{"id":114062,"date":"2026-07-21T23:13:48","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T23:13:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/114062\/"},"modified":"2026-07-21T23:13:48","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T23:13:48","slug":"court-grants-final-approval-to-landmark-1-5-billion-anthropic-settlement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/114062\/","title":{"rendered":"Court Grants Final Approval to Landmark $1.5 Billion Anthropic Settlement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Authors included in the settlement now stand to be paid as much as $3,000 per work. Furthermore, publishers stand to reap a major windfall, with some of the larger publishers due to receive tens of millions of dollars.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

By Andrew Richard Albanese, Editor-in-Chief<\/p>\n

The checks will soon be in the mail after a federal judge this week granted final approval to the landmark $1.5 billion settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic.<\/a> Just over two months since an uneventful final fairness hearing in May<\/a>, Judge Araceli Mart\u00ednez-Olgu\u00edn in the Northern District of California ruled that the settlement met the legal standard of being \u201cfair, reasonable, and adequate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe $1.5 billion Settlement provides substantial benefits to the Class in light of the novel claims asserted. Success at trial was not assured, and a loss would have left the Class with no recourse,\u201d Mart\u00ednez-Olgu\u00edn held<\/a>, adding that the class\u2019s response to the settlement was \u201coverwhelmingly favorable\u201d with the claims rate reaching at least 91.3% of eligible works\u2014nearly 500,000 works in total.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Judge Araceli Mart\u00ednez-Olgu\u00edn.<\/p>\n

The judge also rejected the handful of objections to the proposed settlement, after attorneys noted during the May fairness hearing that the settlement opt-out rate was \u201cminiscule,\u201d with only 53 objections, roughly half of which (26) were from people requesting that their works be added to the settlement itself.<\/p>\n

The closely watched settlement comes after<\/a> judge William Alsup, in a mixed summary judgment decision last June, found that Anthropic\u2019s unauthorized use of copyrighted books to train its Claude AI system was fair use, but also found that the company\u2019s decision to keep millions of unauthorized downloads for a permanent \u201ccentral\u201d research library was likely infringing, and ordered the company to stand trial on that claim, prompting the settlement.<\/p>\n

Authors included in the settlement now stand to be paid as much as $3,000 per work. Furthermore, publishers stand to reap a major windfall, with some of the larger publishers due to receive tens of millions of dollars<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe applaud the court\u2019s final approval of this settlement, which represents an important victory in the larger battle to hold big tech accountable for its unscrupulous appropriation of intellectual and creative properties that clearly belong to authors and publishers,\u201d said AAP President and CEO Maria Pallante in a statement. \u201cIn this case, the court recognized that downloading from pirate sites is not a choice we should simply accept as an efficiency for the infringer; on the contrary, it\u2019s abhorrent conduct that should never be normalized.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only notable change in the order pertained to attorneys fees, which the judge slashed nearly in half from the requested amount.<\/p>\n

While it is \u201cwell established\u201d that 25% of a common fund is a presumptively reasonable amount of attorney\u2019s fees in U.S. class actions, the judge held, that percentage does not necessarily apply to so-called mega-funds\u2014which would include the $1.5 billion settlement in this case. Lawyers had requested a fee award of 12.5%, or roughly $187.5 million, which the court rejected, instead awarding class counsel a total fee award of $101,561,111\u2014still a record payday for a copyright infringement suit.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis amounts to nearly 6.8% of the settlement fund, which is a reasonable percentage given a fund of this size,\u201d Mart\u00ednez-Olgu\u00edn ruled.<\/p>\n

About the AuthorAndrew Albanese<\/p>\n

Andrew Richard Albanese is the editor-in-chief of ‘Publishing Perspectives’ and founder and editor of ‘Words & Money,’ a media site that centers the role of libraries in the 21st Century publishing business. A veteran library and publishing industry reporter, he has previously worked for ‘Publishers Weekly’ and ‘Library Journal,’ where he was widely known for his in-depth coverage of the Google Books and Apple E-book price-fixing cases, developments in the digital library market, book bans and freedom to read issues, the open access movement, and copyright issues. He is a former associate editor at Oxford University Press, and the author of ‘The Battle of $9.99: How Apple, Amazon, and the Big Six Publishers Changed the E-Book Business Overnight.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Authors included in the settlement now stand to be paid as much as $3,000 per work. Furthermore, publishers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114063,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[58319,24,53,7412,24765,7602],"class_list":["post-114062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-aap","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-copyright","tag-fair-use","tag-lawsuits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}