Overview

• U.S. District Judge William Alsup held a preliminary approval hearing Monday, posed questions about the terms, and took the settlement under review.
• The agreement totals $1.5 billion and would pay about $3,000 per eligible work across roughly 500,000 titles, require destruction of the downloaded pirated library, and include no admission of liability.
• Alsup’s June ruling found training on lawfully obtained books could be fair use but held Anthropic liable for retaining millions of pirated copies, with a December damages trial set before settlement talks advanced.
• Eligibility hinges on identifiers and timely U.S. Copyright Office registration, a final works list is due October 10, and filings describe installment payments after court approvals.
• In a separate development, authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson filed a proposed class action against Apple alleging OpenELM training on pirated books tied to datasets such as Books3.