{"id":114536,"date":"2026-07-22T08:20:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T08:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/114536\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T08:20:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T08:20:09","slug":"bloomsbury-in-line-for-around-21-million-from-anthropic-copyright-settlement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/114536\/","title":{"rendered":"Bloomsbury in line for around $21 million from Anthropic copyright settlement"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bloomsbury<\/a> Bloomsbury in line for around $21 million from Anthropic copyright settlement Proactive uses images sourced from Shutterstock <\/p>\n

Shares in Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (LSE:BMY)<\/a> rose 2% in early trading after the publisher confirmed it stands to receive roughly $21 million from the $1.5 billion settlement of a copyright class action against the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. <\/p>\n

The US District Court for the Northern District of California has listed 14,087 Bloomsbury titles as covered by the settlement, with about $3,000 payable for each work, worth around $42 million. <\/p>\n

That payment is split equally between the author and the publisher under standard trade terms, leaving Bloomsbury with roughly $21 million before legal fees and administrative costs are deducted. <\/p>\n

Payments are expected to be spread over several instalments, with the first estimated to arrive in the second half of the current financial year. <\/p>\n

The case, brought in 2024 by the novelists Andrea Bartz and Charles Graeber and the writer Kirk Wallace Johnson, alleged Anthropic trained its Claude models on books downloaded from pirate libraries rather than legitimately purchased copies. <\/p>\n

Judge Araceli Mart\u00ednez-Olgu\u00edn granted final approval on 20 July, in what lawyers on both sides describe as the largest copyright recovery in United States history, covering close to half a million books. <\/p>\n

Anthropic must also destroy the original torrented files and any copies derived from them. <\/p>\n

The judge cut the fee award sought by the plaintiffs’ lawyers from $187.5 million to about $101.5 million, roughly 7% of the fund, with the savings redirected to class members. <\/p>\n

The claims rate was reported at 92.77%, and only 350 class members successfully opted out before the deadline, leaving them free to pursue their own actions. <\/p>\n

The settlement does not establish a legal precedent, and comparable claims against Meta, Google and OpenAI remain unresolved. <\/p>\n

Bloomsbury said it held \u00a329.2 million of net cash at 28 February. <\/p>\n

The company listed its capital allocation priorities as organic investment, debt repayment to cut interest costs, dividends and bolt-on acquisitions, giving no indication that the windfall would be returned to shareholders directly. <\/p>\n

The sum is material for a publisher of Bloomsbury’s size, and arrives as trade publishers press artificial intelligence developers to license rather than scrape copyrighted material. <\/p>\n

Bloomsbury, best known for publishing the Harry Potter series, has expanded in recent years into academic and digital resources, a division it has positioned as a defence against consumer publishing’s volatility. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bloomsbury in line for around $21 million from Anthropic copyright settlement Proactive uses images sourced from Shutterstock Shares…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[53,25,58524,16035,24208],"class_list":["post-114536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-bloomsbury","tag-class-action","tag-the-settlement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114536","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=114536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}