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By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
See also:
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
Pallante: ‘We Are Cautiously Optimistic’
As Publishing Perspectives subscribers will remember, the fast-moving Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit has been quickly moving a class in a case originally filed by authors against the San Francisco-based AI company Anthropic for allegedly training its models on pirated copyrighted works.
Today (August 26), Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers—which has served to support the “Publishers’ Coordination Counsel” representing the publishers’ interests—has issued a memo to the AAP membership, indicating that “a statement of potential settlement” has been jointly submitted to the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The submission asked for “a pause of ongoing litigation so that the parties can finalize their settlement efforts,” Pallante writes, and “the court quickly accepted the development; canceled a hearing scheduled for Thursday (August 28); and requested a detailed submission by September 5 in advance of a hearing on September 8.
“The court’s order,” writes Pallante, “further states that ‘nothing in this order affects the trial date or the final pretrial conference date or any other trial-related date in the event that the settlement craters.'”
Maria A. Pallante
Pallante writes, “A great deal of work has precipitated getting to this stage, which reflects the important ruling from Judge Alsup that ‘torrenting’ works of authorship may be expedient for AI developers, but it is not without consequences.
“Indeed, as AAP has stated before,” she writes, “proliferating piracy is adverse not only to the authors and publishers who are injured but to any kind of rational public policy.
“We are cautiously optimistic that as details are finalized we’ll have a settlement that’s both pro-copyright and pro-innovation and one that provides relief and precedent that supports the creative community and therefore the public.”
Background Notes From Pallante
While this is a development and case based in the United States, many of our international readers have been following, not least because the piracy angle—the allegation that Anthropic obtained its unlicensed copyrighted source materials from online content pirate sites—has been positioned by the judge as the element to be tested in the case (see our article from August 13).
She stresses, “The potential scope of works that Anthropic allegedly infringed numbers in the hundreds of thousands to millions, and consists of works from thousands of copyright owners, both authors and publishers.
“Your house and your authors may each be part of the class.”
A Programming Note
The 2025 Frankfurt Rights Meeting program ahead of Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 15 to 19) opens on September 2 with The AI Dilemma: Balancing Risks and Opportunities. The session features HarperCollins’ Chantal Restivo-Alessi and the FALA Agency’s Fatimah Abbas. An article on the full Rights Meeting series of pre-Frankfurt events is here, with dates, timing, pricing, and other details. The program comprises four weekly digital events and an in-person reception at Frankfurt in October.
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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