I'm trying to find the quote, but I'm pretty sure the judge specifically said that going and buying the book after the fact won't absolve them of liability. He said that for the books they pirated they broke the law and should stand trial for that and they cannot go back and un-break in by buying a copy now.
> “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft,” [Judge] Alsup wrote, “but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
Is copyright in America different to Britain? There, it is legal to download books you don't own. Only distribution is a crime, which most torrenters break by seeding.
I think it's very similar in both countries, but you have got it wrong. Downloading a book without permission is copyright infringement in both countries, regardless of whether you distribute it.
In the UK it's a criminal offense if you distribute a copyrighted work with the intent to make gain or with the expectation that the owner will make a loss.
Gain and loss are only financial in this context.
Meaning that in both countries the copyright owner can sue you for copyright infringement.
What relevance does that have to the present case? The judge, in this civil matter, said there would be a trial. He didn't say anything about it being a criminal trial. The strings 'crim' and 'felon' do not appear in the ruling.
We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness).
There can always be a trial, even if nothing was done to warrant it.
I think the distinction between civil and criminal trials is smaller in my home country. The fact that there is a trial at all implies that someone commited a ‘crime’.
The argument is more along the lines of, negotiating with millions of individuals each over a single copy of a work would cause the transaction costs to exceed the payments, and that kind of efficiency loss is the sort of thing fair use exists to prevent. It's not socially beneficial for the law to require you to create $2 in deadweight loss in order to transfer $1, and the cost to the author of not selling a single additional copy is not the thing they were really objecting to.
I used to order books in English from the US before shipping costs became prohibitive and the cost of shipping the book went to about twice to thrice the cost of the book itself. Is it fair use for me to download books from Anna's Archive now considering that books in English are not available in my region through other means (including the vast majority of ebooks)?
Rhetorical question, we all know that me reading books is not "transformative" so it won't be considered fair use for me to yoink them (transformative as in transforming more damage to the society at large into more money for the already rich).
In the U.S. at least (obviously not the same everywhere), fair use doesn’t necessarily require your work to be transformative. It’s one of several aspects that gets considered, albeit a fairly significant one in many cases. Downloading books/research articles/pirated works in general wouldn’t be fair use as the purpose of the act (obtaining a book to read) directly impacts the market for the work (selling books). There could still exceptions in some cases, mostly related to teaching I’d imagine.
What’s more interesting to me is if you can hire someone in the US to buy the book for you, cut the spine off with a bandsaw, and send you the scans and destroy the pages afterwards.
This is literally why a lot of people pirate content, yes. It’s pretty much always the only way to obtain the content, even if you are otherwise fine with paying for it.
Needing a copy of one book you're going to spend a week reading has a lot less overhead than needing a copy of every book that you're going to process with a computer in bulk.
What do you mean by "negotiating"? They can buy the books in paperback form from Amazon. And for e-books available for sale without DRM, they get to skip the cutting and scanning part.
If the book is out of print, then tough luck. That's not a license to infringe on the publisher's copyright. If we're not ok with that, we have legislative means to change that. A judge shouldn't be rewriting law in that manner.
>They don't need to negotiate with every single author individually.
Yeah they do. What do you think the employees of a publishing house do? They make deals, work with authors, and accept/reject pitches. They 100% need to make sure every work is under a negotiated contract.
It's not the only reason fair use exists, but it's the thing that allows e.g. search engines to exist, and that seems pretty important.
> And you ever heard of a publishing house? They don't need to negotiate with every single author individually. That's preposterous.
There are thousands of publishing houses and millions of self-published authors on top of that. Many books are also out of print or have unclear rights ownership.
It's copyright infringement, which is not theft, they're legally distinct in the eyes of the law. This is partly why the "you wouldn't download a car" copyright ads were so widely mocked.
They stole from the amount they would have legally paid to buy a copy from the copyright holder.
Think about it like sneaking into a movie theater and watch a movie without paying. The theater was going to play the movie anyway and, assuming it wasn't a packed theatre, I didn't deprive anyone else of their ability to watch. It's still theft because I'm getting something that costs money for free and depriving the theater of the money that they're owed.
