Wired Magazine reports that the class action copyright suit involving Anthropic in the Northern District of California (Bartz v. Anthropic) has been settled (for the most part) for around $1.5 billion US. The article is available, here.
The practical implications of the settlement on positioning in other copyright suits involving generative artificial intelligence remain to be seen. In June, Judge Alsup issued an order stating, in part:
. . . This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that
the training use was a fair use. And, it grants that the print-to-digital
format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it denies summary
judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as
training copies.
We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic's central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness). That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages. Nothing is foreclosed as to any other copies flowing from library copies for uses other than for training LLMs.
