A judge has preliminarily accepted a lawsuit brought by book authors against artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, which accuses the company of using pirated works to train its chatbot, Claude. The case seeks $1.5 billion in damages.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit, filed last year by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, alleged that Anthropic pulled vast quantities of copyrighted works from so-called \u201cshadow libraries\u201d like Library Genesis, Books3, and other pirate databases. Under the agreement, Anthropic will pay approximately $3,000 per book and destroy the data it obtained from shadow libraries.<\/p>\n
During a Sep. 25 hearing, US District Judge William Alsup deemed the proposed settlement fair, according to Reuters<\/a>. If approved, the payout will be the largest copyright recovery ever reported in the US.<\/p>\n In June, Judge Alsup issued a mixed ruling<\/a>. He found that using copyrighted material to train AI models was \u201cfair use.\u201d However, the judge also determined that Anthropic\u2019s method of acquiring the books \u2014 knowingly taking them from pirate sites \u2014 was illegal.<\/p>\n The following month, he controversially certified the case as a class action, allowing the three authors to represent all US writers whose works were allegedly downloaded by Anthropic from pirate libraries. This meant that millions of authors could pursue their copyright claims against the company in a single, unified case.<\/p>\n Representatives of the tech industry opposed class certification because it exposed AI companies to overwhelming pressure to settle and the risk of catastrophic liability without proof of actual harm. Creative sector representatives also opposed it, warning that disagreements among authors and publishers over damages and ownership could lead to endless disputes and undermine any potential victory.<\/p>\n Although a trial was scheduled for December, Anthropic agreed to the settlement<\/a> in August, and its value was disclosed earlier this month<\/a>. Alsup initially held off on approving the deal<\/a>, questioning its fairness and demanding more information to ensure authors would not be disadvantaged. He will still only give final approval after all those affected have been allowed to file a claim.<\/p>\n Bartz, Graeber, and Johnson issued a joint statement to Reuters, stating that the preliminary decision \u201cbrings us one step closer to real accountability for Anthropic and puts all AI companies on notice they can\u2019t shortcut the law or override creators\u2019 rights.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s legal representative told Reuters: \u201cThe decision will allow us to focus on developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems.\u201d<\/p>\n This establishes the first settlement among several copyright cases brought against generative AI companies, including Meta<\/a>, Perplexity<\/a>, Stability AI<\/a>, Midjourney<\/a>, Microsoft<\/a>, and OpenAI<\/a> (many<\/a>, many<\/a>, many<\/a> times<\/a>). Courts are being asked to decide whether mass scraping of content, especially from copyrighted or pirated sources, violates legal boundaries. Sam Altman\u2019s startup has signed several licensing deals<\/a> with publishers to avoid further trouble.<\/p>\n Apple is facing a similar class-action lawsuit<\/a> to Anthropic, with two authors alleging the company trained its AI system on pirated books. Reddit is also suing the AI startup<\/a> for allegedly using its copyrighted material without permission.<\/p>\n The question of how creative industries can continue to exist alongside AI, which requires vast amounts of human-created training data to be useful to society, is being hotly debated around the world. Creators need to be compensated, but allowing them to withhold their IP from model training if they disagree with the terms could lead to biased models<\/a>.<\/p>\n Furthermore, US President Donald Trump has called it \u201cimpractical\u201d<\/a> to seek permission from every artist for the scraping of their work, with UK politicians holding a similar<\/a> opinion<\/a>. Political views on this issue are far from neutral: tech companies openly<\/a> resist<\/a> regulations that would slow down their momentum, while politicians are reluctant to deter these lucrative firms from setting up shop in their countries.<\/p>\n Companies like Microsoft<\/a> and Cloudflare<\/a> are looking to put the power back in creators\u2019 hands by offering solutions that allow them to sell their content on a per-use basis.<\/p>\n The post Judge Preliminarily Approves Historic $1.5B Settlement for Authors in Anthropic Copyright Case<\/a> appeared first on eWEEK<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A judge has preliminarily accepted a lawsuit brought by book authors against artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, which accuses the company of using pirated works to train its chatbot, Claude. The case seeks $1.5 billion in damages. The lawsuit, filed last year by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, alleged that Anthropic pulled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5071"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5071\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The authors\u2019 copyright case against Anthropic so far<\/h2>\n
Anthropic and the authors are happy with the judge\u2019s decision<\/h2>\n
More to come: Similar AI copyright cases and ongoing debates<\/h2>\n