"The fact that they believed this is legally useful because of the definition of fair use, so I see why the Author's Guild is emphasizing it, but the authors I know don't talk about it."
Perhaps "the fact they believed this [i.e., the infringement was intentional] is legally useful" for seeking statutory damages, up to $15,000 per infringed work (assuming registration was timely, otherwise up to $7,500), as this requires the plaintiffs to show defendants acted willfully
Without intent, statutory damages could be as low as $200 per work
Anthropic settled for $1.5B with Bartz et al. in an earlier case involving the same pirated copies. The Court in the Bartz case said that training LLMs with these pirated copies was not fair use
""The training use was a fair use," he wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative."
However, the judge ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models, books that websites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) copied without getting the authors' consent or giving them compensation, was not. He ordered this part of the case to go to trial. "We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic's central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness)," the judge wrote in the conclusion to his ruling. Last week, the parties announced they had reached a settlement."
Perhaps "the fact they believed this [i.e., the infringement was intentional] is legally useful" for seeking statutory damages, up to $15,000 per infringed work (assuming registration was timely, otherwise up to $7,500), as this requires the plaintiffs to show defendants acted willfully
Without intent, statutory damages could be as low as $200 per work
Anthropic settled for $1.5B with Bartz et al. in an earlier case involving the same pirated copies. The Court in the Bartz case said that training LLMs with these pirated copies was not fair use
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...
""The training use was a fair use," he wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative."
However, the judge ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models, books that websites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) copied without getting the authors' consent or giving them compensation, was not. He ordered this part of the case to go to trial. "We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic's central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness)," the judge wrote in the conclusion to his ruling. Last week, the parties announced they had reached a settlement."