It's fine that you think that way. But this is a discusion of the laws of the United States of America and ruling by American courts, not a discussion of your own legal theories.
The GP isn’t talking about some edge case legal dilemma that requires a lawyer or judge to comment. It’s already widely documented that copyright infringement is legally distinct from theft.
> So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated.
No, that doesn't undo the infringement. At most, that would mitigate actual damages, but actual damages aren't likely to be important, given that statutory damages are an alternative and are likely to dwarf actual damages. (It may also figure into how the court assigns statutory damages within the very large range available for those, but that range does not go down to $0.)
> They will have ceased and desisted.
"Cease and desist" is just to stop incurring additional liability. (A potential plaintiff may accept that as sufficient to not sue if a request is made and the potential defendant complies, because litigation is uncertain and expensive. But "cease and desist" doesn't undo wrongs and neutralize liability when they've already been sued over.)
> So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated.
For anyone else who wants to do the same thing though this is likely all they need to do.
Cutting up and scanning books is hard work and actually doing the same thing digitally to ebooks isn't labor free either, especially when they have to be downloaded from random sites and cleaned from different formats. Torrenting a bunch of epubs and paying for individual books is probably cheaper
That's for criminal laws where prosecutorial discretion can then (in principle) be used in borderline cases to prevent unjust outcomes.
If you give people a claim for damages which is an order of magnitude larger than their actual damages, it encourages litigiousness and becomes a vector for shakedowns because the excessive cost of losing pressures innocent defendants to settle even if there was a 90% chance they would have won.
Meanwhile both parties have the incentive to settle in civil cases when it's obvious who is going to win, because a settlement to pay the damages is cheaper than the cost of going to court and then having to pay the same damages anyway. Which also provides a deterrent to doing it to begin with, because even having to pay lawyers to negotiate a settlement is a cost you don't want to pay when it's clear that what you're doing is going to have that result.
And when the result isn't clear, penalizing the defendant in a case of first impression isn't just either, because it wasn't clear and punitive measures should be reserved for instances of unambiguous wrongdoing.
Statutory damages were written into the first federal copyright law in 1790, and earlier in state law (specified in Pounds because the dollar hadn't been invented yet).
Specified in dollars because dollars had been invented (in 1789), but in the amount of one half of one dollar, i.e. $0.50. That's 1790 dollars, of course, so a little under $20 today. (There was basically no inflation for the first 100+ years of that because the US dollar was still backed by precious metals then; a dollar was worth slightly more in 1900 than in 1790.)
That seems more like an attempt to codify some amount of plausible actual damages so people aren't arguing endlessly about valuations, rather than an attempt to impose punitive damages. Most notably because -- unlike the current method -- it scales with the number of sheets reproduced.
My fault for the hanging clause: nearly a dozen state laws preceded it and used pounds. Mostly because they were based on the British law and also because the war made a mess of the currency situation.
Statutory damages were added to reduce the burden on plaintiffs. Which encourages people to stay in line. How well this worked out and what it means when some company nobody heard of 4 years ago downloads a billion copyrighted pages and raises $3.5 billion against a $60 billion valuation...
The <$20/page was the same for maps and charts, i.e. things that typically have a single page in the entire work, and came from a time when printing was done a page at a time, i.e. you'd lay out a page and print as many copies of that page as you'd expect to make copies of the entire book, then hide them somewhere else while you print the next page. It was basically a proxy for the number of copies of the work they caught you trying to make, not an attempt to turn a single copy of a 1000 page book into a 1000x multiplier on liability. Notice that otherwise you're letting the infringer choose the amount of the damages, because a larger page size or tighter layout would fit more words per page and therefore have fewer pages per book. (How many "pages" is an HTML document with infinite scroll?)
> Statutory damages were added to reduce the burden on plaintiffs. Which encourages people to stay in line.
It encourages people to not spend a lot of resources speculating about damages. That doesn't mean you need the amount to be punitive rather than compensatory.
Found it: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/federal-judge-rules-c...
> “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft,” [Judge] Alsup wrote, “but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”