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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

Maybe Anthropic should have paid attention to the law that has $150k statutory damages per violation if the infringement is willful. So much cheaper just to buy the books and scan it instead of violating a law that has a statutory damage clause.

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I really want to see an alternative universe where we have mechanical turk folks scanning a huge literal book library into a data warehouse.

Google and the Internet Archive both did/do this with elaborate setups. https://archive.org/details/eliza-digitizing-book_202107

I think anthropic has this operation now

If a person pirates a book should they have to pay 150k?

So true! I too think the average person is basically indistinguishable from anthropic.

And I remember the part in copyright law where it says "if the violation is done by a big corporationy corportation, then the punishment must be more severe even on a per-violation basis"

I mean, it's not crazy talk, you frame it as crazy but this difference in treatment is fairly normal. If punitive damages were limited to what an individual person could manage, they would hardly ever be "punitive" for corporate actors.

You're the second person I've talked to in this thread who thinks "The law is not applied with perfect consistency in practice!? Dear god why is it not like computer programs?".

It's just my personal take, but I don't think extreme rigidity and consistency in a "code is law" fashion would ever be desirable. look over to the crypto world to see how DAOs are faring.

150k per violation of copyright law by means of pirating a book is excessive even for the largest company in the world. I agree that punishment should be somewhat proportional so that "too big to fail" firms don't see it as just a fine to be accounted for as any expense, but among things that ought to be worth a a fine of that magnitude, downloading a book is not among them.

And I agree that 150k is dialing the slider a bit too high compared to an individual's offense, happy to meet you at the middle there.

In general buying books and scanning them for this type of use would *also* be copyright infringement.

No. Thats fair use. Format shifting is fair use as affirmed by RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia which was about ripping CDs to MP3s.

…for personal use, just as timeshifting was with MPAA v. Sony. Neither were about commercial use/exploitation.

Meta case just affirmed that training an LLM is fair use under transformative use. Alsom, Google's indexing(transformative use) of scanned books is settled law with Authors Guild v. Google.

And Roe v. Wade was settled law too, until it wasn’t.

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