{"id":11211,"date":"2025-06-24T16:49:17","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T16:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/11211\/"},"modified":"2025-06-24T16:49:17","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T16:49:17","slug":"anthropic-wins-a-major-fair-use-victory-for-ai-but-its-still-in-trouble-for-stealing-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/11211\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic wins a major fair use victory for AI \u2014 but it\u2019s still in trouble for stealing books"},"content":{"rendered":"

A federal judge has sided with Anthropic in an AI copyright case, ruling that training<\/a> \u2014 and only training \u2014 its AI models on legally purchased books without authors\u2019 permission is fair use. It\u2019s a first-of-its-kind ruling in favor of the AI industry, but it\u2019s importantly limited specifically to physical books Anthropic purchased and digitized.<\/p>\n

Judge William Alsup<\/a> of the Northern District of California also says in his decision that the company must face a separate trial for pirating \u201cmillions\u201d of books from the internet. The decision also does not address whether the outputs of an AI model infringe copyrights, which is at issue in other related cases.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit was filed by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who sued Anthropic last year over claims<\/a> the company trained its family of Claude AI models on pirated material. It\u2019s a pivotal decision that could affect how judges respond to AI copyright cases going forward. <\/p>\n

The ruling also addresses Anthropic\u2019s move to purchase print copies of books, rip off their bindings, cut the pages, and scan them into a centralized digital library used to train its AI models. The judge ruled that digitizing a legally purchased physical book was fair use, and that using those digital copies to train an LLM was sufficiently transformative to also be fair use.<\/p>\n

\u201cAuthors\u2019 complaint is no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works,\u201d Judge Alsup writes, adding that the Copyright Act \u201cseeks to advance original works of authorship, not to protect authors against competition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite these wins for Anthropic, Judge Alsup writes that Anthropic\u2019s decision to store millions of pirated book copies in the company\u2019s central library \u2014 even if some weren\u2019t used for training \u2014 isn\u2019t considered fair use. \u201cThis order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use,\u201d Alsup writes (emphasis his).<\/p>\n

Judge Alsup says the court will hold a separate trial on the pirated content used by Anthropic, which will determine the resulting damages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal judge has sided with Anthropic in an AI copyright case, ruling that training \u2014 and only…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":11212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[691,1022,12131,171,3228,50,153,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-11211","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-copyright","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-law","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-policy","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114739371494516432","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}