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Anthropic judge rejects $1.5B AI copyright settlement

(news.bloomberglaw.com)
290 points nobody9999 | 1 comments | 09 Sep 25 08:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.277s | source
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jawns ◴[09 Sep 25 19:02 UTC] No.45187038[source]▶
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.

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visarga ◴[09 Sep 25 19:32 UTC] No.45187519[source]▶
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?

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gruez ◴[09 Sep 25 19:35 UTC] No.45187577[source]▶
>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.

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visarga ◴[09 Sep 25 19:39 UTC] No.45187621[source]▶
Copyright should be about copying rights, not statistical similarities. Similarity vs causal link - a different standard all together.
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dotnet00 ◴[09 Sep 25 19:55 UTC] No.45187851[source]▶
Those statistical similarities originate from a copyright violation, there's your causal link. Basically the same as selling a game made using pirated Photoshop.
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reissbaker ◴[09 Sep 25 20:11 UTC] No.45188135[source]▶
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.)

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dotnet00 ◴[09 Sep 25 21:05 UTC] No.45189126[source]▶
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?

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1. reissbaker ◴[10 Sep 25 19:20 UTC] No.45202377[source]▶
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).