It turns out that using officially purchased books to teach AI without the permission of the authors — is «fair use». At least, this is the opinion of the California District Court, which sided with Anthropic in a copyright infringement lawsuit.
According to the decision of Judge William Alsup (via The Verge), Anthropic has the right to train its AI models on legally purchased books — in this case, we are talking only about physical copies that the company can digitize later. As for the company’s piracy of «million» books from the Internet, the judge did not issue any injunction, but only noted that this should be considered in a separate lawsuit.
The lawsuit against Anthropic was filed last year by writers Andrea Barz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who claimed that the Claude family of AI models was trained on pirated materials. Initially, the authors demanded $750 billion in compensation — $150 thousand for each of the 5 million books downloaded. Although the judge deviated somewhat from the original intent of the application, his decision is a potentially important precedent for the entire AI industry, where companies will be able to easily use copyrighted materials in the future if they acquired them legally.
«The authors’ complaints are no different from the complaints they would make that teaching students to write well will lead to an explosion of competing works,» Judge Alsup wrote, adding that the Copyright Act «seeks to promote original works of authorship, not to protect authors from competition.
Next, Anthropic will face a separate hearing on the use of pirated content, which will determine the amount of damages.
Anthropic — is one of the key AI players in the United States, founded by OpenAI. Last year, the company received over $1 billion in annual revenueincluding subscriptions to Claude models, which cost from $20 to $200 per month. The authors’ lawsuit is not the only one in which Anthropic is defending itself against content theft, earlier this month Reddit goes to court in Northern California regarding the company’s illegal use of a website for AI training.
Spelling error report
The following text will be sent to our editors: