On July 20, the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 billion settlement proposed in class action suit Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, in which authors accused the Amazon-backed company of illegally obtaining and using their books to teach its AI system.

According to a Bloomberg report, Bartz v. Anthropic is “the largest copyright class action settlement in US history,” paying “about $3,100 per author of more than 480,000 works,” with claims being filed for 440,490, that were downloaded from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror by Anthropic. $122 million of the settlement money will go toward attorneys and litigation costs.

Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin said the settlement “provides meaningful relief to the Settlement Class given the reasonable range of Class Members’ possible recoveries, especially since further litigation would likely be complex, expensive, lengthy, and risky. The estimated per-work payment of approximately $3,000 is four times the minimum statutory damages amount for willful infringement.”

Maria A. Pallante, President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement:

We applaud the court’s final approval of this settlement, which represents an important victory in the larger battle to hold big tech accountable for its unscrupulous appropriation of intellectual and creative properties that clearly belong to authors and publishers. In this case, the court recognized that downloading from pirate sites is not a choice we should simply accept as an efficiency for the infringer; on the contrary, it’s abhorrent conduct that should never be normalized.

Nor should fair use extend to training, which can easily be licensed like every other digital use in the modern copyright economy. Tech companies might like a copyright law with a giant hole in the place of exclusive rights, but that law does not exist. Partnerships, not piracy, are the best path forward.

For more, see the Bloomberg report and previous coverage in Locus.

Stephen King’s 1982 collection Different Seasons (Warner) is the most recent book banned from all public schools in Utah after being removed in four school districts. Utah state law requires a book to be removed state-wide if a sufficient number of districts identify it as “objective sensitive material,” which is defined in state code as “instructional material that constitutes pornographic or indecent material.” The Davis School District website comments that “[t]here is sexual stimulation, arousal, and masturbation in the book.”

The collection includes four novellas: “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: Hope Springs Eternal”, “Apt Pupil: Summer of Corruption”, “The Body: Fall from Innocence”, and “The Breathing Method: A Winter’s Tale”. Three of the stories were adapted to film as The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and Apt Pupil.

According to the Utah State Board of Education website, this is the latest of 36 book bannings from Utah public schools, including five books in Sarah J. Maas’s Court of Thorns and Roses series and one book in the Throne of Glass series, George R.R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings (Voyager UK; Bantam Spectra US), and Stephen King’s Bag of Bones (Simon & Schuster).

For more information, see coverage by The Salt Lake Tribune and KPCW.

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