[danlitt]

You have to admit that "downloading every book ever written for free from a repository of books that is itself illegal to compile and to run, in order to write a text generation tool" being legal is at least unintuitive, to put it mildly.

[usef-]

It wasnt, that's why they paid a >billion dollar settlement over it, and now license/purchase them. I don't know if the people distilling are licensing those books/etc today, though

[usef-]

I'd appreciate if the down voters explain why. I wasn't making a value judgement.

Anthropic did pay more than a billion: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...

And is now buying up a lot of books (controversially, as scanning involves cutting their spines) because that's what the law deems the legal method: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...

We know that models like Deepseek are trained on copyrighted books too: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20957

The looser use of IP (eg, any characters/celebrities in AI video models) is increasingly mentioned as an advantage of overseas models.

[tripzilch]

Clearly paying that fine didn't do anything to stop Anthropic from doing it again.

Buying a book doesn't make it legal to publish lossy compressed copies of it.

Also, the vast majority of authors whose work was copied against their wishes didn't receive any of that fine.

It sounds like your argument is that they paid a fine for breaking the law, and therefore it is okay they reap the benefits of breaking the law and are allowed to continue to do so?

> The looser use of IP (eg, any characters/celebrities in AI video models) is increasingly mentioned as an advantage of overseas models.

UHmmm you remember when Sam Altman changed his profile pic to look like a Disney version of his own face? Yeah neither do I.

Clearly US AI models are playing loose with the use of overseas IP just as much, and even publicly flaunting it, as if US-based IP is more worthy of protection but Gibli can suck it.

[usef-]

The grandparent claim was that they were surprised downloading books was legal, I was saying that it's not, as they did need to pay. Whether the law is enough is another question (some cases are still ongoing), and whether the courts are awarding it widely enough is another, but they are facing genuine legal backlash that international firms aren't right now and are more cautious. Several billion is a genuine cost that can move their prices higher in a time of strong competition (see also other announcements with media firms, it's not just books).

I'm guessing the Sam avatar was related to OpenAI's deal with disney to use their characters: https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

It's true that "in the style of" (eg. Ghibli) is not currently legally protected, only actual character IP or using the Ghibli name. That's not inconsistent with US IP treatment.

[stale2002]

No it's not unintuitive.

Just like I can learn from a book and nobody can make that illegal, so can other people transformative do the same with computers.

Fair use is fair use.

[eloisius]

Just like these distillers can learn from Claude’s output. Fair use is fair use.

[ToValueFunfetti]

I don't think Anthropic argues that distillation violates copyright. AFAIK, their position is that it violates their terms and conditions for interacting with their servers.

[gmerc]

They violate every website and book TOS that says "don't distill".

[eloisius]

I think Anthropic will argue whatever argument is likely to protect their interests. I don’t expect anything consistent or moral from them. My quibble is with all the Anthropic fanboys who repeat this crap.

[ToValueFunfetti]

I'd think the problem with fanboys is that they don't care about the truth of the underlying arguments. They just want to score points for their team. Do you have a different issue with them? If not, why not engage with the arguments yourself?

[eloisius]

I know from reflecting on my own beliefs now compared with 10-15 years past that one's beliefs can change, and I don't want to be so cynical as to say that these fanboys don't actually believe what they are saying and only want to score points. I'm sure there's a great deal of commentary that is astroturf, but I think there are plenty of (hopefully young and naive) techno-optimists who sincerely think companies like Anthropic can do no wrong and only move humanity forward, or something like that.

In any case, online debate is not always about changing the mind of the single person you engaged with. To some degree, its performative debate so that other readers may be influenced by your ideas.

[danlitt]

For someone who finds this "not unintuitive" you sure are confused!

"Just like I can learn from a book" - ok. Are you allowed to go to libgen and download a book in order to learn from it, because learning is a fair use?