{"id":115563,"date":"2026-07-22T22:16:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T22:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/115563\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T22:16:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T22:16:32","slug":"anthropics-1-5b-piracy-settlement-with-book-authors-is-a-record-loss-that-hands-ai-labs-their-biggest-legal-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/115563\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic&#8217;s $1.5B piracy settlement with book authors is a record loss that hands AI labs their biggest legal win"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/the-decoder.com\/author\/matthias-bastian\/\" class=\"w-6 h-6 relative rounded-full overflow-hidden shrink-0 bg-gray-400 block   exclude-from-pdf\" title=\"View all posts by Matthias Bastian\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<img loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"Matthias Bastian\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/avatar_matthias_bastian.jpg\"  class=\"avatar avatar-24 photo w-6 h-6 left-0 top-0 absolute\" height=\"24\" width=\"24\" decoding=\"async\"\/>\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Anthropic has to pay book authors $1.5 billion in a copyright settlement. A federal court in San Francisco <a href=\"https:\/\/law.justia.com\/cases\/federal\/district-courts\/california\/candce\/4:2024cv05417\/434709\/680\/?utm_source=chatgpt.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">approved the settlement<\/a> after Anthropic downloaded books from the piracy databases LibGen and PiLiMi between 2021 and 2022. Of roughly 482,460 listed works, 91.3 percent were claimed, netting about $3,000 each, four times the statutory minimum. Anthropic must destroy the pirated files. Authors retain claims over <a href=\"https:\/\/the-decoder.com\/researchers-extract-up-to-96-of-harry-potter-word-for-word-from-leading-ai-models\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">AI outputs that reproduce original works<\/a> and over Anthropic&#8217;s future conduct. It&#8217;s the largest copyright settlement in class action history.<\/p>\n<p>But the payout covers piracy, not AI training itself. Judge Alsup had previously ruled that training AI on legally obtained books is <a href=\"https:\/\/the-decoder.com\/anthropic-won-a-fair-use-hearing-that-could-end-up-being-a-defeat\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">&#8220;transformative &#8211; spectacularly so&#8221;<\/a> and falls under fair use. Whether mass scraping of internet content without authors&#8217; consent counts as legal acquisition remains an open question, <a href=\"https:\/\/the-decoder.com\/us-copyright-office-says-fair-use-does-not-cover-ai-trained-on-vast-troves-of-copyrighted-works\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">so the fair use debate is likely far from over<\/a>. Still, the ruling looks like a milestone for AI labs that trained on web content without website owners&#8217; consent, their main source of training data.<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\tAI News Without the Hype \u2013 Curated by Humans<\/p>\n<p>\n\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive &#8220;AI Radar&#8221; frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/the-decoder.com\/subscription\/\" class=\"inline-block text-white bg-(--heise-primary) mt-3 hover:bg-blue-800 focus:ring-4 focus:outline-none focus:ring-blue-300 font-medium rounded-sm w-full sm:w-auto  pl-3 pr-3 py-2.5 text-center newsletter-submit-button hover:no-underline\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe now\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anthropic has to pay book authors $1.5 billion in a copyright settlement. A federal court in San Francisco&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115564,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[3069,53,7412,24765],"class_list":["post-115563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-ai-training","tag-anthropic","tag-copyright","tag-fair-use"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115563","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=115563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}