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Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle lawsuit over pirated books
Securities Lawyers |
2025/09/08 06:31
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Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.
The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.
The company has agreed to pay authors or publishers about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.
“As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”
A trio of authors — thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude.
A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.
If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money.
“We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,” said Thomas Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has scheduled a Monday hearing to review the settlement terms.
Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement, if approved, “will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.”
“We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” said Aparna Sridhar, the company’s deputy general counsel.
As part of the settlement, the company has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.
Books are known to be important sources of data — in essence, billions of words carefully strung together — that are needed to build the AI large language models behind chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and its chief rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Alsup’s June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it “knew had been pirated.” It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained.
Debut thriller novel “The Lost Night” by Bartz, a lead plaintiff in the case, was among those found in the dataset. Anthropic later took at least 5 million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote.
The Authors Guild told its thousands of members last month that it expected “damages will be minimally $750 per work and could be much higher” if Anthropic was found at trial to have willfully infringed their copyrights. The settlement’s higher award — approximately $3,000 per work — likely reflects a smaller pool of affected books, after taking out duplicates and those without copyright.
On Friday, Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, called the settlement “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally, sending a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it.”
The Danish Rights Alliance, which successfully fought to take down one of those shadow libraries, said Friday that the settlement would be of little help to European writers and publishers whose works aren’t registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
“On the one hand, it’s comforting to see that compiling AI training datasets by downloading millions of books from known illegal file-sharing sites comes at a price,” said Thomas Heldrup, the group’s head of content protection and enforcement. |
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Trump’s nominee to oversee jobs, inflation data faces shower of criticism
Securities Lawyers |
2025/08/11 07:04
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The director of the agency that produces the nation’s jobs and inflation data is typically a mild-mannered technocrat, often with extensive experience in statistical agencies, with little public profile.
But like so much in President Donald Trump’s second administration, this time is different.
Trump has selected E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to be the next commissioner at the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni’s nomination was quickly met with a cascade of criticism from other economists, from across the political spectrum.
His selection threatens to bring a new level of politicization to what for decades has been a nonpartisan agency widely accepted as a producer of reliable measures of the nation’s economic health. While many former Labor Department officials say it it unlikely Antoni will be able to distort or alter the data, particularly in the short run, he could change the currently dry-as-dust way it is presented.
Antoni was nominated by Trump after the BLS released a jobs report Aug. 1 that showed that hiring had weakened in July and was much lower in May and June than the agency had previously reported. Trump, without evidence, charged that the data had been “rigged” for political reasons and fired the then-BLS chair, Erika McEntarfer, much to the dismay of many within the agency.
Antoni has been a vocal critic of the government’s jobs data in frequent appearances on podcasts and cable TV. His partisan commentary is unusual for someone who may end up leading the BLS.
For instance, on Aug. 4 — a week before he was nominated — Antoni said in an interview on Fox News Digital that the Labor Department should stop publishing the monthly jobs reports until its data collection processes improve, and rely on quarterly data based on actual employment filings with state unemployment offices.
The monthly employment reports are probably the closest-watched economic data on Wall Street, and can frequently cause swings in stock prices.
When asked at Tuesday’s White House briefing whether the jobs report would continue to be released, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration hoped it would be.
“I believe that is the plan and that’s the hope,” Leavitt said.
Leavitt also defended Antoni’s nomination, calling him an “economic expert” who has testified before Congress and adding that, “the president trusts him to lead this important department.”
Yet Antoni’s TV and podcast appearances have created more of a portrait of a conservative ideologue, instead of a careful economist who considers tradeoffs and prioritizes getting the math correct.
“There’s just nothing in his writing or his resume to suggest that he’s qualified for the position, besides that he is always manipulating the data to favor Trump in some way,” said Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics.
Antoni wrongly claimed in the last year of Biden’s presidency that the economy had been in recession since 2022; called on the entire Federal Reserve board to be fired for not earning a profit on its Treasury securities holdings; and posted a chart on social media that conflated timelines to suggest inflation was headed to 15%.
His argument that the U.S. was in a recession rested on a vastly exaggerated measure of housing inflation, based on newly-purchased home prices, to artificially make the nation’s gross domestic product appear smaller than it was.
“This is actually maybe the worst Antoni content I’ve seen yet,” Alan Cole of the center-right Tax Foundation said on social media, referring to his recession claim.
On a 2024 podcast, Antoni wanted to sunset Social Security payments for workers paying into the system, saying that “you’ll need a generation of people who pay Social Security taxes but never actually receive any of those benefits.” As head of the BLS, Antoni would oversee the release of the consumer price index by which Social Security payments are adjusted for inflation.
Many economists share, to some degree, Antoni’s concerns that the government’s jobs data has flaws and is threatened by trends such as declining response rates to its surveys. The drop has made the jobs figures more volatile, though not necessarily less accurate over time.
“The stock market moves clearly based on these job numbers, and so people with skin in the game think it’s telling them something about the future of their investments,” Albrecht said. “Could it be improved? Absolutely.”
Katharine Abraham, an economist at the University of Maryland who was BLS Commissioner under President Bill Clinton, said updating the jobs report’s methods would require at least some initial investment.
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International Criminal Court hit with cyber security attack
Securities Lawyers |
2025/07/02 10:15
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The International Criminal Court has been targeted by a “sophisticated” cyberattack and is taking measures to limit any damage, the global tribunal announced Monday.
The ICC, which also was hit by a cyberattack in 2023, said the latest incident had been contained but did not elaborate further on the impact or possible motive.
