Judge Approves $1.5 Billion Anthropic Settlement Over Pirated Books Used To Train Claude
- Reference: 0184564264
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/07/21/1744202/judge-approves-15-billion-anthropic-settlement-over-pirated-books-used-to-train-claude
- Source link:
> District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin said in a Monday ruling that the class-action settlement provides "meaningful relief" to affected authors and publishers. About 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers who are now due payment. Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement was "the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible."
[1] https://apnews.com/article/ai-anthropic-copyright-settlement-claude-books-bartz-74b140444023898aeba8579b6e9f0d63
[2] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/05/1941245/anthropic-agrees-to-pay-record-15-billion-to-settle-authors-ai-lawsuit
Should be weighted (Score:3)
Recent works: $100,000
Works older than 5 years, author alive: $10,000
Works older than 5 years, author dead. Meaning copyright no longer serves the public good it was put in place to serve and in fact damages it: $0
Re: (Score:2)
so if author dead 5 yeras or more we can use copy right material?
Re: (Score:2)
If the PRIVILEGE of copyright that WE the public give to creators to encourage CREATION no longer applies, and copyright is being used to PREVENT derived CREATIVE work, there should clearly be NO copyright.
Re: (Score:2)
That's pre-Disney copyright.
Re: (Score:2)
> Works older than 5 years, author dead. Meaning copyright no longer serves the public good it was put in place to serve and in fact damages it: $0
Where does it say that? I can't find it in either of TFAs.
Books are still copyright by the authors' estates for up to 70 years past the date of their death, at least in the USA. Not sure how your statement, or the settlement (if it is as you say), square with that.
Re: (Score:2)
You're right. Wasn't so clear though.
Re: Should be weighted (Score:2)
If you cannot be bothered to read all the relevant text before replying, it is not worth commenters' wasting their time debating with you.
Re: Should be weighted (Score:2)
Hmmm...seems like the least cost strategy is to murder all writers.
Re: Should be weighted (Score:2)
The copyright privilege should be optimized for its purpose, encouraging creation, and not for copyright holders' profits.
Re: Should be weighted (Score:2)
This is a settlement for use which has already occurred under existing laws.
Your idea is fairly good but a counterproposal might be to change nothing but expiry, and go back to a 15 year copyright term with no extensions, which would serve everyone.
not illegal? (Score:2)
there is a lot of stuff that if you or I did it, then it would be against the law. but if some Big Corp does it for mega profits, then suddenly it's not illegal.
Re: (Score:2)
Rules for thee, but not for me
So Claude doesn't have to unlearn what it stole? (Score:5, Insightful)
Proves the old adage that It's cheaper to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Re:So Claude doesn't have to unlearn what it stole (Score:4, Insightful)
Just the opposite. The court ruled that Claude had the rights to train using books that they bought. The standard now is buying used/surplus books and mass scanning them.
Re: So Claude doesn't have to unlearn what it stol (Score:4, Insightful)
^----- THIS
is the main take-away here.
it seems to me that the little blurb on most title pages like "cannot be reproduced by any means electronic or otherwise" would cover ai training, but it sounds like this ruling found otherwise.
Re: So Claude doesn't have to unlearn what it sto (Score:3)
Using a work for AI training is not reproduction. It's not storing the works.
Creating the training corpus, on the other hand... That IS storing them, and completely as well.
Re: (Score:2)
From what I understand Anthropic has to destroy originals and duplicates, and authors can take future legal action over future AI output.
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It's also easier to openly break the law and get away with it because you have absurd amounts of money and judges tend to side with whoever has the most cash.
Possession is 9/10 of the law. And yeah I know that doesn't technically mean what I am talking about here. But it means what it means in the context of reality. Specifically judges are members of the property owning class and so whether intentionally or not they tend to side with whoever has the most of the stuff.
So now it's open season on anyt
Corporate Personhood test failed. (Score:2)
Don't "normal" pirates get prison sentence in front of fines/damages?
High price (Score:2)
That's $3419.82 per book. So if you're wondering why they aren't forcing them to have the books un-learned from the AI engine, that's why. It wasn't about theft or impersonation, it was about money. And clearly the defendants are fine with their books being in an AI engine then.
Show of hands (Score:2)
How many of these authors are now using Claude, or another LLM, to assist in their next book?
The should be forced to retrain (Score:2)
They should be made to guarantee that disputed books were not in the training data. If this means retraining the model then so be it. The difficulty to remove the benefit of using copyrighted works shouldn't have any bearing on this.
Re: (Score:2)
> If this means retraining the model then so be it. The difficulty to remove the benefit of using copyrighted works shouldn't have any bearing on this.
IMO the focus on "using copyrighted works" - making copyright **STATUS** the important part - feels like a hell of a red herring - vs if permission is needed, or granted if it is needed. Anything created in a country where copyright is automatic, and not put in the public domain explicitly, is copyrighted, even works where people would encourage using it in X way or Y way, or want it only used in other ways, if used at all.
lawyers (Score:2)
> We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible.
What he really means is that he is looking forward to 33% plus fees on $1.5B. Why work again?