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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

I think you are using a naïve model. You're making the comparison based on "price of book" vs "compensation". Do you think thats all the costs here? Who knows about OP, but I'm willing to bet many of those authors taught legal council, which costs money. Opportunity costs are also difficult to measure. Same with lost future incomes.

I don't think $3k is likely a bad deal, but I still think you're over simplifying things.

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This is a class action suit, so the legal fees are almost certainly being paid on contingency and not out of pocket. And there is no opportunity cost or lost future income here because this is piracy not theft. The authors were never deprived of any ability to continue to sell their work through normal channels. They only lost the revenue from the sale of a single copy.

  > the legal fees are almost certainly being paid on contingency and not out of pocket.

The legal fees for this lawsuit. Not the legal feels for anyone who went and talked to a lawyer suspecting their material was illegitimately used.

You're treating the system as isolated when it is not.

  > no opportunity cost or lost future income here because this is piracy not theft.

I think you are confused. Yes, it is piracy but not like the typical piracy most of us do. There's no loss in pirating a movie if you would never have paid to see the movie in the first place.

But there's future costs here as people will use LLMs to generate books, which is competition. The cost of generating such a book is much cheaper, allowing for a much cheaper product.

  > They only lost the revenue from the sale of a single copy.

In your effort to simplify things you have only complicated them.

You are not entitled to protection from future competition, only from loss of sales of your current work. You are not ever entitled to legal fees you pay if you don't file a suit.

  > You are not entitled to protection from future competition

What do you think patents, copyright, trademarks, and all this other stuff is even about?

There's "Statutory Damages" which account for a wide range of things[0].

Not to mention you just completely ignored what I argued!

Seriously, you've been making a lot of very confident claims in this thread and they are easy to verify as false. Just google some of your assumptions before you respond. Hell, ask an LLM and they'll tell you! Just don't make assumptions and do zero amount of vetting. It's okay to be wrong, but you're way off base buddy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages

Copyright protects you from market substitutions (e.g. someone taking your IP, and offering an alternative to your work). Being trained on your IP, it could certainly be argued that users would no longer need to purchase your book.

"Future competition" is a loosely worded way of saying this.

"It could be argued" but the judge in this case has already ruled that the training does not violate copyright. Market substitution only comes into play to determine fair use if copyright has already been infringed.

"The authors were never deprived of any ability to continue to sell their work through normal channels" this isn't exactly true is it? If the "AI" used their books for training, then it's able to provide information/value/content from them, lowering the incentive for people to buy these books.

However, the judge does not appear to believe they have any legal right to protection from that in this case. The settlement is over their use of pirated copies instead of buying one copy of each of the works in question.

I haven't read this particular case, but typically judges will keep the judgement as narrow as possible... so it may entirely be the case that these IP owners or in similar future cases may also have legal right to protection from it.

The judge has already ruled that using books to train AI does not in itself violate US copyright law, and so the surviving claims from plaintffs were relating to Anthropic pirating books.

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