“A Court-wide impact analysis is being carried out, and steps are already being taken to mitigate any effects of the incident,” the court said in a statement.
The incident happened in the same week that The Hague hosted a summit of 32 NATO leaders at a conference center near the court amid tight security including measures to guard against cyberattacks.
The court declined to say whether any confidential information had been compromised.
The ICC has a number of high-profile investigations and preliminary inquiries underway in nations around the world and has in the past been the target of espionage.
In 2022, a Dutch intelligence agency said it had foiled a plot by a Russian spy using a false Brazilian identity to work as an intern at the court, which is investigating allegations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine and has issued a war crimes arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of personal responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine.
Arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, over Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza have also drawn ire. U.S. President Donald Trump slapped sanctions on its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, in February and earlier this month also sanctioned four judges at the court.
The court is still feeling the effects of the last cyberattack, with wifi still not completely restored to its purpose-built headquarters.
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Judge to weigh Louisiana AG’s challenge to city jail’s ‘sanctuary’ policy
Securities Lawyers |
2025/04/30 06:29
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Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill is pushing forward with her efforts to force Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson to drop a longtime policy that generally prohibits deputies from directly engaging in federal immigration enforcement within the city’s jail.
In legal filings, Murrill claims that the policy — which the state characterizes as a so-called “sanctuary city” policy — is in direct conflict with a newly passed state law that requires state and local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal immigration agencies.
“The consent decree now sits fundamentally at odds with state law as applicable to immigration detainers,” Murrill said in court documents filed Friday.
A federal court will now determine whether to allow the state of Louisiana to join a 2011 federal suit that resulted in the policy and whether to throw out the policy altogether. A hearing has been set for April 30.
The state’s campaign against “sanctuary” policies comes as President Donald Trump is pushing local law enforcement agencies to join the federal government in his promised immigration crackdown. Since his inauguration, Trump has ordered the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to push for more partnerships between local law enforcement units and federal immigration agencies. A few have already signed up. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a longtime immigration hardliner and Trump ally, has worked with Republican lawmakers in the state to enact laws that encourage those collaborations.
As attorney general, Landry criticized a policy adopted by the New Orleans Police Department, under a long-running federal consent decree that blocks officers from enforcing immigration laws.
Neither Murrill’s office nor representatives for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to requests for comment.
In court filings, Murrill said Hutson “does not oppose the (state’s) intervention” in the case.” But a spokesperson for Hutson said that’s not exactly true. “It’s more accurate that we take no position regarding the state intervention,” a Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.
While she has not taken a position for or against increased collaboration with ICE, in an interview with Fox 8 in December, Hutson noted that the jail’s resources were far too stretched to take on immigration enforcement.
The sheriff’s policy stems from a 2013 federal court settlement in a civil rights case involving two New Orleans construction workers picked up on minor charges in 2009 and 2010. Mario Cacho and Antonio Ocampo sued after they were allegedly illegally held in the city’s jail past the completion of their sentences. The two were held at the request of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency issues such “detainer” requests to local law enforcement agencies, asking them to hold onto arrestees who are suspected of immigration violations. Local agencies are only supposed to honor the hold requests for 48 hours, after which they should let detainees free. But in 2009 and 2010, then-Sheriff Marlin Gusman detained Cacho and Ocampo for months, according to legal filings in their case against the office.
Ocampo and Cacho settled the case with the Sheriff’s Office in 2013, and Gusman agreed to adopt a new policy on immigration investigations. The resulting policy blocks the agency from investigating immigration violations and from detaining immigrants for ICE without a court order, except in certain cases where they are facing charges for a small number of serious violent crimes.
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Trump signs order designating English as the official language of the US
Securities Lawyers |
2025/03/02 08:05
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President Donald Trump signed on Saturday an executive order designating English as the official language of the United States.
The order allows government agencies and organizations that receive federal funding to choose whether to continue to offer documents and services in language other than English.
It rescinds a mandate from former President Bill Clinton that required the government and organizations that received federal funding to provide language assistance to non-English speakers.
“Establishing English as the official language will not only streamline communication but also reinforce shared national values, and create a more cohesive and efficient society,” according to the order.
“In welcoming new Americans, a policy of encouraging the learning and adoption of our national language will make the United States a shared home and empower new citizens to achieve the American dream,” the order also states. “Speaking English not only opens doors economically, but it helps newcomers engage in their communities, participate in national traditions, and give back to our society.”
More than 30 states have already passed laws designating English as their official language, according to U.S. English, a group that advocates for making English the official language in the United States.
For decades, lawmakers in Congress have introduced legislation to designate English as the official language of the U.S., but those efforts have not succeeded.
Within hours of Trump’s inauguration last month, the new administration took down the Spanish language version of the official White House website.
Hispanic advocacy groups and others expressed confusion and frustration at the change. The White House said at the time it was committed to bringing the Spanish language version of the website back online. As of Saturday, it was still not restored.
The White House did not immediately respond to a message about whether that would happen.
Trump shut down the Spanish version of the website during his first term. It was restored when President Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021.
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Investment Fraud Litigation |
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Securities fraud, also known as stock fraud and investment fraud, is a practice that induces investors to make purchase or sale decisions on the basis of false information, frequently resulting in losses, in violation of the securities laws. Securities Arbitration. Generally speaking, securities fraud consists of deceptive practices in the stock and commodity markets, and occurs when investors are enticed to part with their money based on untrue statements.
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The content contained on the web site has been prepared by Securities Law News as a service to the internet community and is not intended to constitute legal advice or a substitute for consultation with a licensed legal professional in a particular case. | Affordable Law Firm Website Design by Law Promo |
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