Anthropic’s landmark $1.5B copyright settlement is approved
Quick Answer
Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement has been approved, compensating authors for illegally downloaded works.
Quick Take
While the settlement is historic, the ruling allows AI training on copyrighted texts as fair use, leaving unresolved legal questions for the industry.
Key Points
- Settlement compensates authors and publishers $3,000 per work for 500,000 works.
- Judge ruled AI training on copyrighted text counts as fair use, a pivotal decision.
- Anthropic's illegal downloads from pirate sites led to the lawsuit.
- The case won't set binding precedent as it won't reach appeals court.
- Ongoing lawsuits against other companies like Google and Meta regarding AI training.
DeepSignal Analysis
What happened
A federal judge approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement related to copyright infringement, compensating authors for illegally downloaded works. The settlement allows AI training on copyrighted texts as fair use, leaving broader legal questions unresolved in the industry.
Key evidence
- Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin approved the settlement, which compensates authors and publishers $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works.
- Judge William Alsup previously ruled that training AI on copyrighted texts constitutes fair use, a decision viewed as significant for the AI industry.
- Anthropic's training library included books purchased legally and those downloaded from pirate sites, with the latter method deemed illegal by the court.
Why it matters
This settlement is notable as it represents a significant financial resolution for authors and publishers, yet it raises concerns about the legality of AI training practices. The ruling's classification of AI training as fair use could set a precedent, but it does not resolve ongoing copyright disputes in the industry.
What to watch
📖 Reader Mode
~3 min readAnthropic can finally start cutting checks to a group of authors and book publishers that sued the AI lab over copyright infringement. A federal judge gave final approval Monday of Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit, Reuters reported.
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 copyrighted 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 industry-wide 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.
Topics
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Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.
You can contact or verify outreach from Kirsten by emailing kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at kkorosec.07 on Signal.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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