I'm gonna say one thing. If you agree that something was unfairly taken from book authors, then the same thing was taken from people publishing on the web, and on a larger scale.
Book authors may see some settlement checks down the line. So might newspapers and other parties that can organize and throw enough $$$ at the problem. But I'll eat my hat if your average blogger ever sees a single cent.
The blogger’s content was freely available, this fine is for piracy.
This is not a fine, it's a settlement to recompense authors.
More broadly, I think that's a goofy argument. The books were "freely available" too. Just because something is out there, doesn't necessarily mean you can use it however you want, and that's the crux of the debate.
It's not the crux of this case. This is a settlement based on the judge's ruling that they books had been illegally downloaded. The same judge said that the training itself was not the problem – it was downloading the pirated books. It will be tough to argue that loading a public website is an illegal download.
But you can use copyrighted works for transformative works under the fair-use doctrine, and training was ruled to be fair use in the previous ruling.
Books aren't hosted publicly online free for anyone to access. The court seems to think buying a book and scanning it is fair use. Just using pirated books is forbidden. Blogs weren't accessed via pirating.
The settlement was for downloading the pirated books, not training from them. Unless they're paywalled it would be hard to argue the same for a blog.
It seems weird that there was legal culpability for downloading pirated books but not for training on them. At the very least, there is a transitive dependency between the two acts.
Other people have said that Anthropic bought the books later on, but I haven't found any official records for that. Where would I find that?
Also, does anyone know which Anthropic models were NOT trained on the pirated books. I want to avoid such models.
As far as anyone knows, no models were trained on the illegally downloaded books.
The following document indicates otherwise.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43....
"Similarly, different sets or “subsets” or “parts of” or “portions” of the collections sourced from Books3, LibGen, and PiLiMi were used to train different LLMs..." Page 5
"In sum, the copies of books pirated or purchased-and-destructively-scanned were placed into a central “research library” or “generalized data area,” sets or subsets were copied again to create training copies for data mixes, the training copies were successively copied to be cleaned, tokenized, and compressed into any given trained LLM, and once trained an LLM did not output through Claude to the public any further copies." Page 7
The phrase "Finally, once Anthropic decided a copy of a pirated or scanned book in the library would not be used for training at all or ever again, Anthropic still retained that work as a “hard resource” for other uses or future uses" implies to me Anthropic excluded certain books from training, not that they excluded all the pirated books from training.