ZXQKEEP0 ZXQ was fined US$1.5 billion for piracy of books

The District Court of the Northern District of California approved the largest copyright claim in U.S. history. AI giant Anthropic needs to pay a settlement of US$1.5 billion to the copyright owner for downloading pirated books to train artificial intelligence models. The California court has approved the settlement agreement. Both the prosecution and defense declared victory. Susman Godfrey Law Firm, which represents the interests of the plaintiffs, pointed out in a statement that this class action lawsuit involves about 500,000 works, and each piece will be compensated for US$3,000, plus interest accrued since the case was launched. The settlement agreement only addresses the illegal conduct in this case, and does not authorize Anthropic to use these books for AI training in the future, nor does it give up claims against the output results of the AI ​​model, whether in the past or in the future. However, the judge pointed out in an earlier ruling that it was legal for Anthropic to use legally purchased books for AI model training. The court only supported the plaintiff’s claim for the infringement of the pirated books. Anthropic once purchased paper books, disassembled the spines and cut the pages, and scanned the contents to the Central Digital Library to train the company's Claude series models. The judge believed that using legally purchased books for large-scale model training should fall within the scope of fair use: purchasing copyrighted works and using them for model training is no different from training elementary school students to write. "You cannot accuse the training of writing being illegal just because elementary school students will steal your job after learning. Copyright is intended to protect and encourage originality, not restrict competition," Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California wrote in the ruling. The problem with Anthropic is that the company also downloaded "millions of pirated e-books" from LibGen or PiLiMi. Whose smart person's idea was this? Judge Alsup held that simply downloading is infringement, regardless of whether the company intended to use it. Anthropic guaranteed in the settlement agreement that the company has not used these pirated materials in any business model, otherwise the copyright owner has the right to initiate a class action lawsuit again.