In the case between Bartz and Anthropic, a preliminary settlement has been reached.
In a previous article we already discussed the groundbreaking judgment of Judge William Alsup in this case. He held that it is allowed to train AI systems with copyright-protected works, because this falls under the American fair use exception. On the other hand, Alsup held that there is no justification for downloading more than seven million illegal copies of books. Anthropic had downloaded these copies to compile a general library, which it subsequently used for training its AI systems.
Judge Alsup's opinion on the absence of a justification for the downloading of the illegal copies would have major implications for Anthropic. According to Wired, this led to a ‘financially devastating outcome in court’. The article refers to an elucidation of the US Copyright Act, which shows that damages set by law for illegal downloads may range from $750 to $150,000 per infringement.
Anthropic made the best of a bad bargain; after mediation, the parties reported that they had settled the matter. As this is a class action, the terms of the settlement still have to be approved by the Court before a settlement is actually achieved.
The settlement terms have not been disclosed yet. It remains interesting to see what exactly the parties have agreed on, and how this will affect both pending and future proceedings.
