Just a heads up that anthropic have just lost a $1.5b case for downloading and storing copyrighted works. That’s $3,000 per author of 500000 books.
The wheels of justice move slowly but fair use has limits. Commercial use is generally not one. Commentary and transformation are, so we’ll see how this progresses with the many other cases.
Warner Brothers have recently filed another case, I think.
Anthropic didn’t lose their lawsuit. They settled. Also, that was about their admission that they pirated zillions of books.
From a legal perspective, none of that has anything to do with AI.
Company pirates books -> gets sued for pirating books. Companies settles with the plaintiffs.
It had no legal impact on training AI with copyrighted works or what happens if the output is somehow considered to be violating someone’s copyright.
What Anthropic did with this settlement is attack their Western competitor: OpenAI, specifically. Because Google already settled with the author’s guild for their book scanning project over a decade ago.
Now OpenAI is likely going to have to pay the author’s guild too. Even though they haven’t come out and openly admitted that they pirated books.
Meta is also being sued for the same reason but they appear to be ready to fight in court about it. That case is only just getting started though so we’ll see.
The real, long-term impact of this settlement is that it just became a lot more expensive to train an AI in the US (well, the West). Competition in China will never have to pay these fees and will continue to offer their products to the West at a fraction of the cost.
Just a heads up that anthropic have just lost a $1.5b case for downloading and storing copyrighted works. That’s $3,000 per author of 500000 books.
The wheels of justice move slowly but fair use has limits. Commercial use is generally not one. Commentary and transformation are, so we’ll see how this progresses with the many other cases.
Warner Brothers have recently filed another case, I think.
Anthropic didn’t lose their lawsuit. They settled. Also, that was about their admission that they pirated zillions of books.
From a legal perspective, none of that has anything to do with AI.
Company pirates books -> gets sued for pirating books. Companies settles with the plaintiffs.
It had no legal impact on training AI with copyrighted works or what happens if the output is somehow considered to be violating someone’s copyright.
What Anthropic did with this settlement is attack their Western competitor: OpenAI, specifically. Because Google already settled with the author’s guild for their book scanning project over a decade ago.
Now OpenAI is likely going to have to pay the author’s guild too. Even though they haven’t come out and openly admitted that they pirated books.
Meta is also being sued for the same reason but they appear to be ready to fight in court about it. That case is only just getting started though so we’ll see.
The real, long-term impact of this settlement is that it just became a lot more expensive to train an AI in the US (well, the West). Competition in China will never have to pay these fees and will continue to offer their products to the West at a fraction of the cost.