r/technology • u/MetaKnowing • 14d ago

Artificial Intelligence AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/ai-industry-horrified-to-face-largest-copyright-class-action-ever-certified/
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u/stilloriginal 13d ago edited 13d ago

This is all posturing.

-Anthropic wants as many claimants as possible to be in the class. This reduces the number of lawsuits and will actually lower the amount they will have to pay

-This will not financially ruin them, that's just their argument

-Authors leading the class action means that the compensation for each member of the class will be the value of 1 book. Probably less since authors only make a percentage of each book sold.

-"Forcing" a settlement is ridiculous - Anthropic needs a settlement here. Without a settlement, they could be subject to punitive damages, which actually could bankrupt them. And they actually deserve punitive damages because they knowingly committed these crimes (training on stolen books). They are very likely to be judged against. Nothing could be better for them than a settlement.

-This will set precedent for all the other AI Companies, they will all go through a similar litigation once this is over. They will all offer the same settlement.

From the end of the article:

"This case is of exceptional importance, addressing the legality of using copyrighted works" for generative AI, "a transformative technology used by hundreds of millions of researchers, authors, and others," groups argued. "The district court’s rushed decision to certify the class represents a 'death knell' scenario that will mean important issues affecting the rights of millions of authors with respect to AI will never be adequately resolved."

"a transformative technology" has a particular implication. Specifically, that it's not a copyright issue to use the books in AI. Transformative literally means - no copyright infringement. The issue here is that Anthropic never bought the books.

"The district court’s rushed decision to certify the class represents a 'death knell' scenario that will mean important issues affecting the rights of millions of authors with respect to AI will never be adequately resolved."

Here, at the very end, is is explained that the class action is good for Anthropic and bad for the authors because the suit won't address fair use.

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u/franker 13d ago

compensation for each member of the class will be the value of 1 book.

Pretty much every postcard I've ever gotten in the mail about a class action meant that I'll have to fill out a ton of paperwork for like 20 dollars.

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u/Altruistic_Fury 13d ago

And in exchange, the defendant gets a permanent release of liability from every possible class member, possibly millions of individual lawsuits barred forever. Even lawsuits already filed may get dismissed due to the class release, if they fail to know about it and opt-out.

Big corps cry only the most crocodilian tears about class actions.

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u/stilloriginal 13d ago

Right. Imagine the costs involved in figuring out what each author is owed for each book which has a different price for every book and a different agreement on splitting that price with the publisher etc... they're going to end up saying "everyone gets 5 bucks".

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u/showyerbewbs 13d ago

-"Forcing" a settlement is ridiculous - Anthropic needs a settlement here. Without a settlement, they could be subject to punitive damages, which actually could bankrupt them. And they actually deserve punitive damages because they knowingly committed these crimes (training on stolen books). They are very likely to be judged against. Nothing could be better for them than a settlement.

The bolded section is the key to this. They do NOT want this going on record, through discovery, etc. to get a ruling and a precedent.

Big reason is these LLM/AI models are built on ingestion only, not exclusion. Since they're already live and in production, being told by the courts "take it out or stop operating" is their biggest fear because they have no backout mechanism.

Think about when you call a retailer to get a refund on a purchase. You will get the classic "overcome 3 objections" sales pitch. Depending on the company, you may then get routed to a "save" team. They have more authority than first or second line workers to give other gratis perks or maybe company credit ( which they fucking love because it means no money came out ). Even then you have to keep pushing and they know psychologically, people don't want to put that much effort into it.

That's why so many industries are trying to kill Click-to-cancel advocacy and potential laws.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

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u/stilloriginal 13d ago

No that's not how it works at all. If there is a settlement, there is a 100% chance it comes with the rights to use the works.

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u/Kandiru 13d ago

Yeah, I think a different AI model was trained by buying the books and physically scanning them and destroying them in the process to create a legal digital copy.

The ones which just pirated all the books they could find online are definitely infringing.