Re:AI companies are shredding rare books
by bscphil on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:36AM
(#49070359)
Why did Anthropic settle with authors for 1.5 billion then? Surely their lawyers must have decided there's a pretty good chance of judges ultimately deciding that it is copyright infringement?
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| on HN ]
They had illegally obtained books. 1.5 billion is an incredible deal compared to the per book infringement fine.
https://fortune.com/2026/07/21/anthropic-copyright-settlemen...
Anthropic settled because even though the training is fair use, Anthropic did not acquire all of the training material through legal means.
If a case is settled by the parties, it cannot be cited as establishing precedent.
You could also ask why the other side agreed to that settlement. It's not a one-way street.
It was about piracy, though? Not fair use.
What does that matter? They were sued and the group suing them accepted at $1.5B settlement instead of something theoretically much larger and precedent-setting.
Because the judge ruled that using the books for training was "fair use". The issue was Anthropic downloading and storing pirated content and there is quite a bit of precedent regarding that already...