Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train Claude
- A federal judge approved a $1.5B settlement between Anthropic and a class of authors and publishers over pirated books used to train Claude.
- The case, Bartz v. Anthropic, centers on how the books were acquired, not on whether training on copyrighted text counts as fair use (courts already ruled training itself is fair use).
- The payout works out to $3,000 per eligible book title, roughly 100 times the retail cost of a legitimate copy.
- The judge cut class counsel's fee in half, from 12.5% ($187.5M) to 6.8% ($101M), while the three class representatives receive only $15,000 each.
- Commenters note the ruling raises the capital bar for AI training on books, since new entrants can no longer rely on pirated corpora and must license content at scale instead.
Hacker News 의견들
That $1.5B number is missing context, the settlement is for piracy, not for training itself. Courts already ruled training on copyrighted material is fair use, this is only about how the books were acquired.
It's like the fines people paid for pirating music back in the day, ridiculous per-unit penalties but not actually about the underlying use.
To be clear, the issue was never that Claude trained on these books, it's that Anthropic pirated copies instead of buying them.
Now you need dozens of millions in capital to build a training corpus legitimately. I made books3 hoping to settle whether AI training on books was fair use, and now we're stuck in a world where only big players can afford clean data.
This basically creates a moat. Small hackers or startups can't just scrape pirated books anymore, only companies with huge capital can license or buy at scale.
This is squarely cost of doing business for a company Anthropic's size.
I don't get the point of these fines, they're a slap on the wrist for a company this large. If the fine is less than the profit made, companies will just keep paying it.
It's a civil issue not criminal, that's why it's just damages, not punishment.
This was a settlement both sides agreed to last year, the judge just approved it. $3,000 per book is about 100x what buying the book would've cost, so it doesn't look unreasonable to me.
Civil suits are about restoring damages, not punishing wrongdoing, that's why the number tracks book price and not Anthropic's profit.
Funny thing is most of this settlement money goes to publishers who won't pass it down to actual authors.
If you read the judge's order, the class counsel's fee got cut in half from 12.5% ($187.5M) to 6.8% ($101M), and the three class reps only get $15k each despite being the named plaintiffs.
Lawyers should be capped in fee percentage just like realtors and brokers are, funny how that rule never applies to lawyers themselves.
What about authors outside the US? This is a very US-centric resolution that doesn't touch anyone else's rights.
US courts only have jurisdiction over US companies, if other countries want their authors compensated they'd need their own case.