On Thursday, a California federal judge ruled that three authors suing Anthropic for copyright infringement can file a class action lawsuit representing all American writers whose works were allegedly downloaded from pirated libraries.
The lawsuit claims that Anthropic, the Amazon-backed competitor to OpenAI behind the Claude chatbot, “violated the Copyright Act by downloading millions of Napster-style works.” It alleges that the company downloaded up to seven million copies of books from libraries of pirated works.
The new ruling affects a lawsuit filed last August by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who claimed that Anthropic “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” Late last month, a federal judge sided with Anthropic, ruling that training artificial intelligence models on legally purchased books was fair use, but noted that the company would have to face a separate lawsuit for using allegedly pirated books.
It also follows a lawsuit that Reddit filed against Anthropic last month, claiming that the company’s AI bots have accessed Reddit more than 100,000 times since July last year, after Anthropic said it had blocked their access to the site.
The authors’ lawsuit is part of a growing trend of media outlets, platforms, companies, and artists either suing AI companies for copyright infringement – such as Universal Music’s 2023 lawsuit against Anthropic for “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics” – or partnering with them by voluntarily providing data to train AI to get a share of the profits.
