Anthropic AI wins broad fair use for training! — but not on pirated books
One of the many copyright cases in progress against chatbot vendor Anthropic is Bartz v. Anthropic, where several authors brought a class action suit in August 2024 for violating their copyrights w…
Statutory damages go from $750 a book up to $150,000. For each of those 7 million books.
Please be enough to put these fuckers out of business.
For once, I'm hoping a megacorp actively squeezes the infringer for everything they're worth. The looming threat of getting drained dry is the only thing keeping AI fucks from stealing anything they fucking want.
I'm somewhat disappointed by the fair use assessment, since I think calling AI models "transformative" is a bit of a stretch from how that is normally used, but I also see where the judge is coming from. Would the analytics that go into Google's Ngram word frequency engine be considered infringing? You know, provided we ignore that the fuckers couldn't be bothered to find a single goddamn copy of the book they wanted to feed into the data shredder.
This is a massive loss. At this point we need specific legislation. Insane to grant fair use to a for-profit copier that provides no benefit to the owner of the copied item and competes with it in the market. I cannot overstate how shitty this is.
Top-level commenters would do well to read Authors Guild v Google, two decades ago. They're also invited to rend their garments and gnash their teeth at Google, if they like.