As was pointed out, the settlement is for piracy, not training. They had already ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted material for training fell within fair use.

As such, if you pirated a book and had to pay $3000 for that one instance, I don't think you'd like it if I said you should have paid $30K or $300K instead. If anything, this is analogous to the ridiculous fines people had to pay when pirating music.

(Not that I'm complaining...)

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wgjordan 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> As such, if you pirated a book and had to pay $3000 for that one instance, I don't think you'd like it if I said you should have paid $30K or $300K instead.

If you pirated a book for personal use the amount of liability wouldn't match a company whose profit could be attributed to pirating the same book. In US copyright law, a copyright infringer could be liable for "any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement" [1] (if the copyright owner elects to recover actual damages and profits instead of statutory damages).

[1] 17 U.S.C. § 504(b), https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504

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BeetleB 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would imagine that for over 99% of the books covered in this lawsuit, they're earning less than $3000 per book.

Put another way, their revenues wouldn't drop much if they simply hadn't trained on those 99%.

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ctippett 10 hours ago | parent [-]

IANAL, but the parent comment quotes "any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement", which I take to mean it's the profit Anthropic stands to make based on its use of the pirated content that's recoverable.

Given the entire global economy is currently bullish on the potential profitability of AI, I dare say they got off incredibly lightly settling for just $3k per book.

	▲	blackqueeriroh 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No, because you cannot prove that any individual book actually contributed meaningfully to Anthropic’s profit. Exclude one book from the training dataset. Did you make a worse model? We actually know the answer to this, and it is: absolutely not. The reality is this: your intellectual output is almost always only valuable to any company in existence in aggregate, never in isolation.
	▲	mediaman 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		None of this matters, this is the judge approving a voluntary settlement reached between the parties last year. If you think it should be different then you have to make a cogent argument why the public should get to interfere with a settlement the two sides mutually agree on.

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11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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trentor 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thomas-Rasset got 80k per song and Tennenbaum got 22k per song. The law says up to 150k per work. It was a gift.

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xboxnolifes 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, but in any other instance of piracy, HN would call awarding $20k per pirated song insane.

	▲	trentor 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Because we are mostly discussing a single private person that got caught for maybe 20 songs. I don't want to bring up Aaron but the taste gets saltier the more we see settlements like this.