Stanford professors opt out of Anthropic's $1.5B book-piracy settlement to sue for up to $150K per work

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Stanford professors opt out of Anthropic's $1.5B book-piracy settlement to sue for up to $150K per work

Judge William Alsup ruled in Bartz v. Anthropic that pulling books from shadow libraries like LibGen and PiLiMi to train Claude was illegal, while training on legally acquired copies counts as fair use.
The $1.5B settlement went to authors and publishers of nearly 500,000 registered works, roughly $3,000 per work.
Tobias Wolff, 10 of whose publications Anthropic used, and English professor Chang-rae Lee opted out of the class settlement and filed Cruz v. Anthropic in May 2026, seeking statutory damages up to $150,000 per infringed work plus a permanent injunction.
Stanford law professor Paul Goldstein says the core obstacle is transaction costs: a single training run can copy millions of works, so licensing every title is impractical for the platform.
Over 70 infringement lawsuits are pending against AI companies, including from The New York Times and Getty Images, and the Authors Guild is pressing Congress for legislation that requires licensing.

Hacker News opinions

The title is off. The ruling never said training on the books was illegal, it said taking them off LibGen was. Alsup explicitly put legally acquired books for training under fair use.

That's a distinction without a difference. They pirated the books so they could train on them, that's the whole point.

Fair enough, I changed the submission title to match what the article actually says.

I robbed the bank illegally, but the car I bought with the money was totally legal.

Of course they did it, same as nearly every bit of training data that isn't synthetic, and even the synthetic stuff traces back to something pirated.

The dumb part is they burned $1.5B by not just buying the books. If I torrented half a million books I'd be looking at way worse than a $3k-per-book settlement.

They also claimed the pirated files weren't used for training, then went out and bought a huge pile of secondhand books and scanned those instead, which looks legal.

Good. Information wants to be free, and it shouldn't stay locked in an ivory tower so a few academics can hoard it.

Then why not just pay for the book? Do you think authors should never be compensated for the work at all?

Can I get your credit card and social? Pretty sure that information wants to be free too.

It's funny how hackers who have pirated plenty in their lives suddenly turn into copyright hardliners.

Note the framing: the trillion dollar company isn't the rich one here, the professors are.

This happened to everyone's data, not just Stanford professors. Does it matter more because of who wrote the books?

They were already covered by the class settlement, but several opted out to sue individually for bigger damages. Damn right they did.

So where's the 13 felony CFAA counts here? Aaron Swartz got prosecuted for far less.

The CFAA doesn't reach downloading from LibGen, there's no alleged unauthorized system access in this case.

Swartz broke into a network closet and worked around MAC address bans. That comparison doesn't hold.

Swartz's case never went to trial and it tanked the prosecutor's career, there have been no prosecutions like it since. Let's not wish that back.

Also Swartz meant to redistribute the papers in public. Anthropic trained behind closed doors and had a paper trail arguing fair use, which is a real difference even if you hate it.