8 ms·
>It was not okay for them, they had to pay one billion dollars. Essentially peanuts compared to what they would have to pay to obtain the rights of everything
by callmeal 3mo ago
>It was not okay for them, they had to pay one billion dollars.
Essentially peanuts compared to what they would have to pay to obtain the rights of everything they pirated.
- cubefox 3mo agoNo. It's actually way more than what they would have paid if they legally obtained those books. The 1.5 billion dollars amount to $3000 per book.
- slopinthebag 3mo ago> obtain the rights of everything they pirated They didn't just pirate those books...
- cubefox 3mo agoIf we assume on average $20 per legally obtained book, 1.5 billion dollars are enough for 75 million books. That's approximately every non-fiction book in existence.
- slopinthebag 3mo agoWhy would we assume $20 a book? Many books retail for more, and a licence to use the book for commercial purposes is more than retail.
- internet_points 3mo agoLegally obtaining a book for reading it yourself is different from legally obtaining a book for copying and republishing/reselling. If I buy a book for $5 at a sale I can read it myself or even sell it for $10 on craigslist, but I can't scan it and make a million copies and sell each of those.
- cubefox 3mo agoThey aren't republishing or reselling. In fact, they buy huge amounts of books and then destroy them, which is better for the rights holders than to resell them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...
- scotty79 3mo agoThat's terrifying waste of real world resouces for no other purpose than satisfying the letter i of the absurd rent-seeking-enabling laws.
- m4rtink 3mo agoAnyone who destroys a book on purpose is a criminal.
- DonsDiscountGas 3mo agoPeople are allowed to destroy their own property. And anyway if you don't like this state of affairs blame the copyright holders and copyright law
- pixel_popping 3mo agoMy 2-year old daughter should go to jail.
- gf000 3mo agoSince whole chunks of these books can be recited verbatim by these models, to which they sell access, they absolutely are republishing and reselling these books' content in a way. Like I remember a research paper that managed to recreate the whole of a Harry Potter book from a model?
- cubefox 3mo ago> Since whole chunks of these books can be recited verbatim by these models, to which they sell access, they absolutely are republishing and reselling these books' content in a way. They are absolutely not "republishing" in any meaningful sense of the term. A chunk is not a whole book, and even getting a modern LLM to reproduce such a large chunk of an arbitrary book is not a trivial task. I have never heard of anyone who actively used LLMs for book piracy. > Like I remember a research paper that managed to recreate the whole of a Harry Potter book from a model? Even if that is true (it may well be false), this is likely far too difficult for any normal person to exploit, and moreover, even less likely to succeed for the great majority of other books who aren't nearly as famous.