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Bloomsbury Publishing is set to receive a payout after a US District Court formally approves a landmark $1.5 billion class action settlement. Butts et al. v. humanone of the most important copyright cases of the generative AI era.
The case centers on allegations that AI company Anthropic used millions of copyrighted books obtained from pirated repositories to train its large-scale language model, the Claude family, without purchasing or licensing the copyrighted material.
Bloomsbury has confirmed that it is one of the beneficiaries of the settlement and says it expects to begin receiving payments during the second half of the current financial year.
The publisher said the court found that 14,087 Bloomsbury titles were eligible for the settlement. Compensation is expected to be approximately $3,000 per title, before attorney fees and other court-approved deductions, with the remainder of the payment split 50-50 between the publisher and author.
The lawsuit, filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, Kirk Wallace Johnson, and others, alleges that Anthropic downloaded millions of books from online piracy sites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) to build its AI models. Anthropic denied wrongdoing but agreed to settle the lawsuit, resulting in what is believed to be the largest copyright settlement for generative AI to date.
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