Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

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• Hacker News
• In many ways this adds to Anthropic’s motivation to IPO.

  This deal is built around Anthropic surviving. The $1.5B comes in installments, and counsel’s fees are paid in step with those installments.

  The class is now effectively Anthropic’s creditor, with a direct financial interest in the company staying solvent through the payment schedule.

  Civil suits compensate and the one outcome guaranteed to leave authors worse off was a verdict big enough to kill the payer.

  by chrisaiv
• So, Ahthropic pirated god-knows-how-many books from all around the world to build Claude models, launches multi-billion products out it, and then gets fined $1.5B. Sounds like the crime was worth the shot.

  It reminds me of:

  > "If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class."

  by joelwallis
• Death to copyright, which has always been far more harmful to small authors and creators than it has even been to large companies.
  by blackqueeriroh
• Let's have that conversation after the people strip mining the livelihoods of creators cough up for UBI.
  by ori_b
• Odd place to bring this up. This is one of those situations where copyright is doing what it's meant to do.
  by muzani
• If a person did this, this person would go to jail. If a company does it? Small fine and the green light to cannibalize more content. Funny how that works.
  by doitright99
• It's not a small fine. It's much more than what each title could be bought for in the market.
  by cataphract
• Did someone forget to consult with the MPAA and the RIAA on this one? This is a joke of an outcome. $3k per book. How much was it per song for Napster?
  by BloodyIron
• The RIAA typically asked for around $2-4 per song to settle without a lawsuit, which would come to a total of a few thousand because they generally only went after people sharing over a thousand songs.

  In the couple of few where the party would not agree to a settlement and the RIAA sued, they would pick about 15 of the thousand+ songs to sue over. Statutory damages are a minimum of $750 per infringed work, so the total would now be about 3-5 times what their settlement offer amount had been.

  Most parties then got a lawyer, the lawyer told the party that had no chance, and they would then seriously negotiate with the RIAA and get a settlement.

  Only a couple would still not settle, went to trial, and did an absolutely terrible job and the judge/jury awarded well above the minimum statutory damages. The RIAA still tried to settle for well below that, but the defendants refused and kept trying to fight and did not have a happy time.

  by tzs
• For anyone who thinks the problem is Anthropic, I want you all to know that most authors make less than the median income. Most make less than $20,000 a year, because publishing houses give authors an advance, and then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work.

  Most never do.

  Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years.

  https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author...

  by blackqueeriroh
• Part of the problem is the rest of us are broke as well and taxed to death so we don't have much left. If they paid you well, we wouldn't be able to afford your books.
  by qurren
• Why would you think the advance is the problem? The problem is the low cut of sales if anything. The advance is exclusively beneficial.
  by throwawayk7h
• if authors get an advance that's greater than the sale of their books, doesn't it mean that the publishers lose money, i.e. paid more for those books than the books sales?
  by fhe
• There can be more than one problem at once
  by broodbucket
• > then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work. Most never do.

  Thats a nice way of saying publishing houses are paying most authors more than they make from the sales

  by potlee
• If most books never recoup the advance in sales, then isn't this a better deal for most authors? It sounds like a guaranteed floor which might be very low but is nonetheless higher than the alternative
  by bloppe
• >> Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years

  There are a couple problems with this approach.

  Firstly, while the median income is 20k, the book business is like films or music; ie not evenly distributed. At the top end are a small number of successful authors. They effectively subsidize the publishing house while the house throws advances at authors hoping for the next big whale.

  Many books never earn back their advance. Meaning if the author was paid out of royalties they'd make less, not more.

  Making advances bigger would result in fewer advances. The pot of money is finite.

  This is all happening in a market where supply is unconstrained (everyone thinks they can write), and demand is very limited.

  And before we discuss the value, or lack thereof of having an intermediary at all, it should be noted from your link that the median for published authors is higher than self-published authors. So clearly they seem to be making authors more valuable.

  In truth of course, most (published) books aren't terribly valuable. Like music and movies most float to the bottom.

  So no, the answer is not "pay authors more".

  by bruce511
• To be clear, the issue is not that the books were used to train Claude, but that they were pirated.
  by jdlshore
• how much of your economic output are you comfortable with companies like Anthropic stealing to put you out of work?

  at least in Player Piano they paid the workers who made the cassette tapes that made the robots work.

  our current LLM overlords demand that they be able to basically steal the sum total of all human knowledge so that they can sell it back to us at a rate they set.

  they should have been shunned by society and made penniless when they first announced their goals but we have a bunch of deeply misanthropic people who have money and want to make a world where computer slaves do their bidding.

  by jamesjhare
• A critical distinction, because they were going to to find terabytes of not pirated books to train on that contained the sum history of humanities knowledge /s
  by EmoteSupportBot
• Which is another issue. In the context of pirating, it should be also an issue, because it is a benefit from the crime.
  by nicce
• This is why you should always distill your models from a competitor.

  Let them take on the liability

  by mountainriver
• It's an unfortunate outcome. Now to be a big player in AI, you have to have enough capital to buy your own library worth of books and digitize them. (Fun fact: a pallet of books is called a "gaylord," and they buy hundreds of gaylords.)

  I created books3 to help settle the question of whether AI companies should be allowed to train on books. The outcome of "it's okay to pirate books as long as you're only training on them" was a long shot, but it would've let individual hackers train their own AI models (assuming access to sufficient compute, which you can get e.g. via https://sites.research.google/trc/about/).

  Now we're in a world where you have to have dozens of millions in capital to do substantial work.

  I heard at one point Eleuther was gathering public domain training data. I wonder if they ever built a corpus large enough so that training on books doesn't really matter...

  by sillysaurusx
• I do recall that a "famous redditor" was driven to suicide for making works available and he wasn't even making money for it.
  by cultofmetatron
• He wasn’t just some famous redditor. Aaron Swartz helped create Reddit and invented RSS.

  If I put my conspiracy theory hat one and I always get piled on for this theory in other online communities but I think it could be possible. The theory is I think Aaron found some very dark stuff while exploring the MIT private networks, things that he was not supposed to see and could be very damaging to a lot people if they were exposed. The infamous Jeffery Epstein was donating a lot of money to MIT and its Media Labs. I think there is a much deeper story at play that the mainstream narrative is hiding with a “suicide”.

  by archerx
• But why not jail like Kim Dotcom? And why no Feds jumping on Dario’s window? They are not only pirating, they also resell it!
  by theplumber
• it's a big club, and you ain't in it
  by yogthos
• This settlement doesn't stop that from happening in the future
  by elil17
• Copyright infringement is in most cases tortious rather than criminal.
  by bandrami
• Maybe if they could have fined him $1.5B he would have gotten away with it too.

  What was Sean Parker sued for again?

  by dijit