVIDIA, do they even train models?) Because if they did, why haven't they been sued? This is a garden variety copyright infringement case and would be a slam dunk win for the plaintiffs. The only novel part of the case is the claim that the plaintiffs lost on, which establishes president that training an LLM is fair use.

> 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.