Report from AP News
In Brief – Federal Judge William Alsup has granted preliminary approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement resolving an authors’ copyright class action lawsuit alleging that the company illegally downloaded pirated books. Judge Alsup expressed deep disappointment with the first settlement proposal, decrying a lack of specificity and wondering if the distribution of the funds would be fair. He found the revised settlement acceptable although the claims process would be complicated because of the large number of stakeholders and directed the “excellent” lawyers to successfully manage the “ethical” issues. Anthropic, one the largest AI developers, will pay about $3,000 for each of the 482,460 books it downloaded from “pirate libraries” Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, and destroy the files.
Context – This lawsuit is one of the many filed by copyright holders who argue that AI developers violated copyright laws when they used copies of digital content gathered off the internet to train AI systems. The lawsuits occupy center stage in the US on this key AI policy issue. Judge Alsup’s June ruling on summary judgement was mixed, delivering a robust defense of the application of the “fair use” doctrine for the training of Generative AI chatbots with legally acquired copyrighted books, regardless of the consent of the copyright holders, but harshly criticizing gathering books from online databases notorious for piracy. Hence the settlement in this case deals with Anthropic copying books from the so-called pirate libraries. In a separate class action, Judge Vincent Chhabria delivered an opposing ruling the same week on the fair use question, creating the novel concept of “indirect substitution” through which AI systems nullify the fair use defense by creating massive volumes of cheap content that, while not copies of the originals, are “similar enough to compete with the originals and thereby indirectly substitute for them,” harming copyright holders. In the EU, the AI Act, regulators and expert groups are playing central roles, with the copyright section of the General Purpose AI Code of Practice proving especially contentious.