She said authors were being offered a payment of US$3000 ($5240) for each title accessed by the company.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the one hand, I\u2019m grateful that they\u2019re being held to account. The works they accessed were from two websites that held pirated works so they weren\u2019t accessing them legally. It\u2019s not like they went out and paid for them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI imagine this will serve as a warning to others out there who are hoovering up intellectual property without asking. This has been going on for a while now; it\u2019s just that [Anthropic] are the first company that\u2019s been held to account for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anthropic AI has agreed to pay out up to $2.6 billion to settle claims it used millions of pirated books to train its large language models, in a class action in Californian courts. Photo \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
She said the money offered to authors paled in comparison to the toil behind creating the works.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not really enough \u2013 if you think about the years of effort I\u2019ve put into writing those books \u2013 but I\u2019m glad that there has been a line drawn in the sand.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018A slap on the wrist\u2019<\/p>\n
RNZ AI commentator Peter Griffin said the ruling did not counter the use of intellectual property for training AI models without permission.<\/p>\n
He said instead the settlement had pivoted on Anthropic\u2019s use of two book pirating websites (Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror) to source the content.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis boils down to basically a fine for using dodgy websites and – in the scheme of things \u2013 $1.5b is not a lot for a company like Anthropic. That\u2019s a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket.<\/p>\n
\u201cFundamentally, the things that [the AI companies] were terrified about was a ruling saying you cannot use this material under copyright law \u2013 this is not \u2018fair use\u2019. That what\u2019s really scared them and that did not happen.<\/p>\n
\u201cUltimately, it says to the AI companies, \u2018fill your boots, you can still use all of these texts to inform AI training models but if you\u2019re ever caught doing that through dodgy pirate websites \u2013 or peer to peer file sharing networks \u2013 you\u2019re going to face repercussions\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said companies recognised the need to move quickly to distinguish themselves in the rapidly evolving field.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany of these companies take the view \u2013 in the famous words of Mark Zuckerberg \u2013 \u2018move fast and break things\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey needed to get a model up quickly that would wow the world \u2013 that would be really useful \u2013 so they just hoovered up anything that they could get their hands on. Now there\u2019s this sort of rearguard action by content owners and publishers to try and scramble to retain some of that value.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, Griffin said the need for AI tools to be continuously trained on new data could still \u201cdraw a line in the sand\u201d for AI use of intellectual property in the future.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to be a very difficult process and I don\u2019t think publishers and authors will get anywhere near what they deserve to get but at least now there is a precedent that \u2018sure, it may be fair use but you have to legitimately obtain those copyrighted texts\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only way they can really do that at scale is to strike a deal with the publishers so they can really get that done in a legitimate way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thousand of authors ineligible for compensation<\/p>\n
New Zealand Society of Authors chief executive Jenny Nagle says while thousands of New Zealand titles may have been used by the company it was likely only dozens of local authors would be eligible for compensation.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have records of about 3500 New Zealand titles that formed part of that data set that was uploaded. However, the settlement in the US courts decreed that only books registered with the US copyright office were eligible to be part of the settlement. This was appealed by lawyers from the Society of Authors from around the world because books from all countries, all copyright jurisdictions and languages, are part of this data set [but] it was denied by the US courts.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy understanding is there was about 7.5 million books in this pirated library and about 1.5 million will be eligible for compensation through this settlement.\u201d <\/p>\n
Nagle said the society was encouraging members to ensure their books were registered through the US copyright office for future claims.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is but the first settlement of scores of court cases that are in train for this issue. Nearly all of the larger language models have been trained by pirated libraries. They\u2019ve been trained by copyright theft.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you are a producer of a product generally you pay for the ingredients of your product and in this case the AI developers have said \u2018fair use, we can scrape whatever we want and we don\u2019t have to pay\u2019 but this is people\u2019s property.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nagle said the Government needed to act quickly but the current review of the Copyright Act was unlikely to address issues around AI until its second stage in 2027.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is more urgent than that. The Australian Government has just moved to say that data mining and scraping ingestion is not a fair use \u2013 or fair dealing copyright – and needs licensing and we would really look to the Government to do something about this.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a rapidly evolving space, of course, but really we do need legislation and regulation because the development is just the wild west at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Author Rose Carlyle, whose works The Girl in the Mirror and No One Will Know were published in the US, is included in the class action and due for a payment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey took from us what we slaved over for years,\u201d she told Morning Report. \u201cIt really guts me that that has just been taken and used to make so much money by billionaire companies. They could have bought the book but they chose not to.\u201d<\/p>\n
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