Item — HN Reader

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...

3 comments

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.