Why did Anthropic settle with authors for 1.5 billion then? Surely their lawyers must have decided there's a pretty good chance of judges ultimately deciding that it is copyright infringement?

It's not really a surprise to many here, but we don't want to go back there too often, because that topic is well trodden - the intellectual property in its current form is far worse offender against "what is moral or just" than anything LLM companies ever did.

In fact, the whole problem of shredding books (destructive format-shifting) was created by copyright laws in the first place, and that in itself is a concession hard won against the IP establishment - and all that way before LLMs became a thing.

Yes IP theft and fair use are discussing legality, not morality. Whether or not it’s moral for someone to make money off somebody else’s labor or Reddit comments, I don’t want to get into a discussion about personally.

Fair use is a legal defense with a specific test to demonstrate whether a particular instance of use of a copyrighted work is not infringement. Although fair use is always evaluated on a case by case basis, fair use does produce some precedent (example at [1], not related to TFA), and fair use is not mere justification [2]:

> Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work... is not an infringement of copyright.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107

Sure, everywhere it’s been legally tested so far and there’s been a conclusion, the outcome has been in favor of the LLM trainer. They just can’t steal the books, they have to pay for them. So claims by random HN users that it’s IP theft and copyright infringement and all that are currently incorrect.

Now if you look at how fair use is used colloquially, everyone understood what I meant except the autistic pedants.

>>It’s been determined that training on lawfully acquired works is fair use

>You don’t know what “Fair Use” is.

This isn't the opinion of some armchair HN commenter. Actual judges have affirmed this, as other commenters in this thread has pointed out.

s/fair use/ip theft

The comment uses the same language as it's parent.

If you're going to call people ignorant, you should probably know how to spell the name of the character you're referencing.