Would it actually set any kind of legal precedent, or just establish a sort of cultural vibe baseline? I know Anthropic doesn't have to admit fault, and I don't know if that establishes anything in either direction. But I'm not from the US, so I wouldn't want to pretend to have intimate knowledge of its system.

The number of bizarre, contradictory inferences this settlement asks you to make - no matter your stance on the wider question - is wild.

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gpm 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The settlement doesn't set any kind of precedent at all.

The existing ruling in the case establish "persuasive" (i.e. future cases are entirely free to disagree and rule to the contrary) precedent - notably including the part about training on legally acquired copies of books (e.g. from a book store) being fair use.

Only appeals courts establish binding precedent in the US (and only for the courts under them). A result of this case settling is that it won't be appealed, and thus won't establish any binding precedent one way or another.

> The number of bizarre, contradictory inferences this settlement asks you to make - no matter your stance on the wider question - is wild.

What contradictions do you see? I don't see any.

	▲	gabriel666smith 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks! That's really helpful. > What contradictions do you see? I don't see any. I guess us seeing very different things is also what a settlement might be for :-). But I think I was wrong. I think others in the thread are debating the contradictions I saw. I tried typing them out when I made my earlier comment, but couldn't get them to fix to any kind of logic that made sense to me. They just seemed contradictory, at the time. I think the same arguments have now been made much more clearly by others - specifically around whether a corporation downloading this work is the same as a human downloading it - and the responses have been very clear also. The settlement figure was tied implicitly to Anthropic's valuation in the Ars article [0] where I think I originally posted my comment. Those comments were moved here, so I've linked below. Specifically linking the settlement sum to the valuation of a corporation is what caught me in a loop - that valuation assumes that Anthropic will do certain things in the future. I was thinking too much, maybe, about things like: "Would a teenager get the same treatment? What about a teenager with a private company? What about a teenager who seemed dumber than that teenager to the person deciding their company's valuation? What about a teenager who had not opened the files themselves, but had spun up a model from them? What about a teenager who had done both?" Etc. I think I was getting fixated on the idea that the valuation assumes future performance, and downloading the files was possibly necessary for that performance, but I was missing the obvious answers to some of my questions because of that. I do think that some of the more anthropomorphising language - "training data" is an example - trips people up a lot in the same way. And I think that if the settlement sum reflects anything to do with the valuation of that corporation, that does create some interesting questions, but maybe not contradictions. [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/judge-anthropics...

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stingraycharles 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A settlement means that no legal precedent is set, so I can only assume a cultural precedent.

Sometimes these companies specifically seek out a settlement to avoid setting a legal precedent in case they feel like they will lose.

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lxe 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Hmm my huge concern was that if the settlement were to get approved, it would set a legal precedent for other "settlement approvals" like this one, setting back AI research in the US, paving way for China to win the race.

	▲	impossiblefork 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Nah, I think it's the opposite. If this settlement were approved, then you could screw people over in class action lawsuits. This settlement was the "AI-friendly" thing.

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gabriel666smith 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks!