Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.

Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and printing them and selling them: not fair use

Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and making merchandise and selling it: not fair use

The idea that training models is considered fair use just because you bought the work is naive. Fair use is not a law to leave open usage as long as it doesn’t fit a given description. It’s a law that specifically allows certain usages like criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. Training AI models for purposes other than purely academic fits into none of these.

> Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.

Agreed. Great book for those looking for a read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102439.Rainbows_End

The author, Vernor Vinge, is also responsible for popularizing the term 'singularity'.

> Buying used copies of books

It remains deranged.

Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library.

(Edit: in fact initially I wrote 'is supposed to' in place of 'has more than a right to' - meaning that "knowledge is there, we made it available: you are supposed to access it, with the fullest encouragement").

I wonder what Aaron Swartz would think if he lived to see the era of libgen.

Google scanned many books quite a while ago, probably way more than LibGen. Are they good to use them for training?

Thanks for the reminder that what the Internet Archive did in its case would have been legal if it was in service of an LLM.

It is related to scalable mode training, however. Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. And don't forget about the cost of 1) finding 2) purchasing 3) processing and 4) recycling that volume of books.

> It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use,

I think that this is a distinction many people miss.

If you take all the works of Shakespeare, and reduce it to tokens and vectors is it Shakespeare or is it factual information about Shakespeare? It is the latter, and as much as organizations like the MLB might want to be able to copyright a fact you simply cannot do that.

Take this one step further. IF you buy the work, and vectorize it, thats fine. But if you feed it in the vectors for Harry Potter so many times that it can reproduce half of the book, it becomes a problem when it spits out that copy.

And what about all the other stuff that LLM's spit out? Who owns that. Well at present, no one. If you train a monkey or an elephant to paint, you cant copyright that work because they aren't human, and neither is an LLM.

If you use an LLM to generate your code at work, can you leave with that code when you quit? Does GPL3 or something like the Elastic Search license even apply if there is no copyright?

I suspect we're going to be talking about court cases a lot for the next few years.

Don't forget: NO LEGAL PRECEDENT! which means, anybody suing has to start all over. You only settle in this scenario/point if you think you'll lose.

Edit: I'll get ratio'd for this- but its the exact same thing google did in it's lawsuit with Epic. They delayed while the public and courts focused in apple (oohh, EVIL apple)- apple lost, and google settled at a disadvantage before they had a legal judgment that couldn't be challenged latter.

Thank you. I assumed it would be quicker to find the link to the case PDF here, but your summary is appreciated!

Indeed, it is not only payout, but the destruction of the datasets. Although the article does quote:

> “Anthropic says it did not even use these pirated works,” he said. “If some other generative A.I. company took data from pirated source and used it to train on and commercialized it, the potential liability is enormous. It will shake the industry — no doubt in my mind.”

Even if true, I wonder how many cases we will see in the near future.

So... it would be a lot cheaper to just buy all of the books?

I’m an author, can I get in on this?

From the article:

> Although the payment is enormous, it is small compared with the amount of money that Anthropic has raised in recent years. This month, the start-up announced that it had agreed to a deal that brings an additional $13 billion into Anthropic’s coffers. The start-up has raised a total of more than $27 billion since its founding in 2021.

You're joking, but that's actually a good pitch. There was a significant legal issue hanging over their heads, with some risk of a potentially business-ending judgment down the line. This makes it go away, which makes the company a safer, more valuable investment. Both in absolute terms and compared to peers who didn't settle.

They wanted to move fast and break things. No one made them.

Yes to the first part. Put your site behind a login wall that requires users to sign a contract to that effect before serving them the content... get a lawyer to write that contract. Don't rely on copyright.

I'm not sure to what extent you can specify damages like these in a contract, ask the lawyer who is writing it.

Maybe some kind of captcha like system could be devised that could be considered a security measure under the DMCA and not allowed to be circumvented. Make the same content available under a licence fee through an API.

I'd argue you don't actually want this! You're suggesting companies should be able to make web scraping illegal.

That curl script you use to automate some task could become infringing.

No. Neither legally or technically possible.

I'm sure one can try, but copyright has all kinds of oddities and carve-outs that make this complicated. IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that, for example, if you tried putting in your content license "Free for all uses public and private, except academia, screw that ivory tower..." that's a sentiment you can express but universities are under no obligation legally to respect your wish to not have your work included in a course presentation on "wild things people put in licenses." Similarly, since the court has found that training an LLM on works is transformative, a license that says "You may use this for other things but not to train an LLM" couldn't be any more enforceable than a musician saying "You may listen to my work as a whole unit but God help you if I find out you sampled it into any of that awful 'rap music' I keep hearing about..."

The purpose of the copyright protections is to promote "sciences and useful arts," and the public utility of allowing academia to investigate all works(1) exceeds the benefits of letting authors declare their works unponderable to the academic community.

(1) And yet, textbooks are copyrighted and the copyright is honored; I'm not sure why the academic fair-use exception doesn't allow scholars to just copy around textbooks without paying their authors.

Printing press, audio recording, movies, radio, television were also transformative. Did not get rid of copyright or actually brought them.

I feel it is insane that authors do not receive some sort of standard compensation for each training use. Say a few hundred to a few thousand depending on complexity of their work.

Fair use isn't about how you access the material, its about what you can do with it after you legally access it. If you don't legally access it, the question of fair use is moot.

I wonder how much it would cost to buy every book that you'd want to train a model.

This implies training models is some sort of right.

They're paying $3000 per book. It would've been a lot cheaper to buy the books (which is what they actually did end up doing too).

That metaphor doesn't really work. It's a settlement, not a punishment, and this is payment, not a fine. Legally it's more like "The store wasn't open, so I took the items from the lot and paid them later".

It's not the way we expect people to do business under normal circumstances, but in new markets with new products? I guess I don't see much actually wrong with this. Authors still get paid a price they were willing to accept, and Anthropic didn't need to wait years to come to an agreement (again, publishers weren't actually selling what AI companies needed to buy!) before training their LLMs.