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.

How is it fair? Do you expect 9,000 from Google, Meta, OpenAI, and everyone else? Were your books imitated by AI?

Infringement was supposed to imply substantial similarity. Now it is supposed to mean statistical similarity?

>Were your books imitated by AI?

Given that books can be imitated by humans with no compensation, this isn't as strong as an argument as you think. Moreover AFAIK the training itself has been ruled legal, so Anthropic could have theoretically bought the book for $20 (or whatever) and be in the clear, which would obviously bring less revenue than the $9k settlement.

Copyright should be about copying rights, not statistical similarities. Similarity vs causal link - a different standard all together.

Those statistical similarities originate from a copyright violation, there's your causal link. Basically the same as selling a game made using pirated Photoshop.

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?

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.

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?