[simonw]

There is an important difference between openly training on scraped web data and license-ignored data from GitHub and training on data from your paying customers that you promised you wouldn't train on.

Anthropic had to pay $1.5bn after being caught downloading pirated ebooks.

[lunar_mycroft]

So Anthropic had to pay less than 1% of their valuation despite approximately their entire business being dependent on this and similar piracy. I somehow doubt their takeaway from that is "let's avoid doing that again".

[ben_w]

Two things:

First: Valuations are based on expected future profits.

For a lot of companies, 1% of valuation is ~20% of annual profit (P/E ratio 5); for fast growing companies, or companies where the market is anticipating growth, it can be a lot higher. Weird outlier example here, but consider that if Tesla was fined 1% of its valuation (1% of 1.5 trillion = 15 billion), that would be most of the last four quarter's profit on https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/gross-p...

Second: Part of the Anthropic case was that many of the books they trained on were ones they'd purchased and destructively scanned, not just pirated. The courts found this use was fine, and Anthropic had already done this before being ordered to: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

[simonw]

Their main takeaway was that they should legally buy paper books, chop the spines off and scan those for training instead.