https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

The big deal for publishers and authors is the payout per eligible title is $3k. For a traditional publishing contract involving one author, the amount will be split down the middle.

The other thing which caught my eye is the judge slashed the class counsel's fee by half, from 12.5% ($187.5m) to 6.8% ($101m). The class counsel's unreimbursed litigation expenses were $2.6m.

The three class representatives get just $15k each.

Most never do.

Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years.

https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author...

This deal is built around Anthropic surviving. The $1.5B comes in installments, and counsel’s fees are paid in step with those installments.

The class is now effectively Anthropic’s creditor, with a direct financial interest in the company staying solvent through the payment schedule.

Civil suits compensate and the one outcome guaranteed to leave authors worse off was a verdict big enough to kill the payer.

Anthropic should take it from its marketing/strategic budget. It just bought itself a 1.5B moat at exactly the time it can afford it.

Edited for slight typo.

>It appears that LLMs have already incorporated APOSD EDIT: The text of the book _A Philosophy of Software Design_ ENDEDIT (which would seem to be illegal, since it is copyrighted). For example, I have asked ChatGPT questions about APOSD and it seems to be able to answer.

https://groups.google.com/g/software-design-book/c/_wl1DciZZ...

According to US federal law, pirating a single copyrighted work and gaining commercial advantage of it (which Anthropic 100% did) represents five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. But it gets worse:

"Penalties for a copyright infringement conviction may increase if the defendant has previous similar convictions, made more than 10 copies of copyrighted works, committed copyright infringement during a period longer than 180 days, or infringed copyrighted material worth more than $2,500."

https://www.justia.com/entertainment-law/piracy-in-the-enter...

Cover-your-ass strategy, and nothing more. Who, besides the ones at fault, are ever happy with these mean-nothing fines?

The justice system really needs an overhaul with how it tackles "justice" between the wealthy, the connected, the corporations, and the rest. Though I am unsure what that would look like. Minimum net wealth per category of infraction across the board?

Edit: grammar

This outcome seems to be the best possible for Anthropic. Over 100B$ have been invested in AI so far, venture capital can afford to pay a few billions per big company as a South Park style "Sorry".

Or am I missing something?

> According to state and federal authorities, Swartz used JSTOR, a digital repository,[79] to download a large number[note 2] of academic journal articles through MIT's computer network over the course of a few weeks

> ...federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, increasing Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment

> ...On the evening of January 11, 2013, Swartz's girlfriend, Stinebrickner-Kauffman, found him dead in his Brooklyn apartment.[80][116][117] A spokesperson for New York's Medical Examiner reported that he had hanged himself

It's trendy to say it'll be the later, but I see a credible case for the former.

I see no reason to pay for a textbook in 2026, while I'm happy to pay an expensive monthly subscription for a coding agent.

(And before someone accuses me of being anti education or anything, bona fide scientist with a PhD here and I have written book chapters for a couple of popular textbooks).

Even though Anthropic is my daily driver I’m done respecting any sort of copyright. I’m okay paying for subscription for a service delivery but never ever again will I believe in copyright or any other utterly non-enforceable similar concept.

For context, the ruling is basically, "AI training is fair use but building a library of pirated books to train on is not". This is obviously because Judge Alsup does not want to put AI under a de-facto ban, but he wants AI companies to have to care about copyright... which in my opinion is self-contradictory, but let's go along with the (paraconsistent) logic.

If we insist that every prior act up to a fair use must be lawful, then this means that fair use is not a right, but a privilege that is purchased alongside the work itself. This opens the door to Oracle-level shenanigans: so long as every legal avenue to watch a work is encumbered by, say, a DeWitt clause[0], you cannot legally review the work. There are actually copyright cases hinging on this: Triller Fight Club sued H3H3 for reviewing a pirated stream of a Logan Paul fight that lasted 40 seconds and lost, for obvious reasons. This case smells like an accidental overturning of this.

Would I rather live in a world where robots[1] aren't allowed to read copyrighted books, or a world where copyright owners have veto rights over any and all critical commentary of their work? I would happily choose the former every time.

[0] A contractual clause that prohibits the recipient of a work from reviewing it without written permission of the owner.

[1] Mind uploads inclusive

There used to be libgen. Then it went down. It went semi-back up but ... it is still kind of down.

Those issues kind of coincided with the big greedy mega-corporations leeching off data en masse; Anthropic was not the only one, Facebook is another example here. I always wondered whether the decline in quality, fewer liberated books published, coincided with what the big corporations were doing. Would be great to be able to see any underlying strategy here. Imagine Anthropic, just as a scenario, leeching off of everyone else, and then also sending in their lawyers to try to close down what they leeched off here. I mean the rise of bots kind of coincides with the rise of AI. So why not them also trying to make it harder for the rest of the world to access liberated books.

1. I feel like this should be discussed globally, there should be a public debate, a vote, and guardrails

2. It should not be in the hands of private companies, it should either be done by the government and made available to the public ; or if it’s done by private companies they should be mandated to give the training data to the government so it’s available to the public.

My point is we can decide to say it’s ok because LLMs are too important strategically. But if we do so it should benefit the public, not 5 mega corporations, training data should be considered as public infrastructure, like roads, rails, or the electricity grid. Societies are failing and this is just one more nail in the coffin.

The verdict is a joke.

In the UK, we have a thing called the Public Lending Right [1]. This pays authors a fixed sum each time their book is taken out of a library, up to a capped amount.

The cap isn't very high - about $7k - so it is both an OK bit of income for authors who might be making very little money elsewhere, and also doesn't end up all going to authors who are already bestsellers. It's a decent legal system for helping libraries hold niche titles as well as the popular ones. This is, after all, the purpose of a library.

To establish my bias here: My debut novel came out after the period this specific suit concerns. I also uploaded it to LibGen myself.

I strongly believe that books should be available to read, free of charge, to all people. I benefited enormously from libraries and piracy growing up. I think they serve an important educational purpose that does not end when a person leaves school, and I do not think wealth or disposable income is a fair way to decide the breadth of a person's education.

I also have no problem with people making new "language things" using my work. I love sample-based music (like dance music, hip hop, etc) and it'd be hypocritical for me to take issue with anyone doing analogous things using books. Maximising sales is not the end-goal of making art, for me personally. Other artists feel otherwise. They consider training on pirated books stealing. That's OK - it's not for me to tell them what to believe.

The problem for me is that these corporations - undoubtedly still pretraining on pirated material - are, essentially, leeching. By not releasing the model as open-weight, freely available, they are not acting in the same spirit of the system they took advantage of. It's the Spotify model: pirate first, pay a nominal amount that does not meaningfully harm profit later. Now the dust has settled there, we can see the harm it has done to music culture.

A single settlement which does not establish precedent does not solve anything. A tokenistic $3k allows anti-AI authors to wave a cheque in the air and declare a victory. It pays the rent for a month or two. It does nothing for the months after that, when the corporation is still profiting. It does nothing to establish precedent for future artists, who also have to pay rent.

It would be (non-trivial, but) relatively simple to integrate - for example - download figures from Anna's Archive into the PLR. I'd happily dilute my PLR payment appropriately, because I think libraries are important.

You can't stop people pirating digitally replicable things. Digital ownership is not a concept that has held, or will hold.

There are only 23,000 authors in the UK who claim the cash from the PLR. To pay all those authors the national living wage in the UK (£26k) from the PLR, you would need to raise £546 million. That is around 1/34 of Anthropic's reported annual revenue.

I'm of course not arguing Anthropic should be solely responsible. But it's very frustrating that all the pieces of the puzzle for actually paying artists in a sustainable and ongoing way now exist, and one of the major obstacles to this - and the idea of a genuinely free, legal, international library, which creates more authors, writing better books, full-time - are legacy rights holders who remain attached to a completely dysfunctional and outdated concept of ownership.

So - unless part of a sustained and reasonable campaign, which understands the futility of (and damage to the medium and its creators caused by) treating digital ownership in the same way as physical ownership - this suit is close to pointless, and arguably actively harmful in the long term.

[1] https://www.bl.uk/services/plr

>$3000 per book

Ohhhh, yeah, big copyright fines only apply to us little guys, not the "asshole tech" companies.

I don't think royalties or settlements are really the point here. AI must be a net benefit to humanity, or we burn everything to the ground, it's that simple.

The next few decades of AI need to lift everyone up, it needs to eliminate the most degrading and dangerous jobs while providing abundance. There is simply no point to robots if they don't serve us and make everything cheaper and more accessible to us.

We are watching Wall Street. The Devon's and Luigi's of the world are not interested in your settlement figure or what this means to shareholders. Humanity needs to be aware that it either keeps parasites at bay or the parasites are going to build a robot and surveillance army. It is literally us or them.

I'm not anti-AI, I am not scared of AI going rogue, I simply recognise that these people cannot be trusted, they do not care about your rules, there is no "regulating" it, the only thing that can scare them is a million people holding pitchforks outside their building.