Bartz v. Anthropic Author Copyright Settlement Receives Final Approval
I just plagiarized a headline! Almost.
I just received an email from Author’s Alliance with the headline: “Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement Receives Final Approval.”
Nah, I’m not going to rewrite that just to show I am committed to original work. I think my readers already know that I am. Besides, how do I rewrite it unless I translate it to French or something? So I added a couple of words for clarity, and went with their headline.
If you’re not familiar with Bartz v. Anthropic, it’s the first big AI copyright case in the writing world.
Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude AI, got hit with a class action lawsuit claiming that it infringed authors’ copyrights when it downloaded millions of entire copyrighted books in violation of U.S. copyright law.
Anthropic responded to the lawsuit by claiming that its use of the downloaded “datasets” constituted fair use because it only wanted to train its models on the content for its LLM models.
As a general legal issue, the fair use claim remains unresolved.
The litigants, however, also accused Anthropic of piracy, partly because the sources of some of their downloads contained pirated works, in addition to works they legitimately purchased.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of authors Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse), Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief), and Andrea Bartz (We Were Never Here) by three legal firms: Susman Godfrey LLP, Ieff Cabraser Heimmann & Bernstein LLP, and Cowan Debaets Abraham and Sheppard LLP.
Anthropic tried to get the case tossed into the legal garbage can by obtaining a summary judgment, but in June 2025, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said, “Nope.”
He said that if the books had been obtained legally instead of pirated from various sources, Anthropic could claim fair use. However, he said Anthropic would have to prove it didn’t pirate the books. He then set a trial date for December 2025.
Rather than go through all that, Anthropic settled out of court. They didn’t admit to piracy, but they did agree to compensate authors for the pirated downloads anyway.
This means that if you published a book with a valid ISBN or ASIN (ASIN is, essentially, Amazon’s version of ISBN) downloaded by Anthropic, you could get part of the $1.5 billion cash settlement.
If you didn’t file a claim, however, it’s too late because all the filing deadlines have expired.
Disburse those funds!
Yesterday, the judge overseeing the settlement, Araceli Martinez-Olguin, ordered that funds be disbursed to writers.1
By modern judicial standards, Judge Martinez-Olguin acted quickly on the final settlement. And for good reason. She has bigger fish to fry, as she is now the judge assigned to a case filed by 12 states to block the Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros., an event that would put CNN in the hands of another Trumpanzee, David Ellison, and his über-rich yacht-racing father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison:
If you filed a claim, you can expect about $3000, minus whatever the publisher or any of your co-authors get (publishers get half).
It’s really not much money for a recent book. I had three books on the list of pirated books. They were all old nonfiction technical books that fell into both obscurity and obsolescence a long time ago, so for me, it was an easy decision to join the class of plaintiffs. It’s basically free money for me on a few dead books.
Some authors and publishers declined to participate in the class, which means they can file a separate lawsuit. Most notable is the Chicken Soup for the Soul folks. The way class action lawsuits work, if you join the class settlement, you can’t then turn around and sue separately. But if you don’t join, you can file your own, separate lawsuit.
If you filed a settlement claim, you probably did so through the claims administrator’s website. Presumably, you filled out the forms telling the administrator how you want to be paid. I chose Zelle.
If you don’t know your status, you can contact the administrator here:
1 877-206-2314
info@AnthropicCopyrightSettlement.com
Anthropic Copyright Settlement
c/o JND Legal Administration
P.O. Box 91204
Seattle, WA 98111
They’re responsive and will answer your questions quickly (I know from experience).
Notes
There are other copyright lawsuits in the works:
Master List of lawsuits v. AI, ChatGPT, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Midjourney & other AI cos.
Thanks for reading!
CourtListener. “Order – #680 in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC (N.D. Cal., 4:24-cv-05417) – CourtListener.Com,” 2026. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/680/bartz-v-anthropic-pbc/.