Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

But it was an important factor in the google books case.

One of the other key factors is how it impacts potential sales of the original work. Turning it into an audiobook might be transformative, but when you sell access to it people will buy your audiobook instead of the original book. So it's almost certainly not fair use.

In the google books case, google scanned the books but didn't distribute the content of the books to the user. They only distributed the transformed ability to search books to users. The sales of the books weren't impacted negatively, because the user still had to acquire a copy of the book from somewhere else if they wanted to read the whole work. In fact, google books arguable increases sales of the original work in some circumstances.

I think what he is saving you can't argue the point of the scanning was to save space if you didn't destroy the original. And he concluded that "the mere conversion of a print book to a digital file to save space and enable searchability was transformative for that reason alone"

But my point is that you can't assume Anthropic would have lost if they didn't destroy the books. Alsop didn't rule on that, simply because he didn't need to. Judges hate ruling on things they don't need to.

In an alternative history where Antropic put the physical books in a warehouse after scanning, they could have argued the transformation about "minimising storage costs while increasing the easy of access" and IMO they probably would have won with that too.

For file sharing lawsuits they all ask for "statutory" damages. Those are in the range from $750 to $30000 in the US (but can be lowered to as low as $250 in the case of an "innocent infringer" [1] or raised to as much as $150000 in the case of a "willful infringer" [2]).

These damages are per work infringed, so even if someone were found to be a willful infringer for sharing a song, and the court found their behavior so egregious that it went all the way to $150000, and the person had made and distributed a vast number of copies, it would still only by $150000 because it is not per copy. (Well, it might be per copy in a way...in deciding were to land on the $750-$150000 scale the court may have considered the number of copies).

There have been copyright and copyright adjacent lawsuits over songs that have hit $200 million in the aggregate, but those all involved large collections of songs. Some examples:

• Limp Bizkit sued their record label for $200+ million saying they had concealed that much in royalties that they owed the band.

• There was a $200 million suit by music publishers against Roblox for allowing users to upload and stream commercial compositions without paying the writers.

• There's a massive suit underway I believe against some AI music generation companies.

As far as I know the biggest ever over an individual song was an award of $7.4 million against "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over accusations that the infringed Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give it Up". (That was reduced later to $5.3 million plus 50% of future "Blurred Lines" publishing and songwriting royalties).

[1] Someone who did not know they were infringing and had no reason to know. This almost never applies when pirating things you know are commercial recordings.

So I’d be curious to hear about a counter example.