In the fight to prevent AI companies from copying their content without payment or permission, authors and publishers won an important victory on September 25 when U.S. District Judge William Alsup gave preliminary approval to the $1.5 billion settlement in a class action lawsuit brought against Anthropic.
The case moved at a rapid clip. In late June, Alsup ruled in Bartz vs. Anthropic that the AI company’s training of its Claude LLMs on authors’ works was protected by fair use. But the judge also determined that the company’s practice of downloading pirated books from sites including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror to build a permanent digital library was not covered by the doctrine. In a July decision, Alsup ruled that a lawsuit brought by three writers suing Anthropic for copyright infringement could proceed as a class action lawsuit. In allowing the class action to move forward, Alsup stressed that the case included not only authors but “everyone who owns the specific copyright interest in play,” a decision that allowed publishers to receive part of any settlement agreement.
In marked contrast to the battle over the Google Book Search Settlement that dragged on for years, attorneys for the authors reached an agreement with Anthropic in a matter of months, agreeing in late August to the $1.5 billion settlement. The case hit its first bump in early September when Alsup delayed giving his preliminary approval to the deal, citing a number of questions he had surrounding how the payments would be divided among authors and publishers, and the effectiveness of the plaintiffs’ lawyers plans to alert anyone who may be part of the lawsuit.
Ahead of the September 25 hearing, lawyers for the plaintiffs provided a revised settlement that called for claimants of trade and university press books to equally split the per-work award in half between authors and publishers. For education titles, the proposal requires “the claimant to make a good-faith representation regarding the percentage of recovery that the claimant is entitled to receive for a given work relative to other potential claimants of the work.”
The amended filing also lays out an ambitious publicity campaign to alert anyone who may be party to the lawsuit and the revised proposal was approved by Alsup.
All parties put the amount each work is eligible to receive at $3,000, a figure arrived at after administration fees, lawyers’ fees, and expenses are paid. While as many as seven million works were initially thought to be eligible to receive a payout, most did not meet eligibility requirements, leaving roughly 482,000 works that qualified for the award.
Representatives from both the Association of American Publishers and Authors Guild praised the decision. “The settlement marks a milestone in authors’ fights
against AI companies’ theft of their works,” the Guild said in a statement. “It sends a clear signal to AI companies that infringement of authors’ rights comes at a steep price.” Association of American Publishers CEO and president Maria Pallante said the settlement “is a major step in the right direction in holding AI developers accountable for reckless and unabashed infringement. Piracy is an astonishingly poor decision for a tech company, and—as the settlement figure demonstrates—an expensive one.”
Aparna Sridhar, deputy general counsel at Anthropic, stressed that the ruling pertained to only one part of the original case, noting that Alsup ruled that AI training is transformative fair use, but that copying books from pirate sites was not.
To be continued…
