Anthropic Agrees to Pay $1.5b to Settle Lawsuit with Book Authors

We hem and haw about metaphorical "book burning" so much we forget that books themselves are not actually precious.

The books that are destroyed in scanning are a small minority compared to the millions discarded by libraries every year for simply being too old or unpopular.

Oh I didn't know that. That's wild

I don't think Google Books scanner chopped off the spine. https://linearbookscanner.org/ is the open design they released.

No, that's not how Google Books did it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Scanning_of_books

I remember them having a 3D page unwarping tech they built as well so they could photograph rare and antique books without hacking them apart.

That is something which is extremely difficult to prove from either side.

It is 500,000 books in total so did they really scan all those books instead of using the pirated versions? Even when they did not have much money in the early phases of the model race?

So how did they profit off the pirated books?

I didn't realize Vernor Vinge had passed away... Sad TIL

One of my favorites

Anthropic legally purchased the books it used to train its model according to the judge. And the judge said that was fine. Anthropic also downloaded books from a pirate site and the judge said that was bad -- even though the judge also said they didn't use those books for training....

Books.Google.Com was deemed fair use because it only shows previews, not full downloads. Internet Archive is still under litigation iirc besides having owned a physical copy of every book they ever scanned (and keeping a copy in their warehouses) they let people read the whole thing.

I’m surprised Google hasn’t hit its competitors harder with the fact that they actually got permission to scan books from its partner libraries and Facebook and OpenAI just torrented books2/books3, but I guess they have aligned incentive to benefit from a legal framework that doesn’t look to closely at how you went about collecting source material

Yeah but did he die before anybody actually knew about it?

I had no idea libgen was that old, thanks!

He got into trouble for breaking into an unsecured network closet at MIT and using MIT credentials to download a bunch of copyrighted content.

The whole incident is written up in detail, https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ by Hal Abelson (who wrote SICP among other things). It is a well-researched document.

And a low end of $750/item.

If in most cases damages cannot be recovered or the criminal will never be caught in the first place, then what is the lesson being taught? Doesn't that just create a moral hazard where you "randomly" choose who to penalize?

Even if the goal is to deter crime, we still have a principle of proportionate punishment. We don't cut people's hands of for petty theft, and we don't execute people for exceeding the speed limit even though both should be pretty effective deterrents.

> handsomely profiting

Well actively generating revenue at least.

Profits are still hard to come by.

what a fascinating software project someone had the oppertunity to work on.

That's not how class actions work. Ever.

In this specific case the settlement caps the lawyer fees at 25%, and even that is subject to the courts approval. In addition they will ask for $250k total ($50k / plaintiff) for the lead plaintiffs, also subject to the courts approval.

So they’re creating monopolies? The existing players were allowed to do it, but anyone that tries to do it now will be hit with a 1.5B fine?

The example is a real legal case afaik, or perhaps paraphrased from one (don’t think it was a monkey - an ape? An elephant?).

I’d guess the legal scenario for `rails generate` is that you have a license to the template code (by way of how the tool is licensed) and the template code was written by a human so licensable by them and then minimally modified by the tool.

I don’t think the code you get from rails generate is yours. Certainly not by way of copyright, which protects original works of authorship and so if it’s not original, it’s not copyrightable, and yes it’s been decided in US courts that non-human-authorship doesn’t count as creative.

> courts are generally far more common sense than that in applying the law.

'The Board’s decision was later upheld by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which rejected the applicant’s contention that the AI system itself should be acknowledged as the author, with any copyrights vesting in the AI’s owner. The court further held that the CO did not act arbitrarily or capriciously in denying the application, reiterating the requirement that copyright law requires human authorship and that copyright protection does not extend to works “generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand, as plaintiff urges here.”' From: https://www.whitefordlaw.com/news-events/client-alert-can-wo...

The court is using common sense when it comes to the law. It is very explicit and always has been... That word "human" has some long standing sticky legal meaning (as opposed to things that were "property").

> compensate the authors this one time.

I would assume it would compensate the publisher. Authors often hand ownership to the publisher; there would be obvious exceptions for authors who do well.

Switzerland has five main collecting societies: ProLitteris for literature and visual arts, the SSA (Société Suisse des Auteurs) for dramatic works, the SUISA for music, Suissimage for audiovisual works, and SWISSPERFORM for related rights like those of performers and broadcasters. These non-profit societies manage copyright and related rights on behalf of their members, collecting and distributing royalties from users of their works.

Note that the law specifically regulates software differently, so what you cannot do is just willy nilly pirate games and software.

What distribution means in this case is defined in the swiss law. However swiss law as a whole is in some ways vague, to leave a lot up to interpretation by the judiciary.

Like most things in law, the answers are going to come down to intent and outcome. If you distribute the PDF to other people with the intent that they can read the copyrighted works of an author, then you have distributed that author's content in violation of copyright. If on the other hand, you encrypted the entire contents of that PDF, threw away the encryption key and the published prints of the PDF as artwork of binary code, that's probably going to fall on the side of "fair use" even though the entire copyrighted work is input to and contained in your final output. Though you might get into some legal hot water if you promoted your work using the author's name, but that's more of a trademark issue than a copyright issue.

I think he implies that because one can borrow hypothetically any book for free from a library, one could use them for legal training purposes, so the requirement of having your own copy should be moot

By US law, cccording to Author's Guild vs Google[1] on the Google book scanning project, scanning books for indexes is fair use.

Additionally:

> Every human has the right to read those books.

Since when?

I strongly disagree - knowledge should be free.

I don't think the author's arrangement of the words should be free to reproduce (ie, I think some degree of copyright protection is ethical) but if I want to use a tool to help me understand the knowledge in a book then I should be able to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

> this is obvious

I think it is obvious instead that readers employed by humans fit the principle.

> rights

Societally, it is more of a duty. Knowledge is made available because we must harness it.

> Archive is off the hook then

Probably so, because with "library" I did not mean the "building". It is the decision of the society to make knowledge available.

> we don't call computers "someone"

We do instead, for this purpose. Why should we not. Anything that can read fits the set.

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Edit: Come up with the arguments, sniper.