Writers recently won a partial victory in a class action lawsuit against generative AI firm Anthropic.

The lawsuit alleged that Anthropic trained its language learning model, Claude (Claude?), using millions of copyrighted works scraped from pirate sites.

In a recent ruling, US District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s use of purchased or otherwise legally acquired material to train its AI was fair use, even though the authors were never contacted and never consented to Anthropic using their work in this way.

However, the judge differentiated between legally acquired work and work that had been stolen, even though Anthropic wasn’t responsible for uploading the original files to the pirate site.

Plaintiffs established a certified class of injured parties, comprised of rights holders whose registered books had been pirated and then later used by Anthropic. Writers concerned about the possible misuse of their work can use this database on The Atlantic website to see if their work was uploaded to LibGen, one of the sites scraped by Anthropic.

If you find any of your work in that database, you can submit your information to a website created by plaintiffs’ attorneys to gather data on injured parties in the class. The deadline for submitting information was August 15, but that deadline may be extended. If you think you’ve suffered damages, keep trying. Joining the class will ensure you receive additional notices about the case, as well as the chance to remain part of the class and potentially receive a portion of any recovery.

And the recovery in this case could be substantial.

Statutory damages range from $750 US to $150,000 per infringed work. If the infringement is deemed willful – ie: if Anthropic knew that it used stolen work to train its AI – the court would likely look for damages higher than the minimum.

Breaking down the math: If the court finds that 100,000 copyrighted works were infringed, damages could amount to billions of US dollars. In an extreme case, if the court finds that Anthropic pirated some 6 million copyrights works, damages would exceed $1 trillion US. Even the minimum of $750 per infringement of only 100,000 would equal $75 million.

In any case, a ruling for the plaintiffs would likely be the end of Anthropic, while the precedent could haunt the cases pending against generative AI giants like ChatGPT and Midjourney. With powerhouses like the New York Times and Disney behind those, those cases won’t be disappearing anytime soon.

Know anyone who’d like my blog? Please forward today’s post! I’d love to hear from them.

Need more content? Join my mailing list!