So... it would be a lot cheaper to just buy all of the books?
And they actually went and did that afterwards. They just pirated them first.
Bootstrapping in the startup world refers to starting a startup using only personal resources instead of using investors. Anthropic definitely had investors.
Also, do we know if the newer models were trained without the pirated books?
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
> Also, do we know if the newer models were trained without the pirated books?
I'm pretty sure we do but I couldn't swear to it or quickly locate a source.
Among several places where judge mentions Anthropic buying legit copies of books it pirated, probably this sentence is most relevant: "That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages."
But document does not say Anthropic bought EVERY book it pirated. Other sections in the document also don't explicitly say that EVERY pirated book was later purchased.
I stopped using Claude when this case came to light. If the newer Claude models don't use pirated books, I can resume using it.
When you say, "I'm pretty sure we do...", do you mean that pirated books were used, or were they not used?
Yeah, I wouldn't make this exact claim either. For instance it's probably safe to assume that the pirate datasets contain some books that are out of circulation and which Anthropic happened not to get a used copy of.
They did happen to get every book published by any of the lead plaintiffs though, as a point towards them probably having pretty good coverage. And it does seem to have been an attempt to purchase "all" the books for reasonable approximate definitions of "all".
> When you say, "I'm pretty sure we do...", do you mean that pirated books were used, or were they not used?
I'm pretty sure pirated books were not used, but not certain, and I really don't remember when/why I formed that opinion.
A settlement means the claimants no longer have a claim, which means if they're also part of- say, the New York Times affiliated lawsuit- they have to withdraw. A neat way of kneecapping a country wide decision that LLM training on copy written material is subject to punitive measures don't you think?
In my experience&training in a fintech corp- Accepting a settlement in any suit weakens your defense- but prevents a judgement and future claims for the same claims from the same claimants (a la double jeopardy). So, again- at minimum- this prevents an actual judgement. Which, likely would be positive for the NYT (and adjacent) cases.
>In my experience&training in a fintech corp- Accepting a settlement in any suit weakens your defense- but prevents a judgement and future claims for the same claims from the same claimants (a la double jeopardy). So, again- at minimum- this prevents an actual judgement. Which, likely would be positive for the NYT (and adjacent) cases.
Okay? I'm an IP litigator and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. The only thing left to try in this case was the book library piracy. Alsup's fair use decision is just as relevant and is not mooted by the settlement and will be cited by anyone that thinks its favorable to them.