Anthropic was asked to pay book authors because it trained on pirated downloaded books.
What about books and art where the author/artist does not authorise AI to train on it? They do happily train on it, ignoring their "ToS".
This is just double standards, a slap on the wrist to not worsen the situation with authors imo.
You could also say the Chinese companies are doing the same - they _do_ pay for their Anthropic subscriptions after all.
>Anthropic was asked to pay book authors because it trained on pirated downloaded books.
No, it was asked to pay book authors because it pirated copies of books and stored them on their hard drives. The ruling had nothing to do with training.
Thanks - I didn't verify this personally, but still stand corrected.
If training wasn't considered outside the law, this goes on to make the point about double standards for US vs Chinese model training methods.
Pirating millions of dollars worth of books would land people in jail. Government went after Aaron Scwartz for "pirating" scientific journals.
Aaron Schwartz was re-publishing the journals, which is the core concern or copyright and indeed where the word "copyright" comes from. Anthropic could get in a lot more trouble if their models are caught reproducing copyrighted work from their training set wholesale.
I think the Aaron Schwartz case is incredibly vexing because he was obviously acting out of a sense of altruism without personal self-interest. I don't think he deserved the book getting thrown at him like that. But the whole copyright system, which people seem to think is simultaneously good and bad, kinda rests on not allowing those kinds of violations
I've linked this several times, but LLMs are capable of reproducing entire books. Researchers were able to extract books nearly verbatim: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
I didn't think about this parallel, but that's just so sad.