Anthropic bought paper copies of books, scanned them, and used the resulting data to train their large langugage models. Authors sued, claiming this was not fair use under copyright law, and got their case certified as a class action.

The case was assigned to District Judge William Alsup, a seasoned US district court judge with deep experience in technology law, including two jury trials in the Google v Oracle saga over the Java APIs in Android. Last month Judge Alsup ruled that it’s fair use for legally obtained books to be used to train large language models. That’s a big win for Anthropic and the other frontier model companies.

However, Anthropic is also accused of pirating digital copies of more than 7 million books, and these illegally acquired works are not part of the fair use ruling. Judge Alsup also ruled that Anthropic must face a trial over the author’s piracy complaints.

US Copyright law includes statutory damages of up to $150,000 for willful copyright infringement of a single work. With 7 million works in question, Anthropic faces potential damages of up to a trillion dollars.

In their first major filing since Judge Alsup’s ruling, Anthropic is appealing the certification of the class. It’s their best tactic to reduce their financial exposure. Ashley Belanger summarizes Anthropic’s appeal for Ars Technica:

Confronted with such extreme potential damages, Anthropic may lose its rights to raise valid defenses of its AI training, deciding it would be more prudent to settle, the company argued. And that could set an alarming precedent, considering all the other lawsuits generative AI (GenAI) companies face over training on copyrighted materials, Anthropic argued.

No, Anthropic won’t lose any rights if they decide to settle. They made their choice when they willfully decided to pirate copyrighted works and hoped nobody would notice. Now that everyone knows, they may choose to settle and avoid a trial because if they lose at trial it’s a company ending event. Yes, the precendent would be ground-breaking, but it’s only alarming if you are infringing author’s rights. If other frontier model companies have done the same thing, they should have to face lawsuits as well.

Copyright class action lawsuits are incredibly complex, the case against Anthropic will take a long time, and the outcome is far from certain. Authors Guild v. Google took 10 years for the appeals court to finally rule that Google’s Books project of scanning copyrighted works and publishing them on the internet “provides a public service without violating intellectual property law”. It was appealed to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

I’ll be following Authors Guild v. Anthropic with great interest, even if the certification of the class is overturned. If the individual authors win against Anthropic, the floodgates will be open for claimants to sue every frontier model company. We already know that Meta pirated 7.5 books and 81 million research papers. If there is a precedent set in Authors Guild v. Anthropic, I’ll bet it will only take one phone call to find a lawyer who will help you sue Meta, OpenAI, and Google on the same grounds. A trillion dollars of damages from Anthropic, another trillion from Meta, and pretty soon you are talking real money.

Apple created an iconic commercial for the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. The punchline: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984”. 40 years later, Apple has become Oceania.

A few weeks ago, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers made a landmark ruling in the Epic v. Apple case started in August 2020. After a trial, Judge Rogers issued the first ruling in September 2021. Apple won 9 of the 10 counts, but the court found Apple’s prohibition on linking to web for “outside the app” payments was anticompetitive and issued an injunction. Apple appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, who declined to take up the case. Meanwhile Apple continued with what many have labeled malicious compliance. There is an extensive record in this case: the April 30 order is the 1,508th item in the docket. This latest ruling is not a rushed one, the Judge has had enough. These are the first two sentences or the order:

For the reasons set forth herein, the Court FINDS Apple in willful violation of this Court’s 2021 Injunction which issued to restrain and prohibit Apple’s anticompetitive conduct and anticompetitive pricing. Apple’s continued attempts to interfere with competition will not be tolerated.

It gets worse:

In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.

This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases.

And here’s her closer:

Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover- up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.

It has taken years, but the European Digital Markets Act combined with this ruling in the United States has finally opened the gate to more meaningful competition in Apple’s walled garden. The costs have been staggering, as you might expect when going up against one of the most valueable companies in the world, who also has an enormous cash reserve. In the May 6 episode of his Channels podcast, Peter Kafka interviewed Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games. Tim says they spent more than $100 million in legal feeds on Epic vs Apple.

Naturally Apple is appealing this recent order, but I think it’s unlikely to be successful. Meanwhile, they are finally complying with the injuction issued way back in 2021. Amazon added a “Get Book” to the Kindle app. Spotify now shows links in their app to buy various subscription plans on the web. Patreon updated their app to allow fans to subscribe on the web, bypassing Apple’s 30% fee.

The gate is open, let’s tear down this wall.

250 years ago to the day, the simmering anger between the American colonists and the British crown spilled into a shooting war. We don’t know whether the first shots that day were fired on the Lexington green or at the Old North Bridge. Wherever it was, that day marked a key moment on the path to independence.

As a child, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s father watched the events at the Old North Bridge from his nearby home. In that same home, Emerson would later write:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

− Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”

My eighth great-grandfather Peter Crapo was one of those American farmers, living in nearby Freetown, MA. He was too far away to have been at the Old North Bridge, but records from that day document that he marched with Captain Levi Rounsevell’s Company on “the alarm of April 19, 1775”.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts commemorates these events as Patriots’ Day. I mark the day with gratitude for the sacrifices of my ancestors to secure the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I likewise honor all who have served, and who serve today for the same noble cause.

I just added a new Guide describing how to add a GPS Receiver to your OpenBSD NTP Server which increases resiliance and ensures accurate time when internet connectivity is not available.

There are 800,000 miles of cables the size of a garden hose that carry the world’s international communications. Josh Dzieza writes a delightful long form piece at The Verge about these cables and the ships that repair them: The Cloud Under The Sea

If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”

Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic.