Anthropic has reached A preliminary regulation in a collective appeal brought by a group of eminent authors, marking a major turn of the prosecution during the copyright of the most important IA in history. This decision will allow Anthropic to avoid what could have been a financially devastating result in court.
The settlement agreement is expected to be finalized on September 3, with more details to follow, according to a legal file published on Tuesday. The complainants’ lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comments. Anthropic refused to comment.
In 2024, three books of books, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, continued Anthropic, alleging that the startup illegally used their work to form its artificial intelligence models. In June, the judge of the California district court, William Alsup, rendered a summary judgment in Bartz c. Anthropic which was largely linked with anthropic, noting that the use of books by the company was “fair use” and therefore legal.
But the judge ruled that the way Anthropic had acquired some of the works, downloading them through shadow libraries, including a notorious site called Libgen, constituted piracy. Alsup ruled that the authors of the book could still take anthropogenic in judgment in a collective recourse to pirate their works; The legal test was to start in December.
Statutory damages for this type of hack start $ 750 per violated work, according to the American copyright law. Given that the book library raised by Anthropic contained approximately 7 million works, the IA company was potentially confronted with penalties imposed by the court amounting to billions, perhaps more than one Billion of dollars.
“This is an astonishing turn of events, given the way Anthropic fought tooth and nails in two courts in this case. And the company recently hired a new trial team, “explains Edward Lee, professor of law at the University of Santa Clara who closely follows the copyright disputes. “But they had few defenses at the trial, given how judge Alsup ruled. Anthropic began at the risk of statutory damages in “doomsday” amounts. ”
Most of the authors who may have been part of the collective appeal barely started to receive an opinion that they qualified to participate. The Guild of the authors, a commercial group representing professional writers, sent an opinion alerting the authors that they could be eligible earlier this month, and the lawyers of the complainants had to submit a “list of affected works” to court on September 1.
“The big question is whether there is an important revolt in the author’s class after the conditions of settlement have been revealed,” explains James Grimmelmann, professor of digital law and Internet at Cornell University. “It will be a very important barometer of the presentation of the feeling of copyright.”
Anthropic is always faced with a number of other legal challenges related to copyright. One of the most prominent disputes involves a group of major record brands, including Universal Music Group, which alleges that the company has illegally formed its AI programs on the words protected by copyright. The complainants recently filed a file to modify their file to allege that Anthropic had used the Bittorrent peer sharing service to illegally download songs.
The colonies do not set a legal precedent, but the details of this case will probably be monitored closely such as dozens of other cases of copyright of high -level AI continue to tighten before the courts.
