A Judge Just Priced a Pirated Book at $3,000

A federal judge granted final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion class-action settlement with authors over training Claude on books sourced from pirate libraries. The judge called it meaningful relief; the math works out to roughly $3,000 per book, and only about 350 eligible authors opted out. It is the largest publicly disclosed AI copyright settlement to date. The episode works through what the approval does and does not establish: it creates the first court-blessed dollar figure that future licensing talks and litigation will negotiate around, while leaving the underlying question — whether training a model on copyrighted work is fair use — entirely unresolved, because a settlement cannot produce that ruling.

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Judge grants final approval to Anthro ...