Writer Beware has long been a great resource for writers, calling out outright scams, questionable services, and bad publishers. Lately, they’ve been following the ongoing saga of the class-action lawsuit against Anthropic, and the proposed settlement.
For those who aren’t aware, the settlement revolves around Anthropic’s use of illegally downloaded works of fiction in training it’s LLM models. So while AI and copyright are involved, this is strictly about the means of acquisition and not around the training itself.
The number of books involved is staggering. Only holders of registered copyrights were allowed to participate in the settlement, but this still amounts to roughly 400,000 books. The maximum possible penalties would be $150,000 per case of infringement. In actuality, the settlement will be closer to $3,000 each, which might seem pretty weak in comparison, but still amounts to 1.5 billion dollars, by far the largest copyright-related settlement in history.
As of this week, the settlement has been approved by the judge, which means it’s very likely to go forward and the numbers are unlikely to change in a significant way.
There are also still a handful of authors who opted out of the settlement and have already filed lawsuits separately, presumably in hopes of getting an amount closer to that $150k maximum. So the finalization of the settlement doesn’t mean Anthropic’s woes are over for this particular case. And beyond that, there are dozens of other lawsuits against the big LLM companies still pending.
Check out these recent posts at Writer Beware for more details:
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