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Court rulings, company filings and allegations in the copyright cases against AI companies and pirate libraries, over books, articles, music, images, video and code. Checked for new filings every three hours; items are posted after review, so some appear later. Get these by e-mail · Court filings, free to read

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Court rulingJune 23, 2025Bartz v. Anthropic PBC · N.D. Cal. 3:24-cv-05417

Bartz v. Anthropic: judge rules training Claude on books was fair use, but keeping pirated copies in a permanent library was not

Judge William Alsup ruled on summary judgment that using books to train Claude was fair use, and that scanning print books Anthropic had bought was also fair use. He denied summary judgment on the copies Anthropic downloaded from pirate sites and kept, and set a trial on those copies and on damages, including willfulness. The order states as undisputed that a co-founder downloaded Books3 (196,640 books) in early 2021, at least five million books from LibGen in June 2021, and that Anthropic downloaded at least two million from the Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022, knowing the sources were pirated. It finds Anthropic kept more than seven million copies in a central library open to many engineers, under an internal plan to "store everything forever," and used only parts of them for training. It also says Anthropic resisted disclosing which copies trained which models. The case later settled for $1.5 billion.

Order on fair use (Dkt. 231) ↗

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