Author Kirk Wallace Johnson. Photo Credit: Owl185724
A federal judge has granted class certification in a copyright complaint levied against Anthropic by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson.
Judge William Alsup ordered as much yesterday, weeks after Anthropic scored a partial win in the high-stakes case. Like we reported then, the court found that actually training Claude on protected books was transformative and consequently constituted fair use.
Additionally, the judge expressed the belief that buying physical books, breaking them down, and scanning them into a central database didn’t create new copies and was therefore also fair use.
(Can any tech giant lawfully buy individual pieces of physical media, make digital copies for a searchable “research library,” and grant staff access under the guise of a purported AI-training objective? Perhaps stockpiling works without authorization will set the stage for a fresh employee perk of sorts – sorry, creatives and rightsholders.)
In any event, the court further indicated that Anthropic’s largescale book pirating – “Anthropic thereby pirated over seven million copies of books” – didn’t constitute fair use and would proceed to trial.
Enter the initially mentioned class certification, which could provide valuable takeaways when it comes to music industry infringement litigation against AI developers.
Without diving too far into the legal nitty-gritty, the certification specifically extends to books allegedly downloaded via two pirate libraries – not a third library or the aforesaid scanned books.
Now for the hard part: The authors’ counsel has until just September to submit a list covering the massive pile of allegedly infringed works.
“They must omit from the list any book for which the pirate site provided only an empty file,” this important section reads. “They must correct the title on any book copied from the pirate site for which the pirate catalog provided the wrong title. Although this order certifies a class, it does so on the condition that plaintiffs prepare and file a comprehensive, per work list and do so by NOON ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2025.”
The burden doesn’t end there, either. The “plaintiffs must prove that what was duplicated was in fact a valid copyrighted work,” and “[t]he class is limited to books for which an ISBN or ASIN exists,” per the legal text.
Then comes the tall task of actually notifying the class members. On Anthropic’s end, “[t]o assist, by NOON ON AUGUST 1, 2025, defendant shall provide the titles, authors, publishers, ISBNs and/or ASINs data to plaintiffs’ counsel to the extent such information about the two pirated sets is in its possession or that of its attorneys,” the document specifies. “This is a court-ordered interrogatory and must be honored.”
Bearing the timetable in mind, it’ll be worth closely monitoring the legal battle from here. Of course, certain music industry litigation – like major publishers’ possibly settling complaint against Anthropic – doesn’t require class certification.
But other suits, like those submitted by an indie musician against Suno and Udio, have been levied as class actions from the get-go. As we broke down last month, the proposed class certification would extend to “independent recording artists and the any entities owned or controlled by such independent recording who own sound recordings, of which are available on any internet-based streaming service at any time since January 1, 2021.”
That’s a lot of artists – and even more recordings. Following the point to its logical conclusion, time will tell whether settlements are preferable for AI companies staring down trials, especially given the steady stream of high-profile criticism targeting their training procedures.
