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Anthropic is facing a class action lawsuit representing the authors of the books it pirated to train its AI.
In June, a US federal judge ruled that Anthropic’s AI training using published books without the consent of the author is legal.
The fair use doctrine, which is laid out in outdated copyright legislation from 1976, is up to interpretation by judges. This is legislation that well precedes the internet, let alone artificial intelligence.
In the case of Bartz v Anthropic, federal Judge William Alsup ruled in favour of Anthropic training its Claude LLMs on copyrighted books without the permission of the authors.
“The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under section 107 of the Copyright Act,” said Alsup.
However, on 17 July, “the court certified a class comprised of legal and beneficial owners of the rights in copyright-registered books downloaded by Anthropic”, according to the Authors Guild, which added that a class action lawsuit is to follow, representing the copyright owners of the books.
“All authors whose book(s) were downloaded by Anthropic from the pirate sites are potential members of the certified class, provided certain criteria are met,” the Authors Guild said.
The class counsel will publish a list of all affected books on 1 September, allowing authors to see if they were impacted.
Authors who are the legal or beneficial copyright owner of the work, had copyright registration with the Copyright Office prior to the piracy, and have an ISBN or ASIN number.
“A trial is set for December 1. If the plaintiffs succeed at trial and show willful infringement, statutory damages range from $750 per title up to a maximum of $150,000 per title,” the Authors Guild said.
“We urge all authors who believe their books may have been unlawfully downloaded by Anthropic to provide the requested [contact] information and to share the [Authors Guild] website with any other authors you know.”
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