Anthropic may finally start cutting checks to groups of authors and book publishers who have sued the AI lab for copyright infringement. A federal judge on Monday gave final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement of its landmark class-action copyright lawsuit, Reuters reports.
Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California announced 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 agreement on Monday.
The payments will deliver $3,000 per work across approximately 500,000 works and will be shared between authors and publishers who hold the rights to those works. Although the settlement is believed to be the largest settlement in the history of U.S. copyright law, many writers and creators still do not consider it a victory.
This is because of how the legal issue was resolved. Alsoup sided with Anthropic on key issues. He ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text was considered fair use. This decision is widely considered a turning point for the AI industry. But the ruling did not excuse how Anthropic acquired the books in the first place. Anthropic has built its educational library from two sources: books purchased and scanned (details) and books downloaded from pirate sites such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup found that the second method was itself illegal and said the piracy issue could be taken to trial. Anthropic soon agreed to a settlement to avoid a trial and damages awarded by a jury.
While final approval closes the case, it does not resolve industry-wide legal issues because Alsup’s decision was a single district court decision and Anthropic’s settlement decision means the case will not reach the appellate court to become a binding precedent.
Other judges are still free to reach their own conclusions about the facts, which is exactly what goes on elsewhere. There are still ongoing copyright lawsuits against companies including Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI over whether it is legal to train AI models on copyrighted works. 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 accusations that the company used copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini.
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