Anthropic bought paper copies of books, scanned them, and used the resulting data to train their large langugage models. Authors sued, claiming this was not fair use under copyright law, and got their case certified as a class action.

The case was assigned to District Judge William Alsup, a seasoned US district court judge with deep experience in technology law, including two jury trials in the Google v Oracle saga over the Java APIs in Android. Last month Judge Alsup ruled that it’s fair use for legally obtained books to be used to train large language models. That’s a big win for Anthropic and the other frontier model companies.

However, Anthropic is also accused of pirating digital copies of more than 7 million books, and these illegally acquired works are not part of the fair use ruling. Judge Alsup also ruled that Anthropic must face a trial over the author’s piracy complaints.

US Copyright law includes statutory damages of up to $150,000 for willful copyright infringement of a single work. With 7 million works in question, Anthropic faces potential damages of up to a trillion dollars.

In their first major filing since Judge Alsup’s ruling, Anthropic is appealing the certification of the class. It’s their best tactic to reduce their financial exposure. Ashley Belanger summarizes Anthropic’s appeal for Ars Technica:

Confronted with such extreme potential damages, Anthropic may lose its rights to raise valid defenses of its AI training, deciding it would be more prudent to settle, the company argued. And that could set an alarming precedent, considering all the other lawsuits generative AI (GenAI) companies face over training on copyrighted materials, Anthropic argued.

No, Anthropic won’t lose any rights if they decide to settle. They made their choice when they willfully decided to pirate copyrighted works and hoped nobody would notice. Now that everyone knows, they may choose to settle and avoid a trial because if they lose at trial it’s a company ending event. Yes, the precendent would be ground-breaking, but it’s only alarming if you are infringing author’s rights. If other frontier model companies have done the same thing, they should have to face lawsuits as well.

Copyright class action lawsuits are incredibly complex, the case against Anthropic will take a long time, and the outcome is far from certain. Authors Guild v. Google took 10 years for the appeals court to finally rule that Google’s Books project of scanning copyrighted works and publishing them on the internet “provides a public service without violating intellectual property law”. It was appealed to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

I’ll be following Authors Guild v. Anthropic with great interest, even if the certification of the class is overturned. If the individual authors win against Anthropic, the floodgates will be open for claimants to sue every frontier model company. We already know that Meta pirated 7.5 books and 81 million research papers. If there is a precedent set in Authors Guild v. Anthropic, I’ll bet it will only take one phone call to find a lawyer who will help you sue Meta, OpenAI, and Google on the same grounds. A trillion dollars of damages from Anthropic, another trillion from Meta, and pretty soon you are talking real money.