Hacker News Reader

Comment by phoghed | Hacker News Reader

It’s been determined that training on lawfully acquired works is fair use. Presumably in this discussion of shredding physical books Dario and Sam are not pulling heists at the local library.

I’m sure there’s ongoing litigation, and better sources than this, but fair use was determined in June 2025 in a sf federal district court https://www.goodwinlaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/06/...

And the more recent $1.5B settlement did not overturn it https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-1...

View on HN

Might surprise people to learn but the law isn't the final arbiter on what is moral or just. The law only decides what is legal and as we've seen over our lived history as humans, many "legal" things may not be those we want society to uphold.

It's not really a surprise to many here, but we don't want to go back there too often, because that topic is well trodden - the intellectual property in its current form is far worse offender against "what is moral or just" than anything LLM companies ever did.

In fact, the whole problem of shredding books (destructive format-shifting) was created by copyright laws in the first place, and that in itself is a concession hard won against the IP establishment - and all that way before LLMs became a thing.

> the intellectual property in its current form is far worse offender

It absolutely is... for LLM operators. For the rest of us it's a minor nuisance.

In fact, it is pretty just for the rest of us. because if it was observed by the spirit then we would either not see this tech pushing people out of jobs OR those people would be entitled to pay,

Yes IP theft and fair use are discussing legality, not morality. Whether or not it’s moral for someone to make money off somebody else’s labor or Reddit comments, I don’t want to get into a discussion about personally.

The comment you originally replied to was clearly discussing morality. You don't get to insert your little "erm, ackshually" and then pretend to be a neutral observer.

lmao no it’s not

Okay, then step aside while others discuss the morality.

You don’t seem to be doing so, but I eagerly await your doubtless profound and unique insights on the topic.

> step aside

Isn’t that what I explicitly just did in the comment you replied to?

Yup, and IP theft is morally good. Are we not on HackerNews?

no, we have always been on law-abiding-citizen-except-when-its-white-collar-crime news. the only moral problem here is people cant decide if copyright landlords or ai scammers are better for their portfolio.

No, courts so far in the jurisdictions which have heard such cases, have ruled it's fair use. There is plenty of ongoing litigation in many jurisdictions, so it's way too early to just decree "it's been determined". It likely won't be for years to come.

Why did Anthropic settle with authors for 1.5 billion then? Surely their lawyers must have decided there's a pretty good chance of judges ultimately deciding that it is copyright infringement?

They had illegally obtained books. 1.5 billion is an incredible deal compared to the per book infringement fine. https://fortune.com/2026/07/21/anthropic-copyright-settlemen...

Anthropic settled because even though the training is fair use, Anthropic did not acquire all of the training material through legal means.

You could also ask why the other side agreed to that settlement. It's not a one-way street.

It was about piracy, though? Not fair use.

What does that matter? They were sued and the group suing them accepted at $1.5B settlement instead of something theoretically much larger and precedent-setting.

Because the judge ruled that using the books for training was "fair use". The issue was Anthropic downloading and storing pirated content and there is quite a bit of precedent regarding that already...

If a case is settled by the parties, it cannot be cited as establishing precedent.

You don’t know what “Fair Use” is.

Fair Use is not an activity that you engage in. Fair Use is not a category with criteria that you meet. Fair Use is not a precedent that paves the way for everything afterwards.

Fair Use is a defense that can be used in court when you’re named in a copyright lawsuit. Fair Use is how you justify your actions before the court finds infringement.

Fair use is a legal defense with a specific test to demonstrate whether a particular instance of use of a copyrighted work is not infringement. Although fair use is always evaluated on a case by case basis, fair use does produce some precedent (example at [1], not related to TFA), and fair use is not mere justification [2]:

> Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work... is not an infringement of copyright.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107

Sure, everywhere it’s been legally tested so far and there’s been a conclusion, the outcome has been in favor of the LLM trainer. They just can’t steal the books, they have to pay for them. So claims by random HN users that it’s IP theft and copyright infringement and all that are currently incorrect.

Now if you look at how fair use is used colloquially, everyone understood what I meant except the autistic pedants.

>>It’s been determined that training on lawfully acquired works is fair use

>You don’t know what “Fair Use” is.

This isn't the opinion of some armchair HN commenter. Actual judges have affirmed this, as other commenters in this thread has pointed out.

Depends on jurisdiction, clearly.

e.g. Canada doesn't have fair use, but from wiki on fair dealing in Canada, "According to the Supreme Court of Canada, it is more than a simple defence; it is an integral part of the Copyright Act of Canada, providing balance between the rights of owners and users."

s/fair use/ip theft

The comment uses the same language as it's parent.

Did you manually set those utm_source parameters?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com