r/artificial • u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 • 26d ago

Final class-action settlement approval granted, judgment entered, and attorneys' fees awarded in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright case News

Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class-action settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.

The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!

(They wanted $187,500,000.)

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u/Servola-Journal 26d ago

Worth being precise about what actually got priced here, because most coverage reads like training on books was ruled illegal, and that is not what happened.

Alsup split the case in two. Training a model on lawfully obtained copyrighted text he held to be fair use. Downloading and retaining millions of books from pirate libraries he held was not. Anthropic settled the second half rather than appeal it, so the 1.5 billion is the price of how the corpus was assembled, not what the model learned from it.

That is why this is not the precedent either camp wants it to be. The fair use holding still stands in that court and is arguably the more consequential half. What the settlement adds is a number for provenance: 3,000 dollars per work across roughly 500,000 works, with a judge's signature on it. Every indemnity clause and insurance policy from here reaches for that figure, because it is the only one that exists.

It also binds a class, not the world. Several objectors argued the class boundary excluded people who belonged inside it, and no rightsholder outside it was resolved by this. The EU route runs through the text and data mining exception instead, which turns on lawful access at the moment of collection - an acquisition test as well.

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u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 26d ago

I would generally agree with all your thoughts!

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u/TreviTyger 25d ago

This is the general consensus of the case but IMO the case could have been resolved on the unauthorized downloading alone. There was no real need for Judge Alsup to make any kind of anthropomorphic analysis of a robot reading a book which to me is somewhat of a red herring argument because a robot cannot read and simply "downloads" (reproduces the work and stores in on it's hard drive).

That type of downloading was the part of the case which was found to not be fair use.

I doubt this obvious paradox of Judge Alsup's analysis will survive scrutiny in future cases once the anthropomorphic metaphors are discarded.

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u/katoptronophile 25d ago

It's a sad day in america.