As I summarized last week, a federal court found that AI company Anthropic infringed authors’ and publishers’ copyrights by downloading millions of books from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror to train their AI model. The court also certified a class comprising all rights holders of copyright-registered books downloaded by Anthropic from these sites.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys are now collecting contact information from all authors and publishers who may be part of the class to ensure that they receive official notices in the case going forward and have the opportunity to opt out or to stay in the suit and receive their share of the settlement. The attorneys have created a website where rights holders can confidentially provide this information.
Any author who believes they may be part of the class should sign up at this website. You don’t have to know for sure. This lawsuit is separate from the Authors Guild case, but you can be part of this one, too. For more context, see this article from the Authors Guild.
Related: Follow this AI lawsuit chart by ChatGPT Is Eating the World to keep up with all the cases. There are 48 total, 45 are still pending, three cases are already on appeal, and three cases have seen decisions related to fair use.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
