Anthropic's $1.5 billion book copyright settlement, about $3k per work, approved

There are so many big copyright lawsuits against AI companies winding their way through the courts, it's hard to keep track of them all. In the literary field alone, we're seeing writers band together to build class action suits, and publishers are also going after the same companies. Meta, for instance, is currently fielding two separate lawsuits from authors and publishers, and I love this for Zuckerberg. Then in some instances, the authors and publishers form a united front to jointly sue, which is what happened to Anthropic in 2024. What the creators of the world are trying to do is hold AI companies accountable for "training" their programs on copyrighted material, without consent or compensation. AI companies counter this argument by invoking the fair use claim, a broad legal doctrine that allows for "unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances." Like I said, broad.

The case against Anthropic hit a pivotal juncture last year, when the presiding judge ruled that Anthropic was permitted to use the copyrighted works under fair use. At the same time, the judge said that Anthropic had clearly used illegal means of obtaining the works, mainly by piracy, and the lawsuit could proceed on that issue. Instead, Anthropic decided to cut their losses by cutting a $1.5 billion check to settle the whole affair and avoid trial. It's the biggest copyright settlement to date, except when divided by the number of works pirated, the figure comes out to roughly $3,000 per work. On Monday, a federal judge officially signed off on the settlement:

Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary approval of the settlement last year, after ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyright books.

Alsup has since retired and Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on the settlement on Monday.

The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them. While the settlement is believed to be the largest in the history of U.S. copyright law, many authors and creators still don't view it as a win.

That's because of how the legal question was resolved. Alsup sided with Anthropic on the core issue. He ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text counts as fair use -- a decision widely seen as a turning point for the AI industry. But the ruling didn't excuse how Anthropic obtained the books in the first place. Anthropic had built its training library from two sources: books it purchased and scanned (fine), and books it downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup found the second method illegal on its own terms and said that piracy question could go to trial; Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and whatever damages a jury might have awarded.

While the final approval closes out this case, it doesn't settle the legal question industrywide because Alsup's ruling was a single district court decision, and Anthropic's decision to settle means the case will never reach an appeals court to become binding precedent.

Other judges are still free to reach their own conclusions on their own facts, which is exactly what's playing out elsewhere. There is still a string of copyright lawsuits against companies such as Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI over whether it's legal to train AI models on copyrighted works. Just last week, a group of publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a class action lawsuit against Google over accusations that the company used their copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini.

[From TechCrunch]

And yet another reason to despise AI: they can make a record $1.5 BILLION settlement feel like chump change. But wait, it gets more fraught! One of the big winners out of this settlement is British publisher Bloomsbury; they have claimed 14,087 separate works which were pirated, which translates to a whopping $19 million. 10% of that big pay day will cover lawyer fees, and then the rest gets split between Bloomsbury and the authors. Guess what one of Bloomsbury's biggest titles is? The Harry Potter series. If JK Rowling ends up getting a fat check out of this, I swear to Hermes, Apollo, and all the Muses, I will throw a Homeric-caliber epic fit!