[Fluorescence]

It's different but not in ways that make such interventions irrelevant e.g. why would we only care about lost sales? If copyright has been violated as a necessary means to generate new value, haven't the content creators earned this value?

Such imperfect measures offer a compromise between "big tech can steal everything" and "LLMs trained on unpurchased books are illegal".

It's not just books but any tragedy-of-the-commons situation where a "feeder industry" for training can be fatally undermined by the very LLM that desires future training data from that industry.

[bonoboTP]

> It's different but not in ways that make such interventions irrelevant e.g. why would we only care about lost sales? If copyright has been violated as a necessary means to generate new value, haven't the content creators earned this value?

Indeed the company should purchase the books. If they obtain copies in a process that violates copyright, then that's indeed a violation of copyright.

The current decision does not rule on the legality of obtaining the books without purchasing.

[ethbr1]

Anthropic apparently did it both ways. After realizing that pirating mass quantities of books for training wasn't a great legal look, it hired someone previously responsible for Google Books, who in turn contacted publishers about mass licensing their content for training use.

However, that option was ultimately not pursued as instead...

>> Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase millions of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Each print book resulted in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with machine-readable text (including front and back cover scans for softcover books). Anthropic created its own catalog of bibliographic metadata for the books it was acquiring. It acquired copies of millions of books, including of all works at issue for all Authors.

(from the ruling)

[bonoboTP]

Yes. And from the article "That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages." Sounds reasonable (except for the "stole" and "theft" language -- a copyright violation is a copyright violation, not theft, not stealing).

If the actual model was trained from the unauthorized copies, and then they post-hoc bought the books, that doesn't retroactively cancel the initial copyright violation. As I understand they did not retrain the model using the OCR'd scans