Anthropic may finally start cutting checks to a group of authors and book publishers who sued the AI lab for copyright infringement. A federal judge gave final approval Monday to Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a copyright class action. Reuters reported.
Judge William Alsup of the US 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 copyrighted books.
Alsup has since withdrawn, and Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on the settlement on Monday.
The payment will yield $3,000 per work on approximately 500,000 works, which is split between authors and publishers who own their rights. While the settlement is believed to be the largest in the history of US copyright law, many writers and creators still don’t see it as a victory.
This is because of how the legal issue was resolved. Alsup sided with Anthropic on the key issue. It ruled that training an artificial intelligence model on copyrighted text counts as fair use — a decision widely seen as a turning point for the artificial intelligence industry. But the ruling did not justify how Anthropic acquired the books in the first place. Anthropic had built its educational library from two sources: books it bought and scanned (well), 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 the piracy issue could be litigated. Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and any damages a jury might have awarded.
While the final approval closes this case, it does not resolve the legal issue across the industry because the Alsup ruling was a single district court ruling 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 about their own facts, which is exactly what happens elsewhere. There are still a number of copyright lawsuits against companies such as Google, Meta, Midjourney and OpenAI over whether it is legal to train AI models on copyrighted work. Just last week, a group of publishers and authors including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow and SCRIBE filed a class-action lawsuit against Google over allegations that the company used their copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini.
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