Image – Getty: Vlad Studio Raw
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
See also:
A Potential Settlement in the Anthropic AI-Training Lawsuit
Copyright and Piracy: Publishers Coordinate on the Anthropic Lawsuit
Interview: Niels Famaey on Fighting Piracy in Belgium
UK Publishers and Cambridge Call Out Meta and Piracy in Generative AI Training
French Publishers Prevail Against Manga Pirate Site Japscan
Copyright: Publishers Join Creative Industries’ Protest of Europe’s AI Act Implementation
A Common Goal of Publishers and Authors To Combat Piracy’
As Publishing Perspectives readers know, the proposed settlement negotiated in the class-action lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic does not handle the core issue of so-called “fair use” in Anthropic accessing (without permission or payment) copyrighted content to “train” its large language models. Nevertheless, the proposed settlement is called historic for its action against what the Association of American Publishers (AAP) calls the “mass copying of books from illegal shadow libraries.”
Judge William Alsup of the District Court for the Northern District of California in June “substantially narrowed the claims” so that “only the claims relating to Anthropic’s mass copying of books from illegal shadow libraries remained for trial,” as it’s put in a Q&A about the proposed settlement provided by the association.
On July 17, as we know, the judge “certified the class for these piracy claims,” AAP recounts, to make the class include publishers as well as authors.
A statement released by AAP late on Friday (September 5) says that at a preliminary hearing today (September 8), Judge Alsup will consider the proposed settlement. The judge “must approve the entire proposed settlement before it can take effect and additional details of the settlement will be fleshed out under the court’s supervision.”
If the proposed settlement is fully approved, Anthropic essentially will compensate publishers and authors at the rate of some $3,000 for each of what is expected to be around 500,000 books the settlement addresses.
In the court’s “Class Action Settlement Agreement” document filed Friday, we read, in part, that the defendant—the AI company Anthropic—”shall fund the settlement fund in four installments,” two scheduled installments of $300 million and two of $450 million.
On that schedule, the agreement says, Anthropic “will pay at least US$1.5 billion into a ‘settlement fund'” and that fund will be used “to make cash payments to class members and cover certain costs in the case, including attorneys’ fees,” per the Q&A.
Another provision makes it clear that if the “works list” should “exceed 500,000 works, the defendant will increase the settlement fund by $3,000 for each additional work.
Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the United States’ Authors Guild—which of course, like AAP, is working to support the plaintiffs—makes an interesting comparative statement of what Anthropic is being sued for. “Imagine the outrage if Anthropic and others had illegally siphoned off electricity to build their AI, claiming it was too expensive to pay for it. These vastly rich companies, worth billions, stole from those earning a median income [authors] of barely $20,000 a year.”
Maria A. Pallante
And in her release of a statement Friday, Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers announces that the AAP indeed endorses the proposed settlement of the Bartz v. Anthropic class action, through which Anthropic will pay at least $1.5 billion to resolve copyright infringement claims regarding its mass piracy of books and destroy works that it torrented or downloaded from the pirated LibGen or PiLiMi datasets.
“The proposed settlement,” Pallante says, “will drive home the important message to all Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies that copying books from shadow libraries or other pirate sources to use as the building blocks for their businesses has serious consequences.
“AAP and publishers across the country,” she says, “have been monitoring the Bartz case carefully since its inception. Following the court’s class certification on July 17, we actively engaged through counsel to assist and support this historically large settlement. We know that our counterparts at the Authors Guild have done the same, and we believe that the proposed settlement advances the common goal of publishers and authors to combat piracy.
Mary Rasenberger
For her part, Rasenberger at the Authors Guild says, “This settlement sends a clear message that AI companies must pay for the books they use just as they pay for the other essential components of their LLMs. . . .
“We expect that the settlement will lead to more licensing that gives author both compensation and control over the use of their work by AI companies, as should be the case in a functioning free market society.”
In her Friday article for NPR, Chloe Veltman writes, “Anthropic is in a good position to handle the sizable compensation. On Tuesday, the company announced the completion of a new funding round worth $13 billion, bringing its total value to $183 billion.”
Veltman also gets at the fact that Judge Alsup found that Anthropic’s training of Claude, its AI product, was “exceedingly transformative,” and thus met the standard, in his purview, for “fair use.” That’s a fundamental point with which many in the world publishing industry would disagree.
Nevertheless, as Cade Metz writes in his Friday article at The New York Times, “The agreement is a turning point in a continuing battle between A.I. companies and copyright holders that spans more than 40 lawsuits across the country. Experts say the agreement could pave the way for more tech companies to pay rights holders through court decisions and settlements or through licensing fees.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on artificial intelligence is here; more on copyright and international book publishing is here; more on the United States’ market is here, and more on the Association of American Publishers is here.
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