[pier25]

This is not even than a slap on the wrist. Publishers who negotiated this really fucked up writers.

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...

[conradkay]

Those are the maximum penalties though

It's seemingly $3,000 per book, so they could've (and did, partially) just bought the books themselves for way cheaper, and with only a fraction of that money going to the authors

[jeroenhd]

> could've (and did, partially) just bought

But they didn't. The fact they partially did proves that they knew they should've, so they can't even claim ignorance.

[paxys]

It's valid to not take AI companies' side here but people who think publishers are fighing for the little guy's rights are delusional. Tech companies have been exploiting artists for a few years, publishers/record labels/media companies have been doing it for centuries.

[blackqueeriroh]

THANK YOU! And the idea that copyright actually helps individuals is such bullshit I can’t even believe anyone believes it! On a site filled with free software advocates.

Absurd.

[consensus1]

That is a false statement. Gaining commercial advantage means selling pirated copies which Anthropic absolutely did not do, so none of your following statements are correct either.

[pier25]

It is an indisputable fact that Anthropic made money on models trained on those pirated books.

[consensus1]

It is an indisputable fact that "commercial advantage" in terms of copyright means selling copies. It is also an indisputable fact that Anthropic did npt do